Recent mob attacks in Tel Aviv on African immigrants have attracted attention. According to one report, several local residents spoke at an anti-African rally. Most of the speakers mentioned their fears of a “rising crime rate.” “We are afraid to walk the streets at nights,” said one. “The infiltrators are taking over our neighborhood and over our jobs,” said another.
These are classic “poor white” fears, familiar to those who know U.S. history.
Since the U.S. Civil Rights Revolution, the end of apartheid in South Africa and the Irish Accords, “Israel” is the last remaining outpost of the old-fashioned racial state where the most degraded member of the dominant group is exalted above any member of the subordinate group. In this case the targets are marked by color. But while color prejudice may be part of racial oppression, it is not essential. There can be other markers of racial status, such as “religion,” language or name. The main victims of racial oppression in Zioland are the Palestinians, even though it is not possible to distinguish an individual “Jew” from an individual “Arab” by appearance.
The racial nature of Zionism has been obscured by talk of religious conflict or “Jewish peoplehood.” Some commentators characterize the anti-African outbreaks as the work of fringe elements motivated by “racism” (as if that were new in Zioland). But Zionism, the attempt to create a state for a “people” which does not exist, has been an ideology of race from the start. The Zionists took people from fifty countries, speaking different languages and practicing different religions (or no religion at all) and defined them as a single people based on the fiction of common descent. If that is not race, then the term has no meaning.
These outbreaks show that the economic downturn by itself will not lead to proletarian solidarity.