 Hello, and welcome to Salam Shalom Report on Palestine-Israel. I'm Mark Hage. This show is a production of Vermonters for Justice in Palestine. Tonight, we're going to focus on systemic racism and its consequences for two oppressed peoples in Israel-Palestine, Palestinians and Africans. Our first report was produced by Abby Martin of the Empire Files. She interviews Israeli Jews on the street about their attitudes toward Palestinians, the occupation, military violence. And then she speaks intermittently with Ronnie Barkin, a longtime human rights activist, who helps her to understand the structural, historical and ideological underpinnings of Jewish racism in Israel on this relationship to Zionism. Our second report features David Sheen, an Israeli citizen and an intrepid journalist and anti-racist organizer. She spoke in 2015 at the School for Oriental and Asian Studies in London. And as you listen to David speak, you will understand why it is black lives do not matter in Israel and why they should. Thank you so much for watching. Here's our program. On September 12th, an Israeli Knesset party approved a plan to annex all of the occupied territories that would erase Palestine completely. This is considered an extremist solution to a conflict that has spanned decades and the so-called key to peace in the Middle East. But how do Jewish Israeli citizens feel, those who are not in the government or living in illegal settlements? Last year I traveled around the West Bank to release a series for the Empire Files and the plight of Palestinians featuring their voices and stories. But I also want to speak to average Israelis in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem. We're here in Zion Square in Jerusalem, which the government has actually declared to rename Tolerant Square. And we're just going to ask every day Israelis what they think about the situation. You're American. Where are you from and why did you come here? I'm from New York, and I came here with my family when I was younger to make aliyah because it was always my parents' dream to come to Israel because we're religious. So are you American? Yes. Oh, cool. When did you move here and why? I moved here 11 years ago. My family moved here because this is the country of the Jewish people and the future of the Jewish people. And we want to be here. How old are you guys? 18. 18. We're 18 years old. Now we're here in Israel taking leadership course and we're going to the army for a few months to see how life's here. And then we hope to bring back some of this knowledge to our youth movements. So you're like an internship with the army? It's about two months and they show you everything about the army. Israel is a great place. It's a nice place. You should come and visit. Like, I love Israel and I feel safe here. All the misconceptions are not true. Like, there's not people with knives every day and there's not, I don't know, people exploding. Palestinians? Yeah. No, but pretty much the life here is really good. For people living here, it's just normal to see people in the army walking around with guns and you feel completely safe and protected. I feel like we know who the threat is and it's not coming from anyone random as opposed to in the rest of the world that it could be anyone. Here we know who our enemy is and we know that they are out to get us. Who is the enemy? Who is the enemy? That's a very good question. I don't think it's specifically any nation. I think it's the people that are so interested in being politically correct that they won't actually go after the people that are trying to cover things up. I think that Islam is a very bad disease, not just for Israel, for all around the world. We can see it. They think they all have to be Islam. If you're not Islam, they will kill you. A lot of Americans don't really understand what Israel is like. We hear a lot of things in the news. A lot of people are sympathizing with the Palestinian plight. Can you talk about what it's like to kind of live in this situation? First of all, it's very hard. I also am in an organization, it's called La Hava. It's against the Jews shouldn't marry Arabs. Did you say the organization was, did what again? We, the organization is, the thing of it is that Jews shouldn't marry Arabs. Shouldn't marry Arabs? Why do you feel strongly about that? Because Jews is a special nation that God gave it to the Jews, and we don't want Jews to get mixed up together with a different nation. I think Israelis have to take over and they have to kick them away. It will be much better not to kill them, just to go back to Arab countries. You can't deal with these people, there's no need to try, there's no need to talk to them. What we can do is when they do enough harm, we retell you, that's war, and that's the situation that any Jew who lives in Israel has to deal with. There's nothing to say about Israel, it's the same with the Arabs. OK. It's OK in Hebrew, it's very simple, you have to get used to the customs, and every person who makes a mistake has to get rid of it, you have to get rid of the customs, and then they will commit suicide, and they won't do any harm to us, and everything will be OK. They are their enemies, we live here, we don't have to be together, and everything is OK. I think also that every Arab that is doing a terrorism attack, we have to kill them, and not because he's an Arab, because he's a