Faces dripping with sweat move together as one in a crowd. Shouts echo through a darkened sky as hands wave national flags in a rapid pulse. The mob pounces on a solo taxi in the middle of the street, spraying broken glass over the ground. Egged on by politicians, the mob continues its vengeance by attacking any black bodies in their midst.
This harrowing scene is neither from Apartheid South Africa nor the segregationist riots of South Boston in the 1970s. This is May 2012 in Tel-Aviv, Israel, in the southern neighborhood of Hatikva where most residents are Mizrahim Jews from the Arab and Muslim world. We might react to this as just isolated bigotry, a poor neighborhood inflamed by xenophobia targeting asylum seekers from Eritrea and Sudan.
But that would miss the bigger picture. Arab Jews, too, are victims of racial violence and subjugation wrought by a variant of European colonialism. This system has violently labelled, dehumanized, exploited and excluded bodies of color. Like Palestinians living under apartheid, Ethiopian Jews and African Migrants, Arab Jews are also victims of Zionist white supremacy.
Israel was founded upon Zionism, an ideology that has sought to establish and maintain a white, European-Jewish (or Ashkenazi) colony in non-European lands. Its not hard to see that this is a racist project after all, establishing a state in land already inhabited by indigenous people is a clear sign of a belief in their inferiority.
Zionisms roots are in white supremacy and colonization. It contains the same vein of logic that perpetrated the violent, genocidal European colonization of the non-Western world. Theodor Herzl, the father of Zionism, first lobbied the British government for the creation of a Jewish colony in Uganda in 1903. When his proposal was rejected, Herzl turned his gaze towards the Middle East, joining forces with the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association. Herzl explicitly envisioned Israel to be a part of a wall of defense for Europe in Asia, an outpost of civilization against barbarism or, as former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak once put it, a villa in the jungle. This logic portrays those in Israel and Europe as civilized, as opposed to the barbaric and dangerous peoples of Asia and the Middle East who must be tamed. Zionism claims to be a movement for the Jewish people to a homeland, but being a movement created by white European Jews for white European Jews, Zionism has always concentrated power in the hands of a European elite. When colonialism stopped being fashionable, Zionists dropped the c word from their lexicon, but their practices of racial exclusion and white supremacy continued.
Zionist white supremacy labels non-white bodies in various ways in the case of the Palestinians, they were (and are) marked for destruction, as they occupy the land Herzl declared to be the homeland for Jews. Zionisms racist framework subordinates Palestinian bodies to white Jewish people if white Jews need a state, brown Palestinians will be subjugated for its creation. The erasure of Palestinians cannot be disassociated from Zionism, and the state of Israel cannot exist without it. The ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948, and the ongoing arrest, torture, siege, bombing and water crisis enacted upon Palestinians by Israel are the physical manifestations of this destructive ideology.
White supremacy in Israel does not limit itself to expressly subjugating Palestinians. It is a pervasive force in Israeli politics. Israeli Minister of the Interior Eli Yishai, recently spoke in response to new detainment policies for African refugees. Yishai was quoted in a June 3, 2012 Haaretz article saying that Israel belongs to the white man and that he would use all the tools to expel the foreigners, until not one infiltrator remains. But who are these infiltrators?
While Zionism targets non-white Jews for forced assimilation and exploitation, this racist ideology casts African asylum seekers as infiltrators a term actually used by the Israeli government. This demeaning and accusatory label ignores the imperial histories and the personal circumstances of asylum-seekers. In rhetoric and in practice, the state has attempted to strip migrants of their right to decent treatment and with it, their humanity. Up until 2009, Israel granted only one percent of asylum applications. Instead, the government has begun rounding up Sudanese and Eritrean peoples, sending them to prison, internment camps and deporting them.
This racist ideological framework also permeates the Israeli governments treatment of non-European Jews. Mizrahim, also known as Arab Jews, are targets of racist policies, as well. From 1930 to 1970, Israel under the control of white, European elites systematically and forcibly removed Yemeni Jewish children from their parents and placed them in boarding schools or sold them to white European Jewish parents for adoption. In the 1950s, 150,000 North African Jewish children were given dangerously high doses of radiation without their parents consent in a series of unauthorized medical experiments under the pretext of treating ringworm. Arab Jews were forced into transit camps where they were subjected to a de-Arabization process upon arrival into the country. This cultural genocide sought to transform them into proper Zionist subjects by making them ashamed of their histories, mother tongues and their customs. Over the last three decades, the state has reapplied this policy to Ethiopian Jews.12
