Blacks in Israel Not Wanted: Developments Reveal Israel as a White Supremacist Nation

From arresting activists for erasing graffiti, to proposing a law preventing asylum seekers from sending money they earn abroad: What recent developments in the past week tell us about contemporary Israel. Justice Ministry introduced a new law this week (Hebrew) preventing African asylum seekers and migrant workers from sending or taking money outside of Israel. Asylum seekers trying to send money to their families in Africa will face a fine of NIS 29,200 (some 7,300 USD) or incarceration for six months. The Justice Ministry of a proudly capitalist government wants to prohibit refugees from doing what foreign workers do all over the world: send the money they earned with their sweat home. On the face of it, a refugee who will transfer money to Sinai – which in under the admittedly tottering control of a foreign country – in order to save the life of a relative captured and tortured by a Bedouin gang, is risking being imprisoned for it.

The bill further says that when an asylum seeker leaves Israel, he will not be allowed to take with him a sum larger than half the minimum wage times the months he worked. The bill jokingly says that should he want to take more, he would just have to ask his employer to prove he earned more – conveniently ignoring the fact that many Africans never receive proper wage slips, and that Israeli employers are in the habit of denying them their last paycheck, when they hear they are about to be deported. [MORE] 

Three African migrants hurt in Israeli Racist arson attack. From [HERE] Unidentified arsonists set fire on Thursday to the Jerusalem home of Eritrean migrants, injuring three in what Israeli police said appeared to have been a racist attack. Street violence has surged in recent months against Africans who cross, without permits, into Israel across the porous Egyptian border in search of work or asylum.

Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said an apartment in a west Jerusalem market district was set alight overnight, and that one Eritrean occupant suffered serious burns while two others were treated for smoke inhalation. "Obviously it seems that they were targeted as Eritreans," Rosenfeld said, adding that an investigation was under way. The Israeli firefighting service said two of the victims were a woman in her seventh month of pregnancy and her husband. There are more than 60,000 African migrants in Israel (less than 1% of entire population), jarring its already ethnically fraught population of 7.8 million and prompting deportation drives by the conservative government. [MORE] 

Israel kills man trying to cross border from Egypt's Sinai. A rocket was fired from Egypt's Sinai desert into the southern Israeli resort city of Eilat on April 5, 2012, according to authorities.  Israeli troops fired on two men as they tried to enter the border illegally from Egypt overnight, killing one, Israeli officials said today, reported Reuters.  A military spokeswomen said neither of the men were armed, but declined to provide more identification information, said Reuters. The surviving victim has been hospitalized, according to Agence-France Press.  The Sinai border shared by the two nations has been the scene of growing unrest, with Israel currently at work on a huge steel border fence (in photo) to protect the area and keep out a flood of migrants, many of whom come from Africa, said AFP. [MORE] 

Israel Targets Palestinian Activists Removing Racist graffiti From [HERE] Last weekend, our kindly goons detained a group of Ta’ayush activists who visited the Palestinian unrecognized village of Susya. They visited the place after “price tag” pogromchiks sprayed the slogans “price tag” and “death to Arabs” near the viilage. The Civil Administration – staffed, appropriately, by IDF officers and gunmen – denied the villagers permission to delete those slogans. The officer filing that decision must have had a hard time deciding whether to file it under “stupidity” or “small minded evil.” The Ta’ayush activists managed to paint over the “price tag” slogan, and were in the middle of the dangerous maneuver of doing the same to the other slogan, when our brave policemen charged at them and detained them. The police prosecutor hastily drew up an indictment claiming that the spraying over of those slogans was as dangerous to public peace as the slogans painted a few weeks ago at Yad Vashem.

The activists were deleting offensive slogans, not writing them – and writing those slogans, by the way, is illegal in Israel. Even so, the police promptly prosecuted not the people who wrote the illegal slogans – which it is unlikely it will ever apprehend – but the people who tried to remove them. [MORE]