In early May 2015, when a video circulating on the internet exposed two Israeli settler colonial police beating Damas Pakada, an African in the city of Holon, the masses of African people, angered by this evidence of their everyday humiliation and oppression, rose up in a series of mass protests against police violence in major Israeli cities.
This demonstration of black people in the middle of occupied Palestine captured the imagination of most of the black people around the world.
Africans everywhere were able to see our naked oppression and us resisting and fiercely fighting back. This demonstration is one more vital piece of the growing dynamic of international African resistance around the world.
Masses of African people in Ferguson, Baltimore, Ouagadougou, Kinshasa, Bujumbura, Tel Aviv are inspired by each other’s separated struggles against the same imperialist created oppressor states and are hitting the street with the conviction that if we struggle, we can win.
Masses of African people are in one of the world’s hottest spots of colonial conflict due to the Israeli government’s propaganda coup that occurred between November 1984 and January 1985, which organized the airlifting of some seven thousand Africans from Ethiopia to Israel, under pretext of saving us from famine.
This massive removal of an African population was neither the first nor the last. Several thousand Africans under the initiative of the Israeli government emigrated before and after this massive propaganda airlift.
The second group of Africans in Israel are those who fled neocolonial wars and dictatorships in Sudan, Eritrea, and Congo, etc.
We carry the colonial relationship between us (the African continent / the African nation) and the oppressor white nation everywhere we go.
Whenever Israel intervened in Africa, it did so as a white oppressor nation state—the same way the U.S., France, Portugal, Britain or Sweden intervenes in Africa.
They do not come to Africa as a friend or partner. Israel was simply enforcing a colonial contradiction which exists between the African nation and the white nation. Ethiopia is part of the oppressed African nation.
Most Jews strove to be part of the colonizer white nation as Germans, Belgians, North American, British, Brazilian, etc. before the creation of the Jewish State.
The Jewish State in that sense, despite the fact that it is a new creation compared to the French or British State, is not a newcomer to the exploitation of African people.
Africans in Israel (Occupied Palestine) have been resisting for a long while
In January 2014, thousands of us marched in Tel Aviv, in pursuit of our democratic rights. We chanted “We are all refugees” and “Yes to freedom, no to prison!”
BBC’s Richard Galpin in Tel Aviv says the protest was prompted by the new law on detention, which had dashed hopes that a recent crackdown would be halted.
This demonstration, according to The New York Times, was also a part of “a three-day strike, leaving many restaurants and hotels without dishwashers and cleaners.”
This demonstration was sparked by the new anti-African piece of legislation known as the Prevention of Infiltration Law which allows for the detention of migrants who enter the country illegally for up to a year without trial and allows the State to hold those already in Israel indefinitely in a new “open” detention facility in the Negev Desert.
Prescriptions for Depo-Provera to destroy African women’s fertility
Israeli doctors prescribed Depo-Provera drugs, which target African population for birth control, to African women in Israel for decades.
The birth rate among Ethiopians living in Isreal has declined by at least 20 percent in the past decade. Some sources suggest the decline is 50 percent.
The mistreatment of Africans happens in Israel because neocolonialist African leaders are complicit with and surrender to white power.
This is why the neocolonial African petty bourgeois in Africa does not treat us differently in Africa and gives the oppressor permission to mistreat us.
The settlers have enacted an electric fence on its Egyptian borders with the complicity of Egyptian and all other African presidents, to stop Africans traveling to Israel via Egypt.
The migration out of Africa is the origin of the spread of humanity everywhere in the world. It is ridiculous and offensive for Benjamin Netanyahu and his settler government to call African people infiltrators.
Anyone with an understanding of African Internationalism knows Benjamin Netanyahu was lying when he said “We must stand together as one against the phenomenon of racism, to denounce it and eliminate it,” because he knows too well that the problem for Africans in occupied Palestine is not racism, but lack of an international black power State that protects all black people on Earth.
He also knows that Israel is an illegitimate State, which needs permanent violence over its subjects to keep the land they stole and to keep the Africans that Israel exploits for cheap labor disorganized.
Change in Palestine is unavoidable because African revolution is unavoidable. Chairman Omali Yeshitela recently stated that we have to join with the Palestinian struggle to overthrow the Israeli settler State, which is aware of the
significance of our presence.
We have to unite with the Palestinian people’s struggle to reclaim their land from the Israeli settler thieves.
It is slanderous to call us infiltrators
The poor masses cannot be infiltrators. We are going to Israel because the white nation continues to plunder African resources and labor and supports neocolonial oppression over us.
Israeli businessmen, each year, are throughout Africa extracting minerals worth billions of dollars. Dan Gertler one of those billionaires, sold one of his Congo-based oil companies to the government last year for $150 million—300 times the amount that was paid for the oil rights.
A bunch of Israeli companies like Netafim, Tahal Group International BV, Ashtrom Properties Ltd etc. are reaping great profits in Africa.
Israel is also a big arms seller in Africa selling arms to Kenya, Nigeria, Guinea, Ecuador, Morocco, Algeria and Rwanda.
Our task is to spread the African Socialist International (ASI) everywhere Africans are, to unite our struggles and to build and implement our own African plan for our international liberation as a free and united single African nation State.
This is the African workers’ only guarantee for existence, for dignity and for independence across the planet.
