I make no apologies for writing once again on Israel’s
racism towards African asylum seekers who escaped from war and genocide in
Africa in the mid 2000’s.  Up to 60,000
came from 2005 onwards but after 2011 and under Netanyahu’s regime they were
treated as the enemy within. 

When the
Palestinian refugees were expelled in 1948, because without ethnic cleansing, a
Jewish majority state could not be formed, those who tried to return were
called ‘Infiltrators’.  The idea that
those who were born and were indigenous to the land should be called
infiltrators by those who were settler colonials beggars belief but is part of
the racist mentality of colonialism.

Hostility to refugees relates to the Zionist nature of the
Israeli state.  Quite
simply, Israeli society is overwhelmingly hostile to refugees because they are
not Jewish.  They dilute the
Jewish gene pool and threaten the Jewish demographic majority.  As Prime Minister Netanyahu said,
non-Jewish immigrants threaten the ‘Jewish identity’ of the Israeli
state.  Israel
PM: illegal African immigrants threaten identity of Jewish state

Many refugees have settled in the south of Tel-Aviv where
they have been subject to pogroms and violent demonstrations by racist
Israelis.  This, you
understand, in liberal, gay friendly, pink washing Tel-Aviv.  They are accused of having illegally
entered Israel because it is illegal to claim asylum in Israel.  

All refugees in Israel are, by definition,
illegal. Even worse though is the attitude towards them.  Culture Minister Miri Regev called
them  a ‘cancer’ in Israeli
society.   When criticised for this comment, she then apologised to
cancer patients, for having compared them to asylum seekers.

Israel’s Refuses to
Accept a Single Refugee from Syria or elsewhere because they aren’t Jewish

Israel is now
proposing to steal, because that is what it is, 20% of the incomes of the
poorest section of Israeli society, people who have little or no access to
medical or health facilities, who get no public housing or benefits.  There used to be strong Jewish religious
principles in Jewish religious law about sheltering the stranger, even offering
them up your own bed.  Israel, as a
racist ethno-religious state, sees that refugees are not Jewish therefore they
should not be there.

Israel
Begins to Confiscate 20% of Asylum-Seekers’ Incomes

Watch interview:

transcript

SHIR
HEVER: Welcome to the Real News Network. From the beginning of this month a new
policy’s implemented in Israel. African asylum seekers who work in Israel have
part of their wage income garnished by the state and placed into an account to
which they have no access.

According
to a law which was legislated in 2014 and only now implemented, 20 percent of
the wage of asylum seekers will be deposited into a special bank account. In
addition their employers will be required to deposit 16 percent of the wage
which would normally be allotted to the worker’s pension and to the future of
severance compensation into that same account. And the asylum seekers would
theoretically gain access to the money saved, only upon leaving the country.
Israeli bank, Mizrahi Tefahot, has won the tender to manage these accounts, and
has already informed its’ investors that the policy would improve its liquidity
and reserve ratio, because the money will not be accessible to its owners, and
the bank can use it to offset loans.

They
policy is intended to discourage asylum seekers from entering Israel or from
working in Israel, but as most of the asylum seekers in Israel are refugees
from Eritrea or from Sudan, escaping conditions of slavery and mass murder, one
really wonders if the policy will act as a deterrence, or merely as a mechanism
to make the lives of these refugees even harder than they already are. As
refugees are usually forced to work in precarious and low wage jobs, garnishing
a significant part of the wages make it very difficult for them to make ends
meet.

So we are
joined now to speak about this with Lia Tarachansky. Lia Tarachansky is an
Israeli Russian Canadian journalist and documentary filmmaker. She reported for
the Real News Network on Israel and the Palestinian territories. She’s made
five films already, and one of them Ethnocracy: Israel’s African refugees, is
specifically about the topic that we want to discuss right now, so thank you
very much Lia for joining us.

LIA
TARACHANSKY: Thanks for having me Shir.

SHIR
HEVER: So, how many asylum seekers are currently residing in Israel?

LIA
TARACHANSKY: According to the latest estimates, and also from the numbers of
the Ministry of Interior, about 40,000.

SHIR
HEVER: And let’s talk a little but about the history of this situation, because
Israel was responsible for expelling hundreds of thousands of Palestinians,
creating the longest lasting refugee population in the world since 1948. But no
longer the largest refugee population. Does this have an effect of how African
refugees are seen and treated within Israeli society?