terrorist. I think you should also kick out the family, because it all begins with the education. Whatever they teach the kids, the kids does, you know, it's families. I think we should give them a country. If you're doing any problem, you're just going there to give them a country, and then it's going to be a war between countries, you know. If they're going to throw rockets, we're going to throw one big one, and done. I don't think there's any answer to it. Really? There's only one way, like, I would carpet bomb them. You would carpet bomb them? It's the only way you could deal with it, like, or try to stop them a different way, it never worked. You mean all Arabs are Gaza or? I believe that they, like, I hope to believe they're not, but I do think they are, because I never, I don't, I don't trust them. You can't trust them. And that's the only way I believe that, the only, the only way is just to stop it completely. I think that we're miserable, the Arabists make a big aim, and we need to kill the Arabists. Okay. All right, cool. Well, there is also Jewish civilians that aid Arabs, yeah, I'm not saying, but we have also people that like the Arabs and everything, like Smolanim. I think another thing, that the Jews should have rights to aid them. I think we have the right to aid them. I don't, I don't see a reason why not. I, I won't trust any of them. To better understand this mentality, I also talked to Ronnie Barkin, a Jewish-Israeli citizen who grew up in the country and is now an ardent critic of the notion of a Jewish state. Like anyone growing up in Israel, I went through the whole indoctrination mechanism. And we're being trained to be soldiers from kindergarten, literally from kindergarten. The moment I realized I managed to sort of overcome that indoctrination, then everything became very clear. Because the situation is crystal clear. One of the main successes of Israeli propaganda is to convince the world that the situation is complicated. But it's far from being complicated. It's probably the least complicated conflict in the world today. And it's all about, basically, those who have the power, those who oppress and subjugate and, and trade over the indigenous people of land who have been oppressed and subjugated and expelled from their land. And this is what it's about. The situation here is not very different other than the way it is perceived in the world and among Israeli society themselves. They like to perceive themselves as some being something else, as being, you know, liberal and progressive and all that. And I also follow myself as such until I realize that actually, you know, this is not the case. The case is very clear. And I'm not on the right side of history. And, and that's when, you know, when the moment I managed to overcome this type of brainwashing, then the rest was very easy. So this one is all about creating a place which is for one select group and only that. It's not only the fact that they wanted to take over to usurp the land and the resources and all that. It's also about this exclusive nature of the place that this is ours and only ours. And even any, any Palestinian being born in Israel, even the very Israeli citizens is already regarded as some sort of a threat to the state. The need to segregate, the need to separate and not to interact with Palestinians is part of Israeli identity. So we have to understand that Israeli identity depends on denying Palestinian identity and denying either the existence of Palestinians altogether or at the very least denying their identity, their culture and so on. And also right after the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, right after the Palestinians were expelled from their homes and became refugees, the very next thing that happened was that there was a concerted effort of mass looting of books and other cultural artifacts from Palestinian homes which was led by the National Library in Israel. So it's for a reason that when we say existence is resistance for Palestinians, this is true just by very existing on their land. This is an act of resistance in itself. Even more so when they actually claim their rights, claim their identity, do cultural workers like produce Palestinian culture, that is an act of war. After learning a lot in Jewish history and Israel history, I've seen that people make a big deal out of about a lot of different areas. But if you look back, like correct me if I'm wrong, if you look back at the history, the areas, these places are like really rightfully ours. Like if it was any other country that would have conquered these places or taken over these places, nobody would make a big deal. It's just because it's Israel and it anti-Semitism and everything. They kicked us about 2,000 years ago and we came back. We have Jerusalem, we build every stone here, every stone 3,000 years ago. Over here, this is the city of David. 