An Israeli mob in Tel Aviv burns garbage and sings, "The people want the Africans to be burned."
Southern Tel Aviv is home to a number of blighted and struggling neighborhoods – areas where Israel’s income inequalities and economic disparities are acutely on display in the shadow of the city’s high rises. And it is here – in the neighborhood of Shapira – where large numbers of African refugees and asylum seekers from Sudan and Eritrea have sought shelter from forces much more dire than poverty.
On Wednesday evening, that shelter was shattered by a 1,000-strong protest which turned violent and, ultimately, into a race riot targeting those seeking relief from violence.
How did this happen?
The short answer begins by examining the protest, which was organized by Likud activists and attended by several Knesset members, who (for obvious political reasons) stood before the masses and blamed their hardships on African refugees with incendiary catch phrases.
Addressing the “infiltration problem,” Knesset Member Miri Regev (Likud) criticized the Israeli government for not sending the African refugees from whence they came, calling them “a cancer in our body.” Danny Danon (Likud) followed up his incendiary speech by posting on Facebook, “Israel is at war. An enemy state of infiltrators was established in Israel, and its capital is south Tel Aviv.” And Michael Ben-Ari, a former member of the racist Kach party, incited the crowd by tapping both into their economic despair and xenophobia, warning them that the Africans would take all available jobs and leave everyone else with nothing.
A woman with a shirt that reads, "Death to the Sudanese." Photo by Tomer Neuberg.
The crowd, already gathered to vent their rage, in part, at the African community – blaming them for a rise in crime and the theft of opportunity – suddenly turned violent and streamed into the Shapira neighborhood, attacking Africans on the street, in cars, smashing storefronts belonging to migrants and vandalizing shops.
Eritrean refugees react moments after their shop was attacked by an angry mob.
"A mother with her baby cries minutes after she was attacked by a mob, with the baby thrown to the ground, following a protest against African refugees and asylum seekers in Tel Aviv's Hatikva neighborhood." - caption by Activestills
The violence and rampaging through Shapira happened spontaneously, as though a tinder box had suddenly been set alight by a flint’s sparking surface. And Israeli parliamentarians are to blame for creating that spark, for setting alight a crowd already on the edge of combustion.
Regarding the refugee community in Israel targeted last night, Noam Sheizaf writes:
According to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, there are presently some 60,000 African asylum seekers in Israel. Most entered the country by foot through its southern border. While they are termed “infiltrators” by the government, some 85 percent are from Eritrea and Sudan, to which Israel has agreed until now not to return them in light of the situations in those countries. They fall under a form of group protection from deportation, but their individual refugee claims are not processed.
A few recent crimes against Israelis that were linked to the African community have recently received considerable attention in the local media. They led to a wave of protest and declarations by politicians against the refugees and asylum seekers. MK Ofir Akunis, a member of Likud and a Netanyahu proxy, is set to promote a Knesset bill which will criminalize Israelis who employ, drive or give shelter to refugees.
In addition to a deeply-rooted racism that exists within segments of Israeli society and the continued dehumanizing of minorities, last night’s race riot also occurred because of corrupt economic policies and the rising gap between the rich and poor in Israel – a situation which has left many teetering on the economic precipice. Without minimizing the racist motivations behind what occurred last night, a root cause is partially the same root social justice activists targeted last summer when they crippled Tel Aviv, chanting, “The people demand social justice.”
Last night, poverty-stricken Israelis focused their rage (and racism) on a community of dark-skinned scapegoats. And several Israeli leaders were only too happy to help an angry mob push them off the cliff.
Follow the author – David Harris-Gershon – on Twitter @David_EHG
How many African ECONOMIC refugees live on your block David, give me a number. And why is it incumbent on Israel to be a magnet for half of Africa. I think Berkeley is the proper destination.
Stay classy, Bill.
Not feeling the love Dave
BTW, Still haven’t answered my question. How many African refugees on your block?
Doesn’t matter how many there are – doesn’t justify a pogrom: smashing windows, attacking people based on their ethnicity, throwing babies to the floor……Shameful!
it is not a pogrom
Please stop the hatred, Bill.
Bill, this is precisely the type of behavior that we Jews have so often been victimized by over the generations. How can we condone it in any way, shape or form?
I don’t condone violence, but also do not blame the people of Israel. I blame the government. This is the exact same situation you have in Europe and in the U.S. Poor people from third world countries flood into western nations, will work for little wages, crush wages for the rest of the working people, cause overcrowding in neighborhood, run up the cost of housing, and exhaust resources such as police, fire, and transportation. You cannot bring in large numbers of foreigners with a different language, different customs, very poor, very desperate, and expect them to simply blend into the existing society.
The government of Israel is responsible for controlling its borders and, if they allow refugees as most nations in the world do, then they need to step up and make sure the refugees have the means to support themselves, have housing, healthcare, and an opportunity to live decently while they are in Israel. All nations have a responsibility to accept a certain number of refugees fleeing from political or religious persecution. This is entirely different from economic migrants who come only to get a job and make money. No nation is obligated to allow economic migrants to come live and work in their country.
