Tag: The National

Netanyahu’s nation-state bill is profoundly counterproductive

by adminin Palestine, Writing

The National, 29 November 2014

When I left Palestine this summer, I was relieved to leave the Israeli flag behind. No more blue and white ensign snapping at military checkpoints. No more Star of David standing high over army bases. Saying goodbye to the Israeli flag would also mean putting an end to my ambivalence about it.

Upon seeing it, there was always a moment of familiarity. After all, it bears the Star of David and I grew up with this symbol in my home. As a child it dangled from my neck in the form of the Hebrew pendant – passed down from my great-grandmother – that my mother made me wear.

But the same symbol enraged me. How dare these Zionists appropriate my religion, my culture, my family and the Hebrew language? The language is not theirs. It belonged to another one of my great-grandmothers, who lived in Eastern Europe and recorded all of the family’s deaths and births, not in Yiddish but in poetic Hebrew. She marked all these events on a piece of paper that she carried with her to the New World, Hebrew pressed to her bosom as she crossed an ocean. The language belonged to her. It belonged to all of us.

How dare the Zionists put the Star of David on their flag? How dare they, under the false pretence of ensuring the safety of my people, occupy another? How dare they besmirch Judaism in this way? Not only have they occupied Palestine, they’ve occupied Jewish identity.

Shlomo Sand’s latest book, How I Stopped Being a Jew, could be understood as a reaction to both occupations. It also seems like a response to a state that has become open about its preference for an ethnocracy over a democracy, as evinced by the “Jewish nation-state” bill.

If passed, the bill, which received overwhelming support from Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet, would result in the equivalent of a constitutional amendment declaring Israel the nation-state of the Jewish people. This is alarming considering that approximately 20 per cent of its citizens are non-Jewish Arabs. It also has implications for migrant workers and African refugees who live in Israel.

Sand, an Israeli professor at Tel Aviv University, is a historian and the author of The Invention of the Jewish People. In How I Stopped Being a Jew, which is not nearly as personal as the title suggests, Sand notes a number of moments that made him question his secular Jewish identity as well as the privilege that comes with that identity. Two particular experiences stand out.

The first was his daughter’s difficult questions about a Jewish holiday that celebrates, among other things, the death of non-Jews and Sand’s struggle to answer her.

The second was witnessing discrimination at Tel Aviv airport. As Sand breezes through security, he sees a Palestinian citizen of Israel detained. As a non-Jew, she is automatically considered suspect.

In the pages that follow this recollection, Sand writes: “What is the meaning, then, of being ‘Jewish’ in the State of Israel? There is no doubt about it: being Jewish in Israel means, first and foremost, being a privileged citizen who enjoys prerogatives refused to those who are not Jews, and particularly those who are Arabs.”

This seems to be the heart of the book and it’s also an apt description of the conflict. But it doesn’t come until too late in the book. Rather than using his personal experiences to tease out the inherent contradiction of the “Jewish and democratic” state – which seems the most powerful way to question the status quo – he spends most of the book engaged in an odd attempt to prove that there is no such thing as a secular Jewish identity.

I get his reasoning. Sand is hitting at the very foundation of the Zionist project. The early Zionists, who had internalised anti-Semitic stereotypes prevalent in Europe at the time, wanted to shake off the yoke of the diaspora Jew.

The diaspora Jew, or the image of one, was that of a frail figure, pale, weak and easily intimidated. In Eretz Yisrael (the land of Israel), the new Jews would stand strong. And they would be secular.

Sand, however, doesn’t manage to convince that there is no such thing as secular Judaism. In part because, as he acknowledges, secular Jewish identity is hard to define, making it equally hard to disprove.

He runs through a list of things that might be considered secular Judaism, shooting them all down. However, the list is by no means exhaustive and Sand can’t possibly anticipate the many ways individuals construct their secular Jewishness.

And, in some places, Sand resorts to assertions that unintentionally play into the Zionists’ hands. He takes care to say that he is not conflating Judaism with Zionism. But because his rejection of secular Judaism stems, in part, from his reaction to Zionism, he’s acknowledging and tacitly agreeing to the Zionists’ claim on Jewish identity.

