Tel Aviv, January 15— Over 30,000 black migrants have been on strike for over a week against Israel’s racist Anti-Infiltration Law and fascist living conditions, bringing businesses to a halt. They chanted “we need asylum” and “Yes to freedom, no to prison!”
More than 60,000 undocumented migrants, mainly from Eritrea and Sudan, are the superexploited workers of Israel. One man from Darfur said, “All of us are fleeing genocide, fleeing dictatorship regimes. Looking for protection.” What they get is social murder: “open facilities” in which they are separated from families, required to answer roll call three times a day, prevented from seeking work, on lockdown at night, and surrounded by a fence of razor wire; detention centers in the Negev desert; imprisonment; racist living conditions; mass deportations; disregard of asylum applications.
The Zionist state, and any state for that matter, are racist apparatus installed by rulers to divide and control labor based on an artificial concept of borders. This foments discrimination based on documentation, or the lack thereof. Undocumented workers — be it in England, United States, China, or Russia — must unite with documented workers, in this particular case, Jewish and Palestinian workers, to smash the bosses’ dictatorship. The strikers in Israel serve as an inspiration for workers everywhere, for they provide a glimpse of the potential of workers’ power.