TEL AVIV, March 9—“Residents and refugees refuse to be enemies!” “No to deportation, yes to rehabilitation!” These were among the chants of 700 multiracial women and men workers who marched through southern Tel-Aviv on International Working Women’s Day. They demanded an end to the racist, sexist deportations of 40,000 African workers seeking Israeli asylum.
The marchers came from a multitude of organizations, from liberals to phony lefists to the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party. The women-worker-led, multiracial character of the demonstration showed the Israeli government that the workers who actually live in southern Tel-Aviv do not buy the government’s lies. The workers here welcome the asylum seekers as neighbors, friends, and comrades, contrary to what the bosses’ propaganda claims!
A few fascists organized a counter-demonstration, parroting the most virulent lies of anti-Black racism. They got a boost from the government, because it now repeats similar claims. The aim of the regime and its goons is to lock up asylum seekers in the Holot (officially called a “Residential Facility,” but actually a prison camp) in the Negev desert, in horrid conditions - which particularly harm women and children. The Israeli government pressures them into what they call “voluntarily consent” to being deported to Rwanda and other countries like Eritrea and Sudan.
Inter-imperialist rivalry creates refugee crisis
Many African workers understand that signing the “voluntary consent” to deportation means sealing their and their families’ fate of certain danger, and even death. These workers escaped Eritrea because of its murderous fascist government, and Sudan because of the wars between U.S. and Chinese imperialist-backed proxy armies vying to project one or the other imperialist’s power over this strategically important region of Africa.
According to the Anti-Defamation League and the Jewish pro-migrant group HIAS, “many of those who were relocated by Israel to third countries in Africa indicate that they did not find durable protection…Some have drowned at sea en route to Europe, while others were reportedly detained, tortured and extorted by human traffickers” since, once deported to the countries they initially escaped, migrant workers are forced to move yet again (The Atlantic, 1/30).
Fascist Israeli bosses
Asylum seekers, particularly women, and especially single mothers, are super-exploited by Israeli bosses and face daily supression. Many are undocumented, and thus the employer can pay less than the minimum wage wihtout any benefits. Single women asylum seekers must work long hours to feed their children; sometimes they can only afford horrid makeshift daycare—nicknamed “children warehouses”—where their children live in misery while the mothers toil for some boss’s profits.
The exploitation and oppression of migrant African workers goes hand in hand with imperialist rivalry. As one of U.S. imperialism’s most important pillars of control in the Middle East, and a regional imperialist in its own right, Israel’s growing regional rivalry with Iran has spurred fascism to climb to new heights. This week, the Israeli prosecutors offered a plea deal to racists who lynched and murdered Abtum Zarhum, an African asylum seeker, in 2016. They will only some short “community service” sentences rather than pay for their crimes. Zarhum happened to be around the Beersheba central bus station when a terrorist attack totally unrelated to him occurred. Fascist forces suspected him to be the terrorist, and shot and injured him. While he was bleeding on the ground, a lynch mob of Israelis came and beat him to death, included off-duty cops. These lynch mob fascists will now walk free.
Israeli and migrant worker unity resists fascism
The workers of south Tel-Aviv shows us a glimpse of resistance. This International Working Women’s Day showed that it’s women workers taking the lead of this anti-fascist fightback.
For these reasons the resident and migrant unity of southern Tel-Aviv is all the more powerful, inspiring, and vital for all workers to know about and support. As dark as the fascist night is in Israel, and as the threats of wider regional and world wars grow, the working-class fightback here show the potential of PLP’s communist ideas of internationalism, women leadership, multiracial unity and militant antiracist fightback taking root.
One of the women speakers at the demonstration connected the growing displacement of Israeli workers with the growing movement of Israeli citizens and rabbis who commit to hiding refugees in their homes: “The deportation of asylum seekers is just one step before they deport us, long-term residents of southern Tel Aviv, in favor of the tycoons [capitalists]” (972mag.com, 3/9).
Capitalism breeds racism and sexism. Along with imperialism these are the legs upon which this rotten profit system walks. PLP fights alongside the struggle in southern Tel-Aviv and will continue to fight back while raising our ideas of and revolution. Join PLP and expel the bosses.