The book is at its most confusing and most powerful in its final pages when Sand describes his connection to Tel Aviv and the Hebrew language.

“I inhabit a deep contradiction,” Sand admits. “My deep attachment to the place serves only to fuel the pessimism I feel towards it. And so I often plunge into a melancholy that is despondent about the present and fearful for the future.”

But I’d venture to say that many readers won’t make it to the end of his book, because he’s spent most of it alienating the people who most need to be a part of this conversation: self-defined secular Jews.

Rather than rejecting secular Judaism and engaging in the counterproductive business of attempting to delegitimise others’ identity – which will only make them cling to it more tightly – Jewish identity should be detached from Israel and understood as something that has and can transcend time and place.

The nation-state bill only underlines the importance of doing this.

If Jewishness was understood as something that isn’t dependent on land, Israel would be forced to loosen its grip on Judaism. The state could then instead embrace democracy and all of its citizens – whether they are Jewish, Palestinian, or just Israeli, as Sand defines himself.

Sand would like to see this happen within the context of a two-state solution that would, eventually, lead to an Israeli-Palestinian federation. I’d like to see this happen under the auspices of one democratic state. But, ultimately, we both hope – hope against hope – for the same thing: freedom for all of those who live between the river and the sea.

*Illustrative photo by James Emery, via Flickr

Israel makes no distinctions in its endless persecutions of the ‘other’

by adminin African refugees, Writing

The National, 17 August 2013

A little more than a year has passed since a violent race riot rocked south Tel Aviv, the heart of Israel’s African refugee community. The neighbourhood has not made international headlines since the incident in May last year, when Jewish Israelis attacked Africans on the streets, smashed windows of African-owned businesses and looted the stores. But the area is still simmering and the state is putting asylum seekers under increasing pressure.

Amine Zegata, an asylum seeker from Eritrea, owns a bar in the HaTikva neighbourhood in south Tel Aviv. The front window was shattered during that night of violence, as were the bottles of alcohol inside. Later, as he repaired the damage, Jewish Israelis came and cracked the new storefront. They also threatened to hurt him again. That was not the beginning. Several months before the riot, Mr Zegata was beaten to the point of hospitalisation in what he says was a racially motivated attack.

On a sunny summer afternoon in Shchuna HaTikva, which ironically translates to Hope neighbourhood, Mr Zegata explained to me in fluent Hebrew that locals still enter the bar on a regular basis and harass him. For that reason, he was initially hesitant to be interviewed for this story. “Every time a new article comes out, it creates more problems,” he says, adding that he fears for his safety.

Mr Zegata isn’t alone in this feeling. In the wake of the riot and continuing harassment, the African asylum seekers who were once Mr Zegata’s clients have stopped coming to the bar. “I don’t have enough business,” he says. “I’m in the red now.”

His slide into debt began when his business was vandalised last year. Not long after he’d repaired the bar, city inspectors came and told Mr Zegata that he needed to make further changes in order to bring his place in line with municipal ordinances and to get a business licence. He hired an engineer to make sure the renovations met the city’s requirements.

Despite his efforts, the municipality refused to issue him a licence. Their reasoning? Mr Zegata, like most of the 60,000 African asylum seekers who live in Israel, does not have a work visa.

For the most part, Israel does not process asylum seekers’ requests for refuge. Eritrean and Sudanese nationals do, however, currently get group protection from deportation – de facto acknowledgement of their refugee status. But a majority of asylum seekers receive visas that explicitly state that they are not allowed to work, forcing them to take whatever low-wage, off-the-books jobs they can find. Opening a business has provided a lifeline for a small number of refugees.

But not for Mr Zegata. When his request for a licence was refused, he “asked [officials at the municipality], ‘Who is responsible for all this debt?’ They replied, ‘We don’t care.'”

And Mr Zegata might not have the chance to get back on his feet. This week Israeli authorities began shutting down African-owned businesses in south Tel Aviv, according to the local newspaper Haaretz. While Israelis also run businesses without the appropriate licensing, officials emphasised that the operation targets Africans.

