The Tel Aviv suicide bombing and illegal foreign workers
By Jaggi Singh
Dispatch from East Jerusalem, for No One Is Illegal - January 6, 2002
[The following dispatch was prepared for members of the No One Is Illegal
campaign in Montreal. The No One Is Illegal campaign confronts and
challenges the Canadian state and its racist policies against immigrants,
refugees and indigenous peoples, and works in solidarity with similar
efforts worldwide. For more information e-mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] For
previous reports from Palestine, e-mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] ]
[East Jerusalem, January 6, 2002] -- The double suicide bombing at the
Central bus station in Tel Aviv yesterday evening is dominating headlines
internationally. The attack resulted in at least 23 deaths, and over 100
injured, many very seriously.
Israel's predictable response is to tighten the military occupation over
Palestinians, meaning more restrictions on movement, more curfews, more
checkpoints, more humiliating searches, more military incursions, and the
closing of at least three universities, including Al-Najah University in
Nablus.
Targeted assassinations, home occupations and house demolitions are sure to
follow within the next hours and days, as will Palestinian civilian deaths.
Just in the limited period between December 26, 2002-January 1, 2003, 15
Palestinian civilians were killed by Israeli Occupation Forces, including 5
children (according to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights).
And just as surely as Israel will increase its attacks in the occupied
territories, more suicide attacks against civilians in Israel will follow,
as the logic of collective punishment that Israel applies to Palestinian
civilians is returned in kind by the members of various militant groups,
both secular and Islamic, who all rushed to take credit for the latest
terror attack.
At least six of the people killed in Tel Aviv, and a large proportion of
the injured, were foreign workers, many of whom live and work in Israel
illegally. The bombings occurred in a district of south Tel Aviv with a
large concentration of foreigners (there are 80,000 foreign workers in Tel
Aviv alone). Migrant labor in Israel comes mainly from Africa, Eastern
Europe, Turkey, Southeast Asia (predominantly Thailand and the
Philippines), China, Latin America as well as Palestine.
Many of the foreign worker victims and their relatives have been reluctant
to seek medical help, or to inquire about their friends and relatives.
According to the Jerusalem Post, a hospital spokesman at the Ichilov
Hospital in Tel Aviv said that "many of the wounded were refusing to
identify themselves for fear of deportation, and that some had been left at
the hospital's doorstep by friends who hastily quit the area."
In response, Israel's Interior Minister publicly announced that no
deportation proceedings would be launched against foreigners who were
wounded. Israeli TV news broadcasts, normally in Hebrew, included police
appeals in English to foreign workers to seek medical help without fear of
deportation. And the PR-savvy Israeli Foreign Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu,
will be visiting the foreign worker victims in hospital.
The immediate Israeli government response to the situation of foreign
workers as suicide attack victims belies the day-to-day treatment of
foreign workers here, when they're not sympathetic "Palestinian terror"
victims like other Israelis, but just cheap labor. For the last year,
foreign workers have been a convenient scapegoat for an Ariel Sharon
government that needs lots of scapegoats.
The year 2002 was Israel's worst economic performance -- with negative
growth -- since the formation of the state in 1948. High unemployment has
been blamed, in racist fashion, on the influx of foreign labor.
Adam Baruch, writing in the Israeli newspaper Ma'ariv this past November,
described the campaign against foreigners as an atrocity. In his words:
"The propaganda of the immigration police against the foreign workers is
developing into a cultural, humane and political atrocity. The television
broadcast against foreigners is becoming more and more violent. The foreign
workers are presented as "people enemies". Their humanity is transparent,
non-existent. The fact that the Israelis "imported them" and is taking
advantage of them is being denied. The propaganda incite the unemployed to
act against the foreign worker. The propaganda presents those who employ
foreign workers as "traitors". If you insert the word "Jew" instead of
"foreign worker" in this propaganda - you will get anti-Semitism."
In a speech on unemployment last January, the Israeli Minister of Social
and Labour Affairs, Shlomo Benizri, said: "The main problem we are dealing
with right now is reducing our dependence on foreign workers ... It is
shameful that Israel is number two on the list of [Western] countries with
the highest proportions of foreign workers." [Foreign workers account for
about 10% of Israel's workforce, second only to Switzerland.]
His colleague at the Interior Ministry, Eli Yishai, recently told Ma'ariv,
"I want everyone who is not Jewish not to be in this land. Immigrants are
coming who are gentiles, foreign workers are coming, and with the Arabs,
they will make this state multicultural. The immigrants who are not Jewish
come and build churches. They should stay in their own countries."
[Yishai's comments were condemned by several secular Israeli commentators
and politicians, who see the ultra-orthodox Shas Party of Benizri and
Yishai as enemies, especially during an election campaign.]