LIA
TARACHANSKY: So the mechanisms that the state of Israel is using to essentially
expel, imprison, and minimize the number of African refugees in its attempt to
be the first developed nation with zero refugees, are the same mechanisms that
the state of Israel and pre state used against the Palestinian refugees. For
example, the anti infiltration law, closing the borders, and mass expulsions.
Including a whole matrix of administrative and bureaucratic manipulations in
order to basically withdraw status from people. So those same processes that
the state of Israel uses against the Palestinian refugees, are used against the
African refugees. However, the African refugees don’t have any history of
conflict, neither with Israel nor with the Jews. And so when they first arrived
in 2006, they were actually welcomed and treated well by Israeli soldiers that
were greeting them at the border, and then by the Israeli public. But when the
government of Netanyahu decided to take a 90 degree turn on that treatment of
the African refugees, what resulted was a full out war against them. Even
though they don’t have a history of conflict with either Israel or the Jewish
people.

What’s
amazing is that because, or rather despite the fact that these people are
escaping genocidal regimes that are actually at conflict with the state of
Israel, and it would be a phenomenal propaganda tool for Israel to treat these
people humanely, instead what the government does is incite against them,
dehumanize them, an essentially treat them and scapegoat them as if they are
the core of the problem. So for example, in the city of London alone, there are
250,000 asylum seekers, refugees, and other claimings. In the entire state of
Israel , there are 40,000. They are less than .001% of the population, and yet
they are constantly being talked about as though they are threatening Israel’s
Jewish majority. A demographic threat, which is something that the state of
Israel uses frequently against the Palestinian minorities in Israel.

So what’s
amazing here is that we’re seeing that even a population that is innocent of
any of the kinds of things that the state Israel accuses its enemies of, is
still being treated as an enemy, simply because they are not Jewish. And the
product of all of this is because of course, Israel is an ethnocratic state,
which means that only Jewish people can become citizens. Which means that there
is no mechanism whatsoever for anyone to actually be in Israel long term,
unless they are Jewish.

SHIR
HEVER: I want to get back to the point that you focus on. Policy of the Israeli
government, that there is some tension also between the Israeli government and
the Israeli public on this issue. Or maybe not tension, but some divergence of
opinion. Because originally, and we’ve covered this in the Real News, the
Israeli government, the giant prisons, to keep all the asylum seekers
incarcerated without a trial, and this policy was found illegal by the Israeli
high court. Now many asylum seekers are still in prison, but this new policy of
garnishing wages, do you see this as a response by the Israeli government or by
the Israeli parliament to the decision of the high court?

LIA
TARACHANSKY: I don’t think those two things are related because the cabinet and
the government of Benjamin Netanyahu has proven not once, and not twice, that
they are simply willing to ignore the rulings of the Supreme Court, where those
rulings do not serve their interests. They don’t need to prove anything. They
don’t need to actually counter the court in any way. They’re simply not
implementing it, and there’s a silent consensus about that on the entire
spectrum of the Israeli Zionist political leadership. Even so called centrist
politicians like Tzipi Livni and Yair Lapid and Yitzhak Herzog are all
respecting the status quo of essentially ignoring the ruling of the supreme
court.

But if
you’re trying to understand where this latest attack on African refugees fits,
what you need to do is look at it from the perceptive of the five part plan
that the government of Netanyahu actually implemented. And this is the plan
that we cover in the film that I co directed with Canadian filmmaker, Jesse
Freeston, called Ethnocracy: Israel’s African refugees.

So if
we’re looking at it as step by step by step, the first step that actually took
place was that the Government basically said, “These people have no
status.” And so, when they were first were coming in, what a lot of
African refugees did, is they would go to the UNHCR, the UN body responsible
for refugees. What the government did in its very early attacks, is it
basically gutted the UNHCR of the ability to decide who is and is not a
refugee. And the UNHCR office in Tel-Aviv basically just became a shell. A
meaningless rubber stamp that had no power whatsoever. So the Ministry of
Interior basically gutted that ability and the used that ability to basically
say, “Well we don’t know who’s a refugee, because, nobody’s checking who’s
a refugee and who is not a refugee. Therefore these people are not
refugees.” So that was the first attack.