The state is making other moves to drive asylum seekers out of the country. In recent months, Israeli officials have pressured jailed Sudanese and Eritreans into deportation by presenting them with the “option” of staying in jail or “voluntarily” returning to their home countries. Last year’s amendments to the 1954 Prevention of Infiltration Law – which was originally created to stop Palestinian refugees from entering the young state of Israel – mean that African refugees can be held for lengthy periods without trial.

Changes to the Prevention of Infiltration Law remind that, in the “Jewish and democratic” state, anyone who is a not Jewish is subject to discrimination and persecution. One cannot separate the experience of African refugees from the gross human-rights violations Israel visits upon Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line.

But it’s not just the government. From open violence on the streets of south Tel Aviv – where teenage African girls have been attacked at knifepoint by Jewish youths – to the 2010 religious edict forbidding Israelis from renting homes to asylum seekers, to anti-African marches through south Tel Aviv, citizens have taken part in the discrimination. According to the +972 website, “real-estate agencies in south Tel Aviv are advertising ‘clean apartments'” – that is, African-free buildings. One Ethiopian-Israeli told me that an Israeli Jewrecently mistook him for a refugee rather than a citizen and threw an empty beer bottle at him.

“I did army service like all Israelis,” the man, who asked to remain anonymous, reflects, “and I can’t go out to enjoy myself.”

Rather than creating sympathy for the asylum seekers, the incident hardened his view that the small community of Africans is trouble for the Jewish state. Like other Israeli residents, he complains that at night it’s impossible to wander around the neighbourhood because the Sudanese drink too much.

Some commentators, myself included, have said that area tensions are the result of deep-seated racism and that xenophobia is unsurprising in a country that defines itself along ethnic and religious lines.

While this explanation is true, it is also overly simplistic and whitewashes the Jewish-on-Jewish discrimination that characterises Israeli society. The Ethiopian man mentioned his time in the military because it is supposed to be his entry card to Israeli society. But Ethiopians continue to find themselves shut out of the mainstream. Last year the community held a number of protests against the racism they face in Israel; that same year the media reported that government doctors were giving Ethiopian women birth-control shots without their consent, sometimes without their knowledge.

Locals’ resentment of African asylum seekers also stems, in part, from decades of neglect. South Tel Aviv’s schools are poor and the area gets few services from the state. For example, residents’ requests for a library have been refused. And while the wealthy, predominately-Ashkenazi north of the city has plenty of sports facilities, a mostly Mizrachi south Tel Aviv neighbourhood that has 45,000 residents has only one gym and swimming pool – and the latter is open only in summer.

None of this is an excuse for Jewish-Israeli racism. It does, however, point to another issue that must be reckoned with – the country’s shabby treatment of the Jews it has deemed as “others”, namely those who are not part of the Ashkenazi elite. The Jews who were brought to Israel for demographic war and who then were tossed into the country’s periphery to secure the border. This is true of south Tel Aviv as well, which was actually Palestinian Jaffa before Israel was created in 1948. Mizrachim were thrown into these far-flung neighbourhoods as a way to prevent Palestinians returning.

By the 1970s, the state had begun evicting these same people from their homes to make way for development. Approximately 800 impoverished families currently face eviction from public housing. Many of these people are Mizrachim who live in south Tel Aviv. So, yes, the area is tense and the problems often express as racism. But the issues are deeper than that.

The impossible situation of Mr Zegata and other asylum seekers – as well as the residents of south Tel Aviv – serves as a reminder that the Israeli government continues to be remiss in its duties to respect the human rights of all who reside inside its borders. Can a country maintain a preferred religious and ethnic character and neoliberal economics without trampling on the rights of all “others” – whether those “others” are Palestinian, African, or impoverished Jews?