2,500 years ago. All history of the Jewish people and the Islam doesn't have history at all in this country. I think that they should actually look at a history book and look at the progression of history and who occupied Israel go further back. So if it could be that the Palestinians occupied Israel, that's true, but who occupied that before that. And if you keep going back to the times of the Bible, you'll see that it was indeed the Jews that did occupy it. Where are the Palestinian people during 4,000 years and they're the Ottoman? Answer me. Well, I'm a journalist here, so I don't know. And how gold punished is the sins by other people. He said, he sent the Nazis, he sent, and now he sent the Palestinians. But it's really rightfully ours if you look at the history and the wars and we didn't even start a lot of the wars and we conquered these places rightfully like ours. We brought the settlements by Gaza, you know, all the Gush-Katiff strip. We gave Gaza back. Well, we gave part of Israel, it's not Gaza, we do things for peace. I think that the Jews came here, they took this land and this is our land now and I don't think they should be here, no Arabs. Like Arabs, they won, we gave them Gaza, they should go live their quiet lives, they should go back to Iraq, I don't know, wherever they want. But this is a place, this is a place that God gave it to the Jews and we don't want the Arabs to be here. And before they accuse anyone of occupying, they should actually look back and look at history. So you wouldn't call any of this occupied territory? No, I think that whatever deals were made and wars were fought, they took the land and that's the way things work. I mean, would you call America occupied by Americans because the British used to rule? The people who kicked the Jews out of Israel were the Arabs. 1,400 years later, we come back. Now, I'm not saying that we can blame the people living here for what happened, but you've got to accept that that's some kind of divine justice, that their great, great, great grandfathers kicked my great, great, great grandfather out of here and then we come back and all of a sudden they're like, well, no, we don't want it, it's not fair. They took the land from us, not the Romans and not the Persians and not the Byzantines. It was Arabs who took this land from Jews. And so, yeah, we came back and we took those rightly, rightfully ours. Oh, yeah. Besides the fact that before the Jews came to here and they're late 1800s, early 1900s, it was like a barren land. Like because the Jews came here, it started to flourish or whatever and become actually like people started planting things and making settlements and all these places. If the Jews never came here, then it'd be in the same place it was like 200 years ago or not where it is today. And so we like the Jews came here and they started making it better for also the Arabs and they only start to be an issue because the Arabs started to make it more of an issue. How many people think like you, what is the state of the left wing within Israeli society? So the people who think like me are a negligible few and I would argue that there is no left in Israel and never ever existed. What you have are those self-problamed leftists, liberal Zionists who basically speak the language of peace and human rights and so on in order to sugarcoat their racism and supremacy. And they speak a very different language than the acting government, for example, because the acting government is clearly a right wing government. They are shameless about their racist attitudes and so on. They say this is ours and only ours. Many of them are decent enough to say, yes, there was the anti-cleansing of Palestine and that's a good thing. The problem is that we haven't finished the job, that there are still Palestinians left in Palestine. With the other type of Zionists, with the so-called left in Israel, we cannot even agree about the basic facts. But for them, in order to feel that they are both Zionists and moral at the same time, they have to keep lying to themselves all the time, every moment of every day. So they have perfected this whole discourse of lies in order to lie to themselves and also in order to lie to the international community, in order to justify their existence here in that. I think the occupation does have a role, a big role, and important. I don't think there should be no occupation at all, but in the occupation, things need to be more humane. Do you call the leftist left? Yeah, I am a leftist. Is leftist a slur sometimes? Yes, it is. It's not a good way to be called in Israel. Israel doesn't want to compromise on security, they have to do a blockade, they have to kind of cut this off. It's ridiculous what people have to go through there, but it's also ridiculous what we have to do to keep ourselves safe. We don't want to fight with them, but if they ask for it, they will get it. And we're much stronger, much stronger. We are very behave very gently and morally, very gently with them. It could get a lot worse, is what you're saying. Yeah, if the Russians were here, two days they will kill all of them. If the Americans will be here, they will kill them. Two days they don't care about human rights, they don't care about nothing. Israel is holding back. Very, very. But it's war and civilians get killed in war and it's a horrible, you know, on their side, less on our side, but at the same time, we put money into protecting ourselves. Well look, the refugees, their situation is horrible, but no other nation in the world gets the refugee status the Palestinians do. The Palestinians, third generation people are still considered refugees. You know, I had friends that were Canadian, they went on their passports, they wanted to see what the refugee camps were, they wanted to see what it was all about, they came back, they said it's nothing what I imagined it. Like better than they imagined? They