Thousands Strike vs. Israeli Apartheid

TEL-AVIV, January 5 — Fifteen thousand African refugees, mostly working class, demonstrated in central Tel-Aviv against their racist treatment by the Israeli government. This climaxed a week-long strike of 30,000 by most African refugees and immigrants in Israel — mostly in restaurants, cleaning and housekeeping — protesting their maltreatment by the capitalist regime. They are also demanding an end to their deportation to the “Open Residential Facility”  — actually imprisoned in barbed wire detention centers with three roll-calls a day in the Negev desert.
However, among Jewish workers in the southern Tel-Aviv slums, this demonstration drew mixed feelings and even hostility. Why? Because the Israeli bosses’ regime, with a hand in the crisis and in genocide in East Africa, has even turned the arrival of a handful of refugees — 60,000 in a country of eight million, less than 0.5 percent of the population — into a humanitarian crisis.  In working-class slums around the country, particularly in Tel-Aviv, the long-time residents and refugees both suffer.
Haaretz newspaper (6/25) reported that Israel is the world’s sixth largest exporter of weapons, and traded $2.4 billion worth of instruments of death in 2012 alone. All this is subsidized by the Jewish and Arab workers’ tax money, as well as that of U.S. workers’ taxes. Meanwhile, a handful of well-connected businessmen enjoy its fruits.
Among the happy customers of this industry of death is Isaias Afwerki, Eritrea’s tyrant, who buys weapons at discount prices from the Israeli bosses’ government. This dictator has enacted a mandatory “Civil Service” in his country, sometimes even for decades, which is nothing but slavery, all for the profits of the ruling clique surrounding the tyrant. Those who try to escape this “service” to preserve their freedom risk imprisonment, torture or even death. Most Eritrean refugees in Israel have escaped from the claws of this dictator.
Similarly, the Israeli regime, with U.S. backing, sells weapons to the belligerents in the Sudanese civil war, in which hundreds of thousands of civilians have been killed, and millions more rendered homeless since 2003.
So the Israeli government has a hand in forcing Africans to flee their homes and risk crossing the Egyptian border (facing death from Egyptian soldiers) to reach Israel. As long as the Eritrean dictator continues to oppress workers there, if refugees return to their home country many will be killed, most likely by Israeli weapons.
Tens of thousands of refugees from East Africa have reached Israel’s southern border. The Israeli government quickly dumped them in the slums of southern Tel-Aviv, without a work permit and without any aid. Adding tens of thousands of unemployed refugees, who don’t know the local language, to already impoverished, crime-ridden neighborhoods is a recipe
for humanitarian disaster. And, indeed, crime rates have risen sharply, providing city hall with even more excuses to not invest in maintenance in the slums. All of this was perpetrated by the Israeli ruling class and its government.
The rich profit in three ways. First, a group of tens of thousands of workers without work permits, who face hostility from their environment, are a huge reserve army of cheap labor for Israeli bosses. They’re unprotected by Israel’s already flimsy labor regulations and work for very long hours at below the minimum wage with no social benefits — all for the super-profits of their bosses.
Second, the humanitarian disaster in the slum neighborhoods, with additional racist filth spread by the regime, turns the slums’ long-term residents against the refugees, whom they now blame, in many cases, for the situation there. This is divide-and-conquer, pure and simple. It pushes Jewish workers to blame their African sisters and brothers for their own misery rather than blaming the real culprit, the regime and the ruling class.
Third, because slum life is intolerable, the government can now pretend to “solve” this problem by imprisoning people for a year without trial when their only “crime” is their skin color. This makes the government appear as “saviors” to many workers having been brainwashed by racist ideas. Racism like this serves only the rich and ravages the workers.
A solution to the neighborhoods’ crisis would be to allow the refugees to hold legal full-time jobs, such as in agriculture, instead of dumping them in poor neighborhoods with no jobs. Even a tiny fraction of the tycoons’ riches — all stolen from us, the workers — could rebuild the south Tel-Aviv slums in order to provide good housing and jobs for their residents. But this is unprofitable for the tycoons. They want all of us — regardless of skin color — as slaves to hate each other rather than to hate them.
All workers of all creeds must blame the real culprits, the racist capitalists and their servants in the government. Once the working class unites and seizes state power, we could manage the economy collectively in an egalitarian manner, so that everyone — regardless of skin color or their area of origin — will have decent, safe, dignified lives. This is the essence of the communism for which the Progressive Labor Party fights.