*Illustrative photo by Sasha Kimel, via Flickr

Mistreatment of refugees in Israel doesn’t stop at border

by adminin African refugees, Writing

The National, September 17, 2012

Earlier this month, 21 Eritrean asylum seekers, including a 14-year-old child and two women, spent over a week trapped between fences on the Israeli side of the Israeli-Egyptian border. As the temperatures soared, the group was not provided with any shelter; the “most moral army in the world” gave the refugees only small amounts of water and scraps of cloth to protect themselves from the sun.

Soldiers did not give them food and turned away the activists who tried to bring the asylum seekers something to eat.

After the two women and the child were let into Israel – where they were taken to prison – and the men were returned to Egypt, reports surfaced that the army behaved violently towards these refugees. According to the three who entered, soldiers shot tear gas at the group and used an iron pole in an attempt to push them back to Egypt. The 18 men who were returned to Egypt were returned by force.

According to testimony taken by lawyers from the non-governmental organization We Are Refugees and published on +972, Israeli soldiers, “threw the… men onto a tarp and dragged them underneath the Egyptian fence.” Fearing violence from the Egyptians and deportation from Egypt to Eritrea—where they face imprisonment without charge, torture, and death—the men “screamed ‘kill us right here.’”

International law prohibits states from forcibly returning asylum seekers to countries where their lives or liberty might be in danger, as does the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention, to which Israel is a signatory.

While this was a dramatic example of the Israeli army’s treatment of the refugees, African refugees in Israel have faced the state’s structural violence and an increasingly hostile public for over six years.

Although small numbers of African asylum seekers have been coming to Israel since the 1980s, a tremendous majority of the 60,000 refugees who are here now have arrived since 2005. More than 80 per cent are from war-torn Sudan or Eritrea, which are gripped by brutal dictatorships. After they enter the country, usually via the Egyptian border, those who are caught are jailed without charge for an arbitrary period; when Israel needs to make way for more prisoners, the asylum seekers are dumped in south Tel Aviv and other cities.

For those bearing the scars of war, detention in Israel is traumatizing. Sunday Dieng, a 26-year-old asylum seeker, left his village in South Sudan when he was 10 years old after he saw his parents murdered by Sudanese forces. In Egypt, Dieng says, he faced racism and violence on the street. So, in 2006, he headed to Israel – only to spend his first 14 months behind bars.

“To live in jail for one year and two months for no reason … it’s terrible, it’s very difficult,” Dieng says. “It causes some damage to the [mind], because you know you didn’t do anything wrong, you didn’t do any crime.” Although Dieng was an adult when he arrived, unaccompanied minors make up a significant part of Israel’s refugee population. And those children are also detained without charge.

Once out of jail, the state either refuses to process refugees’ individual requests for asylum or arbitrarily rejects them without adequately investigating their claims. Instead, Israel gives citizens of Sudan and Eritrea group protection. So they get visas, but not work visas – forcing refugees onto the black market where they face exploitation.

Many are unable to find jobs at all and, because they do not have citizenship or residency, they do not get help from the state. South Tel Aviv’s parks are filled with homeless, emaciated refugees. Others scrape by on odd jobs and live in crowded apartments; sometimes two dozen asylum seekers will share a single room.

Their children, even those who are born here and speak fluent Hebrew, are not recognized by the state. Although they can attend municipal kindergartens and schools from the age of three, before then, their parents don’t get help paying for day-care as poor Israelis do. So they are forced to send their toddlers to cheaper, unregulated black market day-cares, places one NGO worker refers to as “storage of children”.

Mimi Hylameshesh, a single mother from Eritrea, earns approximately 2,000 Israeli shekels (about 500 US dollars) a month working as a house cleaner. Her rent is 1,500 shekels; day-care for her toddler runs another 600 shekels. What about food?

She shrugs and looks away, embarrassed. “It’s hard for me,” Hylameshesh says. But her child always eats.

When Hylameshesh doesn’t have the money, she goes without–just like those 21 refugees who spent over a week on the border.

Reflection on limitations on life for West Bank Palestinians

by adminin Palestine, Writing

The National, September 15, 2012

Running tests boundaries – both those we place on ourselves as well as those imposed upon us by the outside world. Whether those external limits are social, cultural or political, the runner collides with them in a way that the casual pedestrian does not, thus serving as a mirror for the issues that affect one’s time and space.