said people were driving around with nice cars, people had nice houses, views, things like that. They thought people were being oppressed, like, you know, like living in tents. It was like they probably were like maybe 10, 15, 20 years ago, you know, like in the past. For them, in order for them to be Zionist and moral, in order for them to have a Jewish democratic state, they needed first of all and foremost to create a Jewish majority by force, by driving away the indigenous people from their land. And this is how this thing was founded. And immediately afterwards, they created a whole legal system that will make sure that those who have been expelled will never be allowed back. And those who remained on their land, because not everyone was expelled, will never be equal citizens. Unfortunately, what we hear on mainstream media, this so-called discourse or so-called debate between the right and the left is about that. It's about do we want a large Israel, which is Arab-free, or do we want a small Israel, which is Arab-free? This is the debate that's taking place. Last question, there's this whole international movement of leftists and activists who want to boycott Israel for human rights violations. Being here, seeing that, and what do you just think about that? I think the BDS movement, the leaders of the BDS movement or everyone that thinks that Israel is bad, if they can, they should bring up about the topic the other side and they should come here and see how everybody's comfortable. People right now, they're looking at Israel and they're calling it an apartheid state. And Israel is not in an apartheid state. There's places, I mean, my family from five generations ago, they were from Genine. You can't find one Jew in Genine right now. I mean, it's totally Jew-free. So if you want to think about a racist apartheid state, it seems it's more, in my opinion, coming from their side. And just a response, I guess, to kind of this international movement, the BDS movement and also the movement that says settlements are illegal, they're encroaching on Palestinian land. Can you respond to that accusation? I think the response would be two-part. The first part would be very simple. Nobody gives Turkey problems for their settlements in Cyprus. It's an anti-Semitic thing. Maybe they don't know that they hate Jews, but they give us so much trouble. The UN only talks about Israel. What about North Korea? What about Russia? Then the second thing would be to say is that... Even from the UN? Completely from the UN. I mean, come on, you're talking about that we're worse than the North Korean dictatorship. Like, nobody in the world thinks that. So those people in the UN and these peace activists, I mean, look, she's a woman, she's walking around however she wants here in Israel, right? There's female general mutilation in Egypt, not very far from here. Why don't people talk about that? I think that we should have more, not more rights. I think we have rights to build more houses for our citizens. And, like, a lot of things that Israel gets criticism for. Other countries will never get it. I want to say to the Prime Minister here in Israel, there's no way that there's peace in Israel. It's not possible to make peace with us. If there's no way to make peace, and the situation can't be like this, you have to get in touch with other countries. There's no way to do it. It's irrelevant. The views of Israelis about the situation are totally irrelevant to the question of how do we change the situation? Did it matter what white people think about apartheid in South Africa at the time? The question is how do we end apartheid and how do we end Israeli crimes? You know, every Israeli official will say, we'll claim to speak on behalf of the Jewish people and we'll even demand of Palestinians to recognize Israel's right to be a Jewish state and so on. I don't recognize Israel's right to be a Jewish state because it is not Jewish by religion. It is only Jewish by supremacy. Israel is Jewish just like South Africa was white in the exact same context, with the exact same meaning. And obviously, any decent person around the world should oppose that because it is inherently racist and more than that. And it also happens to be very much against international law. So when we talk about Israel as an apartheid state, even though it's not exactly like South Africa, it neatly falls under the legal definition of the crime of apartheid, which is a very serious crime, one of a few crimes that is regarded as a crime against humanity, which means that all parties of the world are obligated to do something against it, not to be complicit in that. And what we're coming in saying is, you know, there are basic fundamental Palestinian rights that must be respected. One of them is ending of occupation, of course, but that's not the main issue, that's part of the issue. The other two rights are equality inside Israel proper, or what we call Palestine-48, and the rights of refugees which are being expelled from there since the very foundational state of Israel. These are fundamental rights, they must be respected. And now we can debate, we can argue about how do we implement these rights. I'm willing to discuss that. I'm not willing to discuss, you know, should we have equality or not. This is not negotiable. So there are various different African communities in Israel and Palestine, and I'm only