There are days when I read such horrors as this account, that I feel a
hopeless empty aching in the pit of my stomach. There is so much
violence, mindless hatred, and fear in the world, that I sometimes
feel as though I'm clawing my way up an avalanche. I know that we
Humans are capable of so much more, love, peace, caring for less
fortunate, kindness, sharing,...I know such words and feelings still
exist, but the overload of bad news is pushing us closer and closer
toward the edge of the cliff overlooking Hell.
Carl Jarvis
On 3/4/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The Emmett Till Effect in Israel
African migrants protest outside of Israel's parliament in Jerusalem in
2014. (Ariel Schalit / AP)
Is this justice?
Last Thursday, two Israelis were convicted of brutally beating an African
refugee to death, but were spared long prison sentences when the judge
agreed to reduce the charges against them from murder to manslaughter and
grievous bodily harm, the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz reported.
In November 2016, 20-year-old Dennis Barshivatz and a 17-year-old who
cannot
be named under Israeli law beat Babikir Ali Adham-Abdo, a 40-year-old
Sudanese asylum seeker, for an hour and a half in front of the city hall of
Petach Tikva, a Tel Aviv suburb that is a sister city of Chicago, Ill.
Barshivatz will serve a maximum of 10 years in jail and will be eligible
for
release much earlier. The court has yet to determine sentencing for his
teenage accomplice.
The killing of Adham-Abdo has evoked comparisons to the Mississippi murder
and mutilation of the Chicago teenager Emmett Till in 1955. Just as
American
racists attempted to excuse Till's murder by posthumously accusing the
black
teen of having flirted with a white woman whose path he had crossed, some
Israelis allege that Adham-Abdo had brought on the lethal beating he
received when he supposedly sexually harassed a group of Israeli teenage
girls at the scene.
In the case of Till, the woman he was accused of flirting with admitted
over
half a century later that she had fabricated the entire claim, and that
Till
had never made any advances toward her. The allegations against Adham-Abdo
were also revealed to be baseless when CCTV footage of the incident was
released. The city hall security camera video clearly showed that
Adham-Abdo
approached the table where the three teens were sitting, spoke to the group
for less than 10 seconds, then turned and walked away. Moments later, his
assailants set upon him and began to brutally beat him.
Another parallel between the Adham-Abdo and Emmett Till incidents lay in
the
grievous injuries wrought to their faces. In both cases, their faces were
pummeled so badly that they were unrecognizable. Adham-Abdo's brother was
only able to claim the body for burial once he had identified it based on
its missing fingers, which had been severed during murderous clashes in
Darfur, from which Adham-Abdo had originally fled to Israel to escape.
"We don't agree to the penalties," Adham-Abdo's cousin Moussa told Haaretz.
"We thought there was justice in the Israeli courts, we thought Israel was
a
state of justice. If the victim had been an Israeli, the outcome would have
been different. There's racism here."
Sadly, Adham-Abdo was not the first African refugee to be beaten to death
by
a group of Israelis in a public place in recent years. In October 2015,
during a shooting attack at the central bus station in the southern Israeli
city of Beersheba, a security guard shot 29-year-old Ertirean refugee
Haftom
Zarhum under the premise that he was assumed to be one of the terrorists.
The bus station's security footage revealed that Zarhum was clearly unarmed
and crawling on the ground like other innocent bystanders, trying to avoid
the bullets of the terrorist attackers.
As Zarhum bled out on the ground, Israelis took turns kicking him in the
face and slamming chairs and benches down on him, while other bystanders
actively prevented medics from reaching him to treat his wounds. In June
2016, a judge ruled that one of the Israelis who slammed a bench down on
Zarhum's head would not be charged. Charges are pending against four other
Israelis who participated in the lynching.
The vicious violence against non-Jewish African refugees in Israel follows
years in which Israeli political leaders and religious officials regularly
whipped up racist sentiments against them, accusing them of bringing to
Israel deadly diseases, violent crimes and anti-state terrorism. Official
Israeli government statistics have proven all these smears to be baseless.
But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's primary justification for expelling
the refugees cannot be so easily dismissed: They should not be able to live
in Israel, he claims, because they are not Jews.
That the refugees are not Jews is true. Of those who are religious, about
half are Christian, and about half are Muslim. The belief that non-Jews
have
no right to live in the Holy Land has always had some currency among
Israeli
Jews, but it has become increasingly popular in recent years, with the
country's current chief rabbi now openly preaching that genocidal doctrine.
In 2013, Netanyahu completed the construction of a high-tech fence on
Israel's border with the African continent, in order to end the influx of
asylum seekers. In the five years that followed, Israeli authorities
cajoled
over a third of the community, more than 20,000 refugees, to agree to
self-deport, by withholding their refugee rights and promising instead that
these will be granted to them in an unnamed African country. Now Netanyahu
has warned that any African refugees who don't agree to self-deport by
April
1 will be jailed indefinitely until they do so. The first group to face
this
choice will be single African men who aren't yet fathers.
Human rights activists, journalists and liberal lawmakers who have followed
up with refugees already forced out of Israel have learned that the
government never fulfilled its promises to them, and that they were quickly
made stateless once more. Without state protection, the vast majority of
these refugees then fled for the European Union, hoping to find asylum
there. Many then endured horrific tortures at the hands of Libyan slave
traders, or drowned in the Mediterranean in failed attempts to reach
Fortress Europe.
Anticipating Netanyahu's April 1 deadline to self-deport, progressive
Israelis have begun to publicly oppose the impending expulsion. In recent
weeks, groups of doctors and artists, pilots and teachers have taken out
advertisements in Israeli newspapers, articulating their objections to the
plan. Liberal rabbis have invoked the memory of iconic Holocaust victim
Anne
Frank in announcing that they plan to resist by hiding African refugees in
their own homes, and some Holocaust survivors have also agreed to take them
in.
But despite these expressions of solidarity, Netanyahu has vowed to carry
out the expulsion as planned, reaping popular support for the plan that he
sowed with years of racist incitement. A poll last month found that
two-thirds of Israeli citizens support the government's plan to round up
and
deport all the remaining African asylum seekers, who now number only about
36,000, less than 0.5 percent of the population.
On Saturday, 20,000 Israelis and Africans marched in the streets of Tel
Aviv, calling on the government to allow the refugees to work legally, and
to invest in the neighborhoods they live in, so that their presence is not
perceived as a burden to long-time residents. It was a brief reminder that
the left still exists, even after a decade of rule by what may have been
the
most racist governments in Israel's history.
But it was also an indication of the vigilante violence that could be let
loose against African refugees if Israeli racists feel that the government
plan to expel them all is in danger of being annulled. According to Israeli
news site i24, police detained two Israeli men and seized a gun from one of
them after they publicly plotted over Facebook to attend a pro-refugee
demonstration and attack the Africans with weapons.
David Sheen
David Sheen is an independent journalist and filmmaker born and raised in
Canada, now reporting from the ground in Israel*Palestine. His written and
video work focuses primarily on the country's racial and.
David Sheen