A woman in a male-dominated society, for example, might face cat calls or even physical assault while running; Palestinians living under Israeli occupation have, literally, nowhere to run. Trapped inside a labyrinth of Israeli military checkpoints and permits, bordered by illegal settlements, freedom of movement is nonexistent.

In Ramallah,Running is a collection of prose and visual art that expresses how one moves through – or doesn’t move through – occupied space. Edited by Samar Martha, the co-founder of ArtSchool Palestine, and the London-based writer Guy Mannes-Abbott, the book brings together prominent Palestinian artists and writers as well as several from the international stage.

They offer reflections on Ramallah, the city that has become the de facto centre of Palestinian cultural and political life. As contributor Najwan Darwish writes in his powerful essay Ramallah Versus Ramallah, the focus on Ramallah as a “temporary capital” is “meant not only to make us forget Jaffa, Haifa, Acre, the Galilee and all of Palestine that was occupied in 1948, but also to overshadow the importance of Jerusalem”.

Mannes-Abbott’s contribution is a 14-part series about his runs and walks in Ramallah. His descriptions can border on the lyrical – rendering the beauty of the land and his love for the place and its people. But they are also laden with the claustrophobia and fear that typify Palestinian life: “… in the prison of these hills, in lovely Ramallah itself, there is no freedom. Here, in this place, life spirals within abysmal limits.”

His essay reveals the physical limitations imposed by the Israeli occupation; more importantly, Mannes-Abbott points to how those restrictions linger inside the psyche, long after one has entered the so-called “autonomous” areas. But his depiction of Palestinians is also almost too sympathetic. One villager is “comically, sweetly” emphatic, another’s voice “betrays a sweetness of character that is very Palestinian”.

As a foreigner who can easily leave Ramallah and its suffocating environs behind, Mannes-Abbott spends a little too much time on stage. There are less than 150 pages of prose and art in the book and his essay – while moving, nuanced and deeply researched – takes up more than 70. In Ramallah, Running is at its best when those whose very existence is intertwined with dispossession and occupation – the Palestinians – speak for themselves.

Khalil Rabah, a Palestinian artist who lives in Ramallah, presents the reader with a simple image: a photograph of two worn leather loafers. At first glance, the brain interprets it as a pair of shoes. But something is amiss. It is actually two right shoes. It is, perhaps, the perfect metaphor for Ramallah. The shoes are shiny and seem business-like – just like the city, which is awash with foreign aid and seems to be booming – but the person who wears them is cobbled; if they manage to run, they won’t get far.

Forced relocations from the West Bank fit decade-old plan

by adminin Palestine, Writing

The National, August 28, 2012

South Africa has decided that anything produced in the West Bank must be labelled as coming from the Occupied Palestinian Territories, rather than Israel, as the labels now read. The ruling suggests that the global movement known as “Boycott Divestment and Sanctions” is picking up speed.

But Israel is also stepping up its process of forced relocations from the land, increasing pressure on Arabs on both sides of the Green Line. The forced transfers most often associated with the 1948 war did not end with the armistice agreements. They continue today, through overt plans to “relocate” Bedouin citizens of Israel using bureaucratic manoeuvring and the manipulation of the law that pushes West Bank Palestinians off their ancestral lands.

The United Nations reports that in the first six months of this year, Israeli demolitions in “Area C” – which makes up 61 per cent of the West Bank – led to the “forced displacement” of 615 Palestinians and Bedouins, more than half of them children. If demolitions continue at this rate, displacements will exceed those of 2011, in which 1,095 people were made homeless by Israel.

In Area C, dozens of Palestinian and Bedouin villages are threatened with demolition, and over 27,000 men, women and children face forced transfer. Most of these people are refugees.

The Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem says the Israeli civil administration will begin by relocating those closest to Jerusalem and will work its way out, finishing with those in the Jordan Valley. The 2,300 Bedouin men, women and children who live alongside the Israeli settlement of Maale Adumim, which many Israelis consider a suburb of Jerusalem and which the state intends to expand, are in the most immediate danger of expulsion. Among other options, the Israeli government is examining the possibility of moving them to the edge of a rubbish dump.

