Black Workers Rebel vs. Israeli Racism

TEL-AVIV-JAFFA, May 16 — Within days of workers and youth rebelling against racist cops in Baltimore, U.S., thousands of Ethiopian-Jewish workers protested in the streets of Tel-Aviv against apartheid. Like Ferguson and Baltimore, Black workers here lead the way in fighting racism.
They battled the cops and were not deterred by tear gas and stun grenades. While in the West Bank these weapons are used on a daily basis, this was the first time these “riot control” weapons were used in Tel-Aviv proper. Police cars were turned over. More than 23 cops were injured, and over 40 protesters were arrested.
Unlike the largely peaceful protests connected to the worldwide Occupy movement of 2011, this time workers fought with all their might against the racist cops. The protestors blocked the Ayalon Highway for three hours and resisted the cops’ attempts to remove them. Many other white Jewish and a few Palestinians workers united in fighting the violent cops. Thousands of Ethiopian workers and youth demonstrated in front of the Israeli Police Headquarters in Jerusalem.
The reason for this protest was to fight racist violence against Ethopian workers. The trigger was on April 27, when two policemen beat up and arrested Damas Fikadeh. He is a young Ethiopian who serves as an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldier in Holon, a city south of Tel-Aviv. What is Damas’s crime? He is a Black worker under capitalism. Israeli police thrive on racist violence against Black, Arab, and migrant workers.  
The State of Israel brought many Ethiopian Jews here in the 1980s and ‘90s as a source of cheap labour for Israeli bosses to employ in minimum wage and dead-end jobs. Racism is the order of the day for Black workers in Israel. Ethiopians are forced into slum neighborhoods and are targets of police terror. While Ethiopians are 2 percent of the population, they make up 30 percent in juvenile jails. Over 41 percent live in official poverty. Unemployment is twice as high among Ethiopians compared to other Jewish Israelis. The racist system that segregates Black youth into racist housing and schools is the same system that controls the Black population by forcibly injecting Ethiopian women with birth control. The Israeli blood bank also rejects or dumps blood donated by Ethiopians. The tremor of rebellion here is about the systematic racism against Black workers.
The Baltimore KKKonection
The link between the U.S. and Israel is one of racism and fightback. Whether it’s Baltimore, Ferguson, Holon, or Jerusalem, Black workers suffer the brunt of racist attacks from the ruling class. From one imperialist country to another, Black workers are a key revolutionary force. Whenever the most exploited sector of the working class fights back, it serves as an example for workers everywhere. There is also another connection between Baltimore and Israel: the racist cops are trained by the same forces. Nearly every major police department in the U.S. gets training from Israel, the experts of Apartheid and racist occupation. Among them were Baltimore kkkops who learned “crowd control” strategies, “gathering intelligence” lessons and other methods of domination. These Israeli-trained kkkops terrorize Black workers throughout the United States.
Black Workers Lead the Way
These Ethiopian workers and youth showed the working class the way forward to crush the racist system that oppresses us all — not by peaceful protest, but by open rebellion against racism. Surrendering to police demands and listening to misleaders who call for “peaceful protest” will not end racism. The only way to end police terror is by confronting the class enemies — the cops and their racist lords, the big bosses — and fighting them on all fronts. The cops have guns, stun grenades and tear gas, but we the workers greatly outnumber them. We must overcome the racist divisions the bosses put upon us and unite based on class. If Palestinian, Jewish, and Black workers unite, workers can become a force capable of defeating capitalism and replacing it with a system of equality for all ethnicities—communism.
Another lesson from this important struggle is that when workers fight back, they are violently attacked. No matter how much the police chief apologizes for individual abuses of power by rank-and-file cops, it is not just “a few rotten apples” but the whole rotten system.
However, this system is not without weakness. The police command prevented Ethiopian cops (many of whom are Border Guard soldiers, essentially enlisted soldiers pressed into the police) from working at the protest locations. The cops fear that many of these soldiers will switch sides and fight for their families and friends, not for the bosses.
Need Multiracial Unity and Red Leadership
The struggle continues and there will be more demonstrations. As communists, PLP here know from similar cases in history that limited to ethnic liberation struggle alone, the Israeli bosses will be able to suppress this struggle or buy off its leaders. The protest needs two things to grow into a revolutionary movement.
First, the fightback must be multiracial and include all oppressed workers suffering from apartheid, like African refugees and Palestinians. It must also include white Jewish workers. Workers from Palestine to Israel must unite to see that we are part of one struggle for justice, which means a world without racist bosses, whether it is here in Israel or in the U.S.
Second, this struggle needs communist leadership that will be able to move it from a struggle against police terror to a struggle against the racist system of capitalism itself. While we are modest PLP branch in this country, we will fight for these politics in everywhere.