You often have a mixture, which is why there are processes to determine refugee status. But in the meantime, the government is responsible for taking care of any refugee living inside the country.
Replace “Africans”, “refugees” by “Jews” and the words should sound familiar although it is a crying shame that Jews are led to act by Jewish parlementarians whose evil ways are exposed in public. One does not need to replace any word to know that this behavior and thinking is despicable and all the more going against the spirit of Torah.
Which hounds are allegedly respresenting the people in Israel, willfully leading them on to vent their rage as a valve of conditions caused by these same parlementarians and government officials in their greed and lack of social norms and morality, toward the poorest, the stranger in our midst. Refugees. Most ancestors have come from Europe, North Africa and other countries, often with nothing in their hands but the clothes on their back. Longer ago we were often expelled, murdered, and ostracized for being poor and different. Oh yeah: the holocaust: how did that begin? Anyone forgot? Shame on the people who perpetrated this and woe to them who incited this hatred and fanned the flames.
Abigail,
Those Sudanese refugees fled far worse in Egypt and I am sure you were silent. As a matter of fact,I bet you did not even realize there were Sudanese refugees in Israel up until this moment. The Israeli government you accuse of racist incitement is the very same government that admittted the refugees in the 1st place. Israel is not getting any assitance from the UN to provide for them.It is all coming from Israeli tax payers.
How many African refugees on your block Abigail? And why is it cincumbent on Israel to take in Moslem and Christians from Africa in large numbers. Huge numbers on a per capita basis. And who pays.
@Bill, i smell hate/racism coming from you.you keep asking “how many immigrants there are in David’s block”, and you also said “why so many Africans in Israel “? well i say just like there are so many Europeans including jews here in the US! so tell me why did all these europeans including you come to the US ? why so many? i thought life was good in Europe, why didn’t you stay in your own country?
Selfish Dude.
I have news for you. When European Jews were desperate for a refuge leading up to the Holocaust, the doors to the US were locked tight. You might want to consider reading about the USS St Louis, a ship carrying Jewish refugees from Germany.It was denied entry and returnedot Germany.No one on the ship survived the Holocaust.
Hi Don.
Yes, I’m sure most of us know at least some of the story of the
almost one thousand Jewish refugees on the MS St. Louis
being callously rejected by anti-Semites and pin-headed
bureaucrats in the USA, Canada and Cuba, when being sent
back to the Third Reich meant shoah. The captain, Schroeder,
doubtless with advice from some of the refugees themselves,
did everything he could to save these desperate people.. even
several time seriously planning to beach the ship both on the
U.S. coast and the U.K. to create a fait accompli which officials
would have to honor. After long frantic negotiations with France,
the U.K., Belgium and Holland (I think), these four nations accepted
all of the refugees into their ports as legal refugees. Of course when
Hitler’s Wehrmacht invaded the countries of Western Europe, many
Jewish refugees once again were in mortal peril and a high portion
of them did not survive the camps. The mortality estimates range
from about 200 to higher than 260.
These were infamous failures on the parts of western nations
which routinely preened and posed as standard-bearers of
The Enlightenment, democracy and at the very least, common
decency.
Ah, and by the way, it does behoove us to take care when hurling
around the ~shock-agenda statement that someone “hates Israel!”
because he or she is appalled or otherwise pissed off about this or
that government, or not-so-government, policy or action. We’ve
all seen good people with steam coming out of their ears because
some powerful group held temporary sway in their respective
nations, promulgating agendas and values which the steamy-eared
people seriously didn’t agree with, and loudly so. But by and
large these same angry people still loved their countries, their peoples
and cultures, however homogenous or heterogeneous they were.
The great majority are neither traitors nor given to slander or
violence against those they disagree with. They merely want,
and deserve, to be heard, as clearly as anyone else. This kind
of thing makes the Democracy go round. When this is not allowed
and made unsafe, the bell of Democracy rings with a very dull
thud.
Peace, Gene
What I am gathering here is many are of the opinion that the government is fueling this behavior, which irt is clearly not. On should differentiate between a few extreme MP’s and te actual government
Still waiting Abigali, David, Ron. How many Africans on your block, your building. Talk to me.
Why stop at your block, Bill? The world is full of threats, some around the corner, some a world away. Demographics threats. Nuclear threats. Whether imminent “mushroom clouds” in Condo Rice’s parlance, or “ticking timebombs” in another, the world’s a scary place! What’s your plan?
You could arm yourself to the teeth, stock up on Viagra, breed prolifically, but will the threat go away? Probably not. The threat is in your head and how you perceive the world, not the world itself, Bill.
Where in the world can anyone go to be safe? Why, in Israel, a land of refugees, is this terrible behavior happening? Does it matter how many refugees are on my block? Let me tell you Bill, there are plenty of refugees where I live–I’m one. We all came from somewhere.