In other cases, Israel is not offering Palestinian and Bedouin residents an alternative location – the state is simply destroying their homes, leaving families to fend for themselves.

That’s the story in Susya, a small village in the south Hebron Hills. Israel claims the structures there are illegal because they were put up without building permits. But for the most part, the civil administration won’t issue building permits to non-Jews in Area C.

And if the state has its way, another 1,500 Palestinians will be displaced from the area that Israel has just recently named Fire Zone 918. Ten Israeli outposts have been built in such fire zones; their residents do not face expulsion.

Israel also has plans for Palestinian citizens of Israel who live inside the Green Line. Under Israel’s Prawer Plan, between 30,000 and 40,000 Bedouin face forced transfer from their villages in the Negev to townships that are little more than ghettos. Before the Prawer Plan was approved by the Israeli cabinet last September, the state had already demolished the unrecognised Bedouin village of Al Araqib dozens of times. At the time of writing, Al Araqib has been destroyed 41 times in two years.

But demolitions and forced transfers are not new to the Negev. In his book Palestinians in Israel: Segregation, Discrimination, and Democracy, Ben White notes that more than 2,000 Palestinians “were ‘transferred’ to Gaza in 1950” from the Negev and villages near the borders. Between 1949 and 1953 Israel expelled some 17,000 Bedouin from the Negev, White adds. In the decades that followed, Israel demolished thousands of homes in unrecognised Bedouin villages.

Elderly residents of the occupied Syrian Golan Heights recall Israeli soldiers forcing Arabs from their homes during and after the 1967 war. Decades later, witnesses described how Israeli soldiers “forced [Syrians] from their homes … fired their guns into the air and told them to leave”. They also described how those who took refuge from the fighting in neighbouring villages were prevented from returning to their houses. Approximately 120,000 Arabs were expelled or fled the area, which Israel unilaterally annexed in 1981.

The Israeli government also uses other, less direct methods to encourage non-Jewish Arabs to relocate. In the West Bank and Gaza, Israel has purged more than 150,000 Palestinians from the population registry – making it impossible for them to return or to get identification cards.

B’Tselem estimates that nearly 650,000 Palestinians who live in the occupied territories have an immediate family member who is unregistered, and thus paperless. Israel has ignored over 100,000 requests for family reunification.

In the West Bank, Israel restricts Palestinian and Bedouin access to water, crippling agriculture, the traditional livelihood of many residents. And of course there is the separation wall and the system of checkpoints and permits, making it difficult for many – and impossible for some – to reach schools, work, health care, friends and families. The resulting economic and psychological pressures have led some to emigrate.

Al Araqib and the Prawer Plan – and the rise in demolitions and displacements – made international headlines, which may give the impression that forced transfers are a new Israeli strategy, or at least one that has been resurrected from the 1948 war. But this is not the case. The current and upcoming relocations must be understood as part of an ethnic cleansing process, taking both overt and bureaucratic forms, that began 64 years ago and that will end only when the international community no longer allows it to continue.

African refugees join Palestinians as a “threat” to Israel

by adminin Israel, Writing

The National, May 10, 2012

On Tuesday Israelis woke up to the surprising news that the early elections Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had announced on Sunday had been cancelled.

In a deal made while the country was asleep, Netanyahu forged a new coalition with Kadima. Now the Knesset will march in lockstep behind the PM, meaning little will change. Not that elections would have made much of a difference, however – the popular Mr Netanyahu had been expected to win by a landslide.

Public support for him is somewhat surprising. Last summer’s protests against the cost of living suggested that many Israelis are less than satisfied with the state of the state. And almost a year later, life in Israel is only getting more expensive. Housing is as unaffordable as ever and wages are still relatively low. The gap between Israel’s rich and poor remains one of the highest in the western world. This winter saw a steep increase in electricity and gas prices. And, despite last year’s “cottage cheese protests”, food prices continue to rise.