The
second attack is that they used that designation as essentially not knowing and
not wanting to know and eliminating the processes of getting to know, who is a
refugee, to then mass deport anyone who is from a country that the government
decided is deportable. And under this policy we saw the Ivory Coast refugees
deported. Some of them in the middle of the night by riot police. We’ve seen
the south Sudanese refugees reported. Of them, more than half have … We can’t
track them down. There’s been dozens and dozens of people that have been
reported killed as a result of this policy. A direct product of Israel’s attack
on the African refugees. And basically, over the years, since 2011, when a few
right wing politicians saw that they can use xenophobia to basically ride a
wave of racism to the front of the parliament from the back benches, which is
where they were, we’ve seen this huge change. And in that change we have seen all
of the African refugees that are basically not from Eritrea and Sudan deported
with a few individuals as exceptions. Then the next step was that the
government of Netanyahu built a 240 kilometer wall along the border with Egypt
for the first time in human history, cutting off Asia from Africa. And this
wall essentially reduced to number of African refugees entering Israel to zero.

The next
step was building the biggest prison for refugees in the entire developed
world. And they build this massive camp in the middle of the desert, surrounded
by other prisons and military bases and they basically created a racial
profiling police force that went down the streets of Tel-Aviv and asked for IDs
from anyone who is brown or black, and then basically on mass deported
thousands of people to this prison.

And so,
the last step of the program essentially has been to pressure those people that
are in that jail and everyone else who hasn’t yet been put in jail into self
deporting. So this is the most important part of the 5 part plan. Which is
essentially, the government of Israel knows that if they deport Eritrean or
Sudanese refugees, which are refugees that come from countries that the level
of refugee recognition worldwide for them is about 80% and up. If they deport
people to these regimes, Eritrea being a dictatorship, and Sudan being
essentially run by a war criminal genocidal maniac. If they deport these
African refugees to these countries, they would significantly lose the support
of the international community because they would be seen as clearly
non-humanitarian move. So instead what they do is that the government of Israel
basically came to an arms agreement with a number of three African states on a
number of arms agreements. Basically saying that those states are gong to take
Israel’s unwanted African refugees, in exchange for discounts of arms being
sold to them by the state of Israel.

And now
they’re trying to shuffle the African refugees to self deport to one of these
three countries. And the latest attempt in the pressure which the UNHCR
actually said is in complete violation of international law, is to push these
African refugees to self deport because of also basically stealing 20% of their
salaries. Now as you yourself reported Shir, when you were talking about the
Histadrut basically theft of the taxes of Palestinian laborers, I have every
little faith that the African refugees are ever going to see that money again.

SHIR
HEVER: Well finally I want to get back to the point that you said before when
you made the comparison with London, for example. And you said that Israel has
the largest prison for asylum seekers in the developed world. Lets talk a
little bit about kind of the international comparison. Is there any other
county in the world that garnishes the wages of asylum seekers in this way in
order to create an incentive for self deportation? And do you think that this policy
is completely for internal purposes, like you said? For the back ventures to be
able to move forward through populism or is it also something that could affect
policy towards refugees in Europe or in other countries, which might copy
Israeli policy.

LIA
TARACHANSKY: Yeah so the African refugees, like the Palestinian laborers, paid
taxes to the state of Israel while they receive absolutely no services
whatsoever from the state of Israel. They don’t get shelter, they don’t get
basic food supplies, they don’t get healthcare. Zero, nothing. So on top of
paying taxes to a government that does not provide them with any services, they
are now going to have these wages taken. And as far as I know, and I’m of
course not a refugee expert, no other country does that. Now you have to
understand that Israel actually promotes itself to Europe, which is currently
seen as in a crisis of migration, as the frontier of effective policies on how
to basically prevent migrants from coming into your borders. So Israel is using
this as yet another tool in its marketing campaign that its trying to convince
other western nations, other developed nations, to adopt in their attack on
globalized migration.

SHIR
HEVER: Alright this is very interesting but of course very concerning about
what will be the implications of this policy. Thank you very much, Lia for
joining us.

LIA
TARACHANSKY: Thanks for having me, and I would like your audience to know that
if they’d like to watch Ethonocracy, its available for free on Vimeo, and they
can also

find it
on narrativeproducions.com.

Israel jails asylum seekers, labels them
“infiltrators”

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