gonna be talking about one of them, the African refugees. We're talking about a group, 66,000 people originally, about 90% of them are from Sudan and from Eritrea. They're fleeing, the war criminal, the president of Sudan, and they're fleeing the dictatorship in Eritrea. And this person has been in power since 1987, if you can imagine this, 63% of the people born or people living in Eritrea have only ever known this man as leader. So they're fleeing ethnic cleansing, they're fleeing abject slavery essentially, and I'm just gonna show you a map so you can see what I'm talking about. So you have Sudanese refugees fleeing ethnic cleansing going towards Europe, but Gaddafi kind of cuts a deal with European leaders to stop that in exchange for purchasing Libyan oil, and so then you see flow of refugees towards Egypt and eventually from there on to Israel, Eritreans joining the flow. Now why didn't these refugees just stay in Egypt, the first country they got to? Well, they did, they tried to get there, they tried to ask for their refugee rights and they were slaughtered in front of the UN building in Cairo. And when that happened then people realized that's not gonna provide them with any safe space so they started moving on to Israel. Now I just wanna warn people, you may wanna avert your eyes just for one minute, these are horrific images I'm about to show you because on their way to Israel, so many of these people were kidnapped by human traffickers and were tortured in order to exploit them for money, they would call their relatives on mobile phones and say if you do not give us money, transfer money through these shady bank accounts, we will continue to torture your relatives and on the phone, this is our I'm about to show some horrific scenes, in addition to the usual tortures of beatings, executions, rape, gang rape, they invented new forms of torture, they would take plastic bags and they would drip them on people's bodies, scarring them permanently. This has been documented by many news crews in the Sinai Peninsula, so this is what they have to do to get to Israel and once they arrive there, you wonder how a country as secured as Israel is able to allow these people, but at that point, the border with Africa, because Israel's in northeast Africa, so the African border with Egypt was, this is pretty much what it looked like, not easy but not insurmountable either and so people pass, no one infiltrated, no one tried to get into the country and sneak past the authorities and no one did that, everyone crossed the border, according to international law, they crossed the border and they wait there for Israeli authorities to come by and pick them up and test them, make sure they don't have any communicable diseases, etc. But once they arrive, the Israeli government doesn't want to give them refugee rights and so of all of the applications that are made, the Israeli government just ignores 80% of them, doesn't even look at them and of those it does examine, it just outright rejects 99.++% of those and we're talking of Israel's entire population, we're talking about less than 1% of the population but even that, as we heard from Muslim, this is considered a demographic threat and so these people, in other countries of the world, they do receive refugee rights, in large numbers here in the UK, 71% in other countries, much higher in Israel, it's zero there. I've been four Eritreans who have received refugee status and zero Sudanese, if I'm not mistaken and it's not that other countries in the region aren't taking in these refugees, we can see countries taking in tens, hundreds of thousands, even millions and these numbers aren't even up to date, this is from several years ago, we just talked last night about Lebanon being something like 50% of its population, almost, refugees at this point. Jordan also, these are Israel's two closest neighbors, Lebanon and Jordan each taking in millions of refugees, I'm not Syrian but this is how people are contributing in the area to alleviate the refugee crisis in Israel, Israel actually leads the world having the highest refugee rejection rate of any country in the world. So, in the country, without the right to work, without any support from the government or the right to work and thereby sustain themselves, we have abject poverty in the community, the government sends these people to South Tel Aviv so essentially creating, taking impoverished neighborhood to begin with and then turning it into a refugee camp so putting two impoverished populations, one against the other. Of course, many people at first living on the streets know where to go with no help and so people out in the rain and living in very cramped conditions and very, very difficult to work and when they find work, it's usually exploitative work but at least people are no longer being ethnically cleansed, at least they've gotten away from the abject slavery and so they can start a new life but no, that's not enough. So, this is how we see reports on Africans, I'm just gonna quickly read it, I'm gonna go back to a critique of Haaretz, so this is written in Haaretz, in the corners of the living quarters of Africans you will find the filth, card games played for money, residents getting drunk and prostitution. The Africans bring this way of life with them when they migrate, it's no wonder the crime in a country is on the upswing. Young women and even young