Agents from the Labour and Interior Ministries are collaborating with the
Israeli police in an aggressive crackdown against illegal migrants that
began in September 2002, part of Ariel Sharon's announced strategy to
deport 50,000 illegal migrants in one year. Tel Aviv has been the location
of several police dragnets and roundups of illegal migrants, who often wait
in prison for months pending removal.
Sharon's current deportation policy was announced after a previous suicide
bombing last summer that killed Romanian and Chinese laborers, but the
principle of expulsion began when Binyamin Netanyahu was Prime Minister,
and continued under Ehud Barak.
The situation of migrant foreign laborers in Israel parallels other modern
capitalist states in Western Europe, North America and Australia and New
Zealand (reflecting Israel's similar neo-colonial relationship to the Third
World), as well as the rich Arab Gulf plutocracies that treat foreign
migrant labor horribly. The worldwide neo-colonial reality interacts with
Israel's direct colonial relationship to Palestine and Palestinians.
Palestinians workers constituted a large pool of cheap labor for Israeli
industry, and the occupied territories were a literal captive market for
Israeli products. The captive market remains, but since the second intifada
in September 2000, Palestinian workers have not been able to freely travel
to work in Israel, and many migrants from elsewhere have filled the gap,
especially in the construction field.
Palestinian workers in Israel were deemed a security threat by then-Prime
Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1992, which accounts for the current wave of
foreign, non-Jewish, migration to Israel, and the lesser numbers of
Palestinians who still remain in Israel. [Unemployment rates in the
occupied territories of Palestine are at 40%, in some areas much higher.]
There are an estimated 300,000 migrant workers in Israel (including about
100,000 Palestinians) -- both legal and illegal -- a significant proportion
in a country of only 6 million. They work mainly in areas like agriculture,
cleaning, construction, decorating and nursing. There is also significant
trafficking of women for the sex industry.
Like migrant labor everywhere, foreign workers in Israel are not accorded
full social benefits, and often lack even minimal medical access. They are
reliant on the whims of their bosses, where abuse and harassment is common.
Their existence in Israel is always temporary, on contract, and directly
dependent on continuing to work, even in dangerous or unhealthy situations.
The lack of status means that foreign workers are hesitant to demand better
conditions, for fear of dismissal and deportation. Meanwhile bosses
consistently pay foreigners significantly lower wages than they would to an
Israeli for exactly the same work (reflective of the apartheid logic of
migrant labor worldwide). In many cases, foreign workers are essentially
bonded laborers.
And now, as a result of the Sharon government's scapegoating, illegal
immigrants are being agressively rounded up and detained. There is even
such a lack of prison space for the illegals that Israel is planning on
using hotels to detain some of the foreign workers.
The mass round-ups of illegal foreign immigrants also coincides with the
deportations of Palestinians, often to the Gaza Strip, even when native
villages and towns are in the West Bank. In the case of one "illegal"
Palestinian worker from the West Bank -- Jihad Abu Id -- the Interior
Ministry is attempting to deport him to Jordan because he is married to a
Jordanian. He has been detained for over six months.
The link between the roundups of illegal workers and the deportation of
Palestinians has been made by one Israeli NGO, Kav La' Oved, a migrant
workers hotline. In their words: "We suspect, that this is no coincidence,
and fear, that mass deportation of migrant workers will legitimise mass
deportations of Palestinians."
Israel continues to pursue its particular colonial domination over
Palestinians -- mimicking the practices of colonial Britain and France in
colonies like India and Algeria -- in defense of a chauvinist Zionism.
Meanwhile it its treatment of migrant labour -- illegal and legal -- Israel
similarly mimics the racist anti-immigrant (ie. non-Jewish immigrant)
policies of the countries of Fortress North America, Fortress Europe, and
the so-called Pacific Solution.
The logic has come full circle after the recent Tel Aviv suicide attack,
and the large numbers of foreign worker victims. In the hypocritical
thinking of the Israeli government and state authorities, if you happen to
be a victim of a Palestinian bombing, you might get a visit from the
Foreign Minister in hospital -- cameras in tow -- and even an extended
visa. Otherwise, shut up and work, and expect a knock on the door by
Sharon, Benizri and Yishai's thugs really soon.
[More information about the situation of Israel's migrant workers,
including Palestinian workers, can be found at
http://www.kavlaoved.org.il/index_en.asp]
[Prepared and written by Jaggi Singh, in East Jerusalem. Jaggi was recently
a volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) in Palestine,
and is a member of the No One Is Illegal campaign in Montreal. For previous
reports from Palestine, please e-mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]]
http://www.infoshop.org/inews/stories.php?story=03/01/07/8690262