“Social justice” – a term Israelis use not about ending the occupation of Palestinian land, but about building a more egalitarian economy – remains elusive. Meanwhile Mr Netanyahu’s government uses policy and rhetoric not only against Palestinians but also against Israel’s other “others” – migrant workers and African refugees.

Palestinians have been squeezed by the Netanyahu administration: increased settlement growth; a dramatic rise in demolition of Palestinian and Bedouin homes in East Jerusalem and Israeli-controlled Area C in the West Bank; and the approval of the Prawer Plan, which will see tens of thousands of Bedouin citizens of Israel forcibly removed from their villages in the Negev (Naqab) to make way for Judaisation of the area.

But Africans and refugees are under pressure, too. The list of examples includes a government campaign in which paid actors claimed that they are unemployed because foreigners took their jobs. It includes the deportation of Israel-born children of migrant workers, even though the Supreme Court overturned the policy that made their parents illegal. It includes the construction of what will be the world’s largest detention centre, a prison to house African refugees, including women and children. There, asylum-seekers will be held without trial, most for up to three years, some indefinitely.

Their only crime will be that they violated Israel’s 1954 Infiltration Prevention law, intended to criminalise the actions of Palestinian “infiltrators” – refugees who attempted to enter the newly created state of Israel to return to the homes and lands from which they had been expelled in 1948, during the nakba. Last year, this law was modified to include undocumented migrants who enter Israel via Egypt. A large majority of those coming in through the southern border are African asylum-seekers, a group the government, including Mr Netanyahu, calls “infiltrators.”

And then there’s the legislation that Israeli human rights groups call the “slavery law.” It’s a modification of the 1952 Entry to Israel law, conferring privileges on Jews while preventing Palestinians from returning. It places severe restrictions on the freedom of foreign caregivers, going as far as to limit them to a set region of the country.

It’s no coincidence that Israel is using laws intended to discriminate against Palestinians to tread on the human rights of another non-Jewish group.

In 2003 Mr Netanyahu, then finance minister, called Arab citizens of the state a “demographic problem” adding that the separation barrier would stop a “demographic spillover” of Palestinians from the Occupied Territories. Fast forward to 2010: Prime Minister Netanyahu calls African asylum seekers a “concrete threat to the Jewish and democratic character of the country” and promises another separation barrier, this one to run the length of the border between Egypt and Israel.

When considered through the lens of the government’s goal of maintaining a “Jewish and democratic” country, every non-Jew – Arab or African, Christian or Muslim – becomes a “threat” to or enemy of the state. It’s not about Palestinians or Arabs per se. It’s about maintaining Jewish privilege.

The state’s policies have implications for citizens’ behaviour. As the state steps up its persecution of and incitement against foreigners – whipping the public into a nationalistic frenzy – Jewish Israelis are emboldened to ratchet up violence and discrimination against migrants. In Eilat, for example, African refugees have been banned from municipal schools. Several schools in Tel Aviv have also barred foreign children.

In South Tel Aviv, Jewish Israelis have held protests against the mere presence of Africans, calling on the state to deport them. Right-wing Knesset members have taken part in these demonstrations, lending an air of governmental approval.

South Tel Aviv is becoming a flashpoint for rising tensions. As Independence Day drew to a close a week ago, a 20-year-old Israeli threw Molotov cocktails at a kindergarten and four apartments that serve African refugees. A week later, two firebombs were hurled at the home of Nigerian immigrants.

In 2011, three teenage girls – the Israeli-born, Hebrew-speaking daughters of African migrant workers – were beaten by a group of Jewish teenagers. The attackers, one of whom was armed with a knife, allegedly called them “dirty niggers.” One of the girls needed medical treatment for her injuries.

There have also been a number of other violent incidents.

The new coalition just means more of the same, discrimination and violence against non-Jews on both sides of the Green Line. Whether that violence comes from the state or its citizens, whether it takes the form of bulldozers or firebombs, the goal is one – the preservation of Jewish privilege in a “Jewish and democratic” state.