men are again not safe going out on the streets alone after dark. Now, this was also written in Israeli, daily liberal Haaretz but it was written in 1949, okay? It was not written about these Africans, it was written about these Africans, that Ali just spoke of, okay? And then we see even back in the day there's this white supremacy, this pigmentocracy of people of color being vilified and because, yes, we have nativism where people who immigrated less recently think they deserve more privileges and those who immigrated more recently and of course white supremacy, people feel they have less pigment, believe they deserve more privileges and those with more pigment but we also have now the extra added effect of Jewish supremacy, people who are Jewish or more Jewish in their own eyes believe they deserve more privileges than those who are not Jewish or less Jewish and we see the institutions in Israeli society waging war against these African populations, we see chief rabbis from all around the country authoring an edict, a religious edict forbidding Jews to rent apartments to non-Jews and to Africans specifically. We see the mayor of Tel Aviv, he's since changed his tune but then 2012 he urges the Israeli government to kick out all the Africans and he sends his municipal inspectors to shut down their little makeshift businesses in their cafes pouring bleach into their cooking pots. We see that even soup kitchens in Israel from Tel Aviv to Elat refuse to serve Africans on principle. So this is the institutions then we have the government, Netanyahu comes to power, back to power 2009 he appoints his interior minister, Eli Shai and Eli Shai really builds his career on inciting hatred towards Africans. He rightly says, most are Muslims who think the country doesn't belong to us white men. Says they bring with them a profusion of diseases tuberculosis, AIDS and drugs. Until I'm able to deport them, I will jail them and make their lives miserable. So this is the official government policy and so he does and he appoints one of Israel's mega racists Ardon Sofer to compile official government report on how to deal with these African refugees and in his report they recommend the concentration of the infiltrators and that's exactly what the state of Israel does. So first of all it does this by curtailing their visas saying now you gotta get your visas renewed every three months, two months, one month and of course huge lineups people waiting all day and they he with their babies sleeping on the ground outside to get these visas just for the right to be able to but then quickly we see police rounding up Africans off city streets of Tel Aviv and other cities and they know, oh this Sudanese man is about to get some kind of diploma because he just finished a course, an exception that proves the rule of someone who managed to succeed in Israeli society so they know there's gonna be Sudanese people there and they swoop in on this graduation party and they arrest Africans knowing they're gonna be there and take them and they stop people on the streets in areas that are frequented by Africans and even if you look Jewish, they'll ask you for your papers, are you really Jewish and if you're not they rounded up people and they're taking them down to this desert detention center in the south of the country on the border with Egypt, there's nowhere to go, there's nothing to do, it's in the middle of nowhere, it's just sand as far as you can see and this is where they have thousands of African men living out their days and nights and of course, the Supreme Court kind of tried to mediate it so that it would be watered down a little bit, it wouldn't be as horrific but essentially, they've got furloughs, they're allowed to walk out and walk back in for a few hours every day to get some exercise but complete crappy food, they have like really substandard medical services, Israel's high tech marvel can send teams of people all over the world but it can't provide decent medical, so you have human rights groups coming out on the weekends and doing medical clinics on the ground because the government can't even provide because the whole point is not to actually give them a place to be, the idea is as the Interior Minister said, to make their lives miserable so that they will eventually give up and self-deport back to Africa, that's the goal and so that's what people eventually do because they realize the government is determined to get them out, nothing they're gonna do is gonna change matters, so thousands of these men and women decide they will accept the government's bribe to leave the country in exchange for a couple thousand dollars and sure enough, but we see now the statistics that the government said they were gonna send them to safe places where they would be able to find a new life elsewhere but sure enough, turns out 68% of those refugees they coerced to self-deport have been sent back to the tortures they fled from, back to Sudan, back to Eritrea, major, major, massive violation of refugee rights and of those 32% that weren't sent to Sudan and Eritrea, the ones sent to these countries, Israel supposedly secured arrangements with, since then they have had to continually flee and leave those countries to find refuge elsewhere, reaching as far as Scandinavia and South Africa and the seconding part of sending these people back to the African continent is that Israel has