Confident that it can act with impunity, the Zionist state continues to treat the US-sponsored Peace Talks with complete contempt while treating thousands of African asylum seekers with racist brutality.
At the end of 2013, a third batch of 26 long-term Palestinian prisoners was released in line with the terms of the Peace Talks. In response, on 10 January 2014, the Israeli government announced the construction of around 1,400 housing units in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The decision met with ritual criticism from EU countries, Britain, France, Italy and Spain calling in their respective Israeli ambassadors to rap their knuckles. This in turn was met with manufactured outrage by the Israeli government. Foreign Minister Lieberman condemned their supposed support for Palestine and grotesquely announced: ‘Israel is making great effort to allow the dialogue with the Palestinians to continue and the position these states are taking, beyond it being biased and unbalanced, is significantly harming the chances of reaching an accord.’
On 11 January, Israeli press reported that the Israeli Defence Minister, Moshe Ya’alon, had labelled John Kerry, the person most clearly associated with the Peace Talks, as ‘obsessive and messianic’ and said that his peace plan was ‘not worth the paper it’s written on’. As we go to press, Kerry has yet to announce his framework proposals which will be the basis for the continuation of the talks. However, it is widely expected that they will include land swaps which would remove the largest settlement blocks from Palestine, the recognition of Israel as a ‘Jewish state’ and a continued Israeli military presence in the Jordan Valley. In other words the Kerry proposals and the Peace Talks as a whole are geared to the interests of Israel. Yet even this it seems is not enough to satisfy the demands of the Zionists who want to see the aspirations of even a neutered Palestinian statehood smashed alongside the destruction of Palestinian national consciousness.
All Palestinian resistance factions are united in their condemnation of the sham Peace Talks and call for Abbas and the Palestinian Authority (PA) to abandon them. Demonstrations have taken place across the West Bank and Gaza with the PFLP calling for the building of a mass movement against the talks. But Abbas and the PA refuse to withdraw as their political and future financial wellbeing is directly linked to their success. In December 2013, the EU threatened the PA that it would consider withdrawing its financial support if the Peace Talks broke down. This would have a devastating effect on the PA’s continued ability to pay the approximately 150,000 workers it directly employs and who provide the basis of whatever support Abbas continues to have. The EU then announced that the ‘success’ of the Peace Talks would see both Israel and a new Palestinian entity rewarded with the status of ‘special privileged partnership’. This would give Abbas and the PA a massive financial boost. This carrot of a new financial deal with the EU is something the small parasitic layer of Palestinian bourgeoisie will go to any lengths to secure; it is the political interests of this class that Abbas and the PA represent.
Israel – a racist and apartheid state
A direct consequence of Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people is its racist treatment of asylum seekers from Africa (see FRFI 228 for an earlier report). In December 2013 the Israeli parliament passed an amendment to the ‘Prevention of Infiltration Law’ in response to a High Court ruling that an earlier amendment allowing the detention of asylum seekers in prison for three years was illegal. The new amendment allows the state to keep new asylum seekers in prison for one year and then to hold them in an ‘open’ prison. The first ‘open’ prison, Holot Camp is situated near the border with Egypt and in the middle of an Israeli army firing zone. Asylum seekers have to sleep in the camp and be present for three roll calls during the day.
There are an estimated 60,000 African refugees in Israel, mostly from Sudan and Eritrea. Israel cannot deport people to these countries, but neither will it grant people official refugee status. The vast majority have been granted temporary status visas and are not legally allowed to work, although up to now in the majority of cases the state has been turning a blind eye to their exploitation by Israeli firms. The state gives no benefits or aid to these asylum seekers.
In response to these conditions and to the new law, thousands of asylum seekers in Tel Aviv met in a park at the beginning of January and called for a three-day general strike of all asylum seekers working in restaurants, cafes and other work places. An unprecedented mass demonstration of around 20,000 asylum seekers took place in Tel Aviv; their central demands were for the end of indefinite detention and for Israel to individually examine their requests for asylum and refugee status. This followed asylum seekers twice defiantly marching out of the ‘open’ prison of Holot in December 2013. On the second occasion 200 marchers succeeded in reaching the Israeli parliament in Jerusalem after a three-day march. They were then arrested and re-imprisoned. Netanyahu declared that asylum seekers had the choice of either going back to their countries of origin or staying in the Israeli prison camps. But asylum seekers in Israel are now refusing this racist choice of either imprisonment or torture and death and are demanding their democratic right to freedom and the right to work.
Boycott the racist apartheid state of Israel!
Bob Shepherd
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! 237 February/March 2014