This is appalling and so awful for us as Jews to act this way. WHO are we? What kind of people throw babies to the ground? Abigail, well said, well done. Imagine–put yourself there; no one knows what these refugees have been through.
“If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? And if not now, when?”
How can such a contemptible thing happen in Israel? From my
perch in the USA these days, one thing seems painfully clearer
with each passing day. The USA is supposed to be a shining
beacon of democracy, the Enlightenment and fair play. But its
history is brutally scarred with evidence to the contrary. Just to
name a few things… slavery of blacks, supported by wealth and
religion alike; near-slavery of poor whites; near annihilation of
Indian peoples, and more. The harsh and usually unspoken
fact is that no nation, no culture can escape this kind of evil,
as long as there are class systems, which have the inevitable
effect of draining wealth and the power it attracts toward the
tiny top of a hierarchy. Which would love to style itself the
favored Rich (but humble) Men of God, if it could just figure
out how to shove that poor camel through the eye of that
bloody needle.
this is about an ancient truth. We ignore it at our peril. When
we deny it we doom ourselves to repeating precisely the same
kinds of tragedies of the last century. And in our hearts, we
know its honest truth.
Old Tom Jefferson and many of his generation understood
that the greatest possible threat to democracy was the steady
accumulation of more and more wealth into fewer and fewer
hands. No one is infallible, not even Jefferson… we can nail
him for owning slaves, for being a bit of an aristocrat and
thus rather detached from the real struggles and vulnerabilities
of ordinary men and women.
But he got this one right. I do not know Israel; but I do know
the USA. And nowhere is it more apparent than in my own
land, that great wealth confers overweening power and narrow,
increasingly selfish and self-entitled mindsets. Governments
and politicians and people of different races and cultures… we
are all visible to one another, easy to identify, vulnerable with
one another and ultimately, answerable to one another. But the
obscene power of great wealth long ago became expert at
both camouflage and divide-and-conquer. The usual tools
it deploys consists of governments, the military and the press.
But it remains hidden. The deadly and ultimate antithesis of
tolerance, understanding and the very heart blood of democracy
itself.
No land is immune to this, no matter how righteous and
wonderful it thinks itself… not the USA, and not Israel. It
would be good for us to remember this, and think on this,
which so many of those who came before us learned and
knew in their bones.
Let’s not let smoke and mirrors, sleight of hand and misdirection
divert us from our highest common denominators to our lowest
and basest. It’s not easy but it can be done.
Well said, Gene Partow. Well done.
I’m sorry. Gene Partlow. 🙂
Thanks, Julie… you too. And people routinely get my name wrong anyway,
which must inflame the suspicions of FBI and other censors of public propriety
and add to a funny list of ersatz ‘aliases’. So it goes. 🙂
You all do realize that ifd this were a pogrom like in the Ukraine,it wouldhave backing of the government. I am sure the police wil make every effort to cvat those behind the attack.
In the mean time you warm hearted people should have turned your attention to Syria where the government massacred over 100 men woman and children. Where is your outcry? Where is the outcry of Harris-Gershon? You are all so consumed wth you hatred towards Israel that you have blinders on.
Most of the top leaders of the Israeli government have condemned the violence, with such statements as from Pres. Shimon Peres that “hatred of foreigners contradicts the foundations of Judaism.”
And from Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin: “When the masses are furious, public leaders must try to contain that anger and offer a solution, not to fan the flames. We must not use the same language anti-Semites use against us. We are a people that suffered a great deal of incitement and harassment, and we have an obligation to be extra sensitive and moral.”
Even Prime Minister Netanyahu stated that “there is no place for the statements and acts that we witnessed yesterday.” Still, Netanyahu is moving to construct an Egyptian border fence, a detention center, and intends to deport thousands of African asylum seekers.
“…a cancer within us”…. Am I alone in shivering at the sound of such hate? Does it not sound like the historic lines spat at Jews in a dark time of European history, not so long ago? Are the people of Israel so detached from reality that they don’t realize that their actions are seen beyond their borders and such displays of hatred, especially when led by government officials, are going to be compared to the very people for whom Israel was envisioned as the moral antidote, the Nazis?
Paul
You might be referring to well over 1000 years of misery for Jews in Europe, where they were booted out of many con tries. We al know how it culminated in the 1930’s and 40’s.
Now paul, you may just realize that the Sudanese refugees in israel were offered shelter form oppression and death in Darfur and later in Egypt. They were given housing and financial assistance by the Israeli gov’t, with NO help from the UN.
Comparing Israel to Nazi Germany is just a sick joke on your part, a very sick joke. The conduct of the Sundanese gov’t in Darfur might be a more appropriate comparison. At least there was a door open for Sudanese reuses in Israel, which was not the case for Jews feeling Europe.
So what’s the latest news from Syria/ Oh yes, the UN is investigating a massacre where all men, woman and children were wiped out. Only scattered body parts remain. This resembles more a Nazi atrocity, but I guess Arabs get a free pass.
http://www.cnn.com/2012/06/08/world/meast/syria-unrest/index.html?hpt=wo_c1