played no small role in some of the horrors that have taken place on the African continent in recent years, we heard about Israel's massive arms industry and from the genocide in Rwanda, we don't know exactly but no small amount of these people died from Israeli weapons because Israeli arms manufacturers continued to sell weapons to militias engaging in genocide while the Rwand ethnic cleansing was going on. Disgusting and so now the Israeli government is cutting deals with these African countries, the idea is, well, if you agree to take some of these unwanted people of color off our hands then we will bribe you with more weapons and more weapons training so you can make more refugees out of Africans and so it goes and that's why you have some protesters here, Israel, Mohamed Neshek, Israel sells arms to murderers and expels the victims. This is what happens and as it starts to coerce these people to self-deport within 10 days you have kids who were born in Israel who speak perfect Hebrew and kids already dying from simple communicable diseases that could have been easily treated because they're sending them back to South Sudan in this case where there's over 50% of the population has no drinking water. So Israel is so determined it doesn't really care what happens and recently we saw that several of these people who've been deported were since executed by ISIS, if you can imagine that and of course we've seen in the media recently how many thousands of people are dying in the Mediterranean every single year fleeing in every single direction. This is the result and a small amount of these people again. So with Israel sending these people off back to Africa and then continuing to flee from there to find refuge somewhere else and you have a boat with 1,000 people drowning in the Mediterranean. How does the Israeli government respond? Well, minister, senior minister Israel Katz after that boat with 1,000 refugees drowned said see how correct the government policy was? You can give us a compliment. Yeah. And so once news came out that these Africans who were in Israel and who had to self-deport were pressured to self-deport, eventually were executed by ISIS. They had memorial ceremonies at Holot at that Desert Detention Center. But at the Desert Detention Center you also have ceremonies for other events like Holocaust Remembrance Day in Israel and also on Passover they have a ceremony to honor it because these people understand the ones who went through ethnic cleansing, they know what ethnic cleansing is, they know what the Holocaust is. The ones who escaped from Eritrea from abject slavery, they understand what coming out of slavery is the meaning of Passover. For many of them the reason they came to Israel was because they'd heard these myths of the Jewish people, of what they went through in the Holocaust, of their stories, of the Exodus and they thought that they would find refuge because these people, of all people in the world would understand their plight, what they went through. But no, thank you, they do not, the Israeli government does not want them to join the Jewish people in Israel and it is doing everything it can to prevent that. Even if they want to, most of them are Christians and Muslims but even if they want to join the Jewish people in some way you have the conversion czar, if you can imagine Israel actually has something like this, that conversion czar and Muli Jeslas and the conversion czar says the government built a fence on the border and we built one here at the entrance gate to the Jewish people. Here we are talking about tens of thousands who want to assimilate into us and have no connection to Judaism. Usually people say, oh well, Israel's not racist. Okay, even if you're not Jewish, you can become Jewish. So even if we privilege Jewish people, anyone can become Jewish but we know as an abject lie that the government does not want people who are not Jewish to become Jewish and here we have it from the horse's mouth and here we have it from Israel's so-called justice or injustice minister until a couple of years ago, Yaakov Numan said the exact same thing. It's impossible to allow anyone to convert to Judaism. It permits anyone to receive citizenship. He's also said other crazy stuff but this man until recently he is one of the, he is actually Israel's most richest politician. I think it's important to mention this because there is a connection with capitalism here and exploitative other populations because part of the reason, yes, part of the reason they don't want Africans in Israel is because of racism and part of the reason is capitalism because if you have this group of Africans in the country then they can work in the country but that means you won't need to import workers from other parts of the world, primarily the Far East like people working in agriculture, people from Thailand or people from China doing construction work or people from the Philippines doing caretaking work because there are people who make huge amounts of profits, huge profits from glorified slave trading essentially bringing in these workers and getting money from them for the privilege of being able to work in Israel. There's industries that make massive amounts of money and of course some of these groups contribute very, very nicely to the electoral campaigns of these racist politicians. So one hand washes the other. All right, now they