The Tel Aviv
Suicide Bombings
and Foreign Workers
By Jaggi Singh
East Jerusalem, January 6,
2003 -- 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.
[This 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].]
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[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. ]