On Wednesday night, an anti-African race riot broke out in South Tel Aviv in Israel. It began as a protest against illegal immigrants from South Sudan, and spiralled into an orgy of violence in which the rioters attacked Africans or people who appeared to be Africans, and smashed up and looted shops owned by members of, or serving, the African-Israeli community.
I should be clear, right off the bat, that I don’t intend what I am writing here to be a slam on Israel. I have my issues with Israel, but that isn’t what this is about. The Tel Aviv race riot is only the most recent manifestation of the phenomenon that I want to discuss.
This riot happened because of a growing right-wing attack on those who are not white. It shows up in the growth of the anti-immigrant far right in Europe (the Front National in France, the Freedom Party in Austria and the Netherlands, the True Finns in Finland and Golden Dawn in Greece) as well as far right terrorism such as the massacre in Norway committed by Anders Bering Breivik. It shows in the Minute Men and the racist rantings of the Birthers in the United States. And it shows most recently in what happened in Israel.
This race riot started as a protest against illegal immigrants, but the racism inherent in it, and that led to the violence, was evident well in advance. A Likud member of the Knesset, Miri Regev, said, right out, “the Sudanese are a cancer in our body”. It doesn’t get much clearer than that. The rioting crowd shouted slogans such as “the people want the Sudanese deported” and “infiltrators get out of our home.
This violence is not an aberration. It isn’t some surprising and unexpected event. It was only a matter of time until the racist hatred that was building up and building up spilled over into violence. And right wing political figures, like this Likud MK, have to take responsibility for the fact that they are inciting violence when they exploit racism for political gain. This kind of thing has happened many times in the past. When people are incited to hate a particular racial or religious group, eventually it devolves into violence, whether it is this race riot in Tel Aviv or pogroms in Russia against Jews, or in the United States against African-Americans, or Breivik’s bombing and massacre targeted at those he feels are enabling the immigration of Muslims into Norway.
Until the world faces up to the fact that there is no “innocent” racism, that stoking fear and hatred of illegal immigrants, of those of a different skin colour or a different religion, ultimately leads to violence, we are going to keep seeing repeats of Tel Aviv’s race riot. Though where the next one happens is hard to say, it isn’t hard to say that if politicians don’t stop there <i>will</i> be another. And another. Violence breeds more violence.
But right wing politicians either don’t get that, or want it to keep happening. The day after the riot, another Likud MK, Danny Dannon, essentially placed the blame for the riots on the victims, and demanded the immediate construction of detention facilities to hold all asylum seekers in. He said “the infiltrators must be distanced immediately. We must expedite the construction of temporary detention facilities and remove Africans from population centers.” This MK claims that he denounces violence, but he was at the protest that became the riot, and came out with that statement the day after. By so doing, he is giving a wink and a nod to the rioters. Similarly, the day after the riot, the Mayor of Tel Aviv* began a campaign to imprison all asylum seekers who are illegally in Israel, and he was joined by six other mayors.
Right wing politicians need to either stop inciting racial and religious hatred, or admit that violence is their ultimate goal.
*H/T to DearBrutus for pointing out that the Mayor of Tel Aviv is in fact a Labour Party politician.
Sources: Haaretz articles here and here.
Image via Wikimedia.