do, they're willing to let Africans do some of the work like actually building the fence to prevent any more Africans from entering the country. That they did allow them to do. There's some pretty good metal workers in that community and we have Israeli politicians now reaping the political currency of this war on Africans. Netanyahu running for reelection in 2013, promoting himself. We stopped the wave of infiltrators from Sinai but it's not only on the national level, even on the local level we have this. Now imagine walking down the street in your city and seeing a sign like this. To keep those Jews far from my daughter, I'm voting for the Christian identity party. Now of course this is a sick sign and it doesn't exist. I hope it never will exist. I made it in Photoshop, right? It doesn't exist, but this does exist and it's the exact same sign but in Hebrew towards Africans. Welcome to Israel 2015. Okay, and so all of this incitement has an effect on the people, all right? So you walk down the street in Tel Aviv and you see graffiti, all right? You have people accosting African people in the streets. People are afraid to leave their houses, okay? You have rallies, anti-African rallies in the streets of Tel Aviv and other cities around the country. Get out of here, we don't want you here. Go, you're rapists, you're murderers, you know? And so this builds up to a peak in 2012 and we see people firebombing African people's homes, all right, firing, trying to burn them out and we see even the firebombing of an African kindergarten in Tel Aviv. Why wasn't this reported in the UK media? All right, now that kindergarten that was firebombed, the people who founded the kindergarten for those kids, the man who founded it, he was deported within six months and eventually the person who actually firebombed that kindergarten, he got up without any jail sentence, okay? So this is the level of impunity, the message to the Israeli people, continue to burn out these Africans, you know, if we're not doing it fast enough. Now of course there's some Israelis who are objecting to this, who fight back, who counter-protest, who try to help the Africans who stand in solidarity, but it's too little, too late and we see in May 2012 a massive pogrom, a thousand Israelis running through the streets. First of all, let's put it in perspective, we have top Israeli politicians, we've actually just heard about Mir Regev and others who stood on the podium and who said that the Sudanese are a cancer in our body. Now I should point out, she apologized a few years later, a few days later she said, I apologize, I did not intend to hurt cancer patients. So she didn't want to insult cancer patients by comparing them to Africans, so she apologized for this. But after she said this, a thousand Israelis ran rampant through the streets of Tel Aviv for hours attacking any dark-skinned person they came across and smashing stores and cafes operated by Africans and beating people in the streets. And this is the result, this is Israel today. And so now we have also knife attacks, so African man standing on the street, someone doesn't like the way he looks and lops his hand off. We even have a family downtown Tel Aviv holding a one-year-old baby in her mother's arms and an Israeli comes up and stabs the baby in the head three times. Now, of course not every single Israeli is gonna do that. Obviously this guy is off his rocker, but why didn't he stab an African baby? Because, and he said it because blacks are terrorists, all blacks, blacks, babies are terrorists and this comes straight from the government rhetoric all the way from the top. This is the atmosphere in Israel and this is the result, if you can imagine that. So I wanna be respectful of your time, I'm just ending my talk just to give you a sense that yes, some people notice this, African ambassadors to Israel from these six countries demanded a meeting with the government saying, look, we're afraid to walk the streets at this point. Our wives, we don't know what to do and they wanna go for shopping and they're accosted in the streets. You've gotta lower the flames. This is the level of anti-African incitement in Israel and after that infamous anti-African race riot that we saw in Tel Aviv, the people were polled and they were asked, what do you think? Is it legitimate? And sadly, sickeningly, 52% of Jewish Israelis said they agree that the Africans are a cancer. Of course, Miri Regev was then promoted, not fired but promoted and then made chair of the interior committee, the very committee that determines what happens to those African refugees. We can talk a little bit more but maybe we'll do that in a Q and A. I think I've horrified you enough for one day. This is the reality of African people and keep this in mind when you think about what the fate of Palestinian people is and what are the reasons for the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians and is it really about the cycle of violence and this bad blood between them? Is that the reason why there's anti-Palestinian racism or could there be some other reasons for anti-Palestinian racism that originate not in the last 100 years of conflict but in something about the Zionist state and something about anti- Gentile racism that blurs over into any group that's not Jewish whether there's a history of conflict or absolutely no history of conflict between them. Thank you.