Yair Lapid
Photo: Yoni Hamenachem
Rally against infiltrators in Tel Aviv
Photo: Yaron Brener
This is not racism
Op-ed: Demonstrations against illegal migrants have nothing to do with their skin color
Ignore for a moment the infiltrators’ skin color and inferior Knesset members like Michael Ben-Ari who got on the bandwagon. Close your eyes and try to imagine that the migrants were blond. Tens of thousands of blonds from Norway who entered Israel illegal.
Living in Fear
Yael Branovsky
'It's no longer safe to walk around Tel Aviv,' says Congolese resident of Israel after violent rally held Tuesday in protest of city's migrant community. Opposing rally scheduled for Friday set to protest holding facility for infiltrators
Sturdy blond men who arrived here without their families, blond laborers who are willing to do any job and never heard about the concept of minimum wage, and blonds who mostly drink alcohol at night. Blonds without healthcare insurance, without income supplements, and without any civil rights.
Miserable blonds whom the police doesn’t want to deal with and nobody wants to admit that he’s responsible for them.
Because had the infiltrators into Israel been blond, nobody would have accused southern Tel Aviv residents of racism, and we could have engaged in a genuine discussion about the fact that these migrants cause a real problem.
The participants in the rally held in Tel Aviv Tuesday tried to explain to the media, almost desperately, that their motives have nothing to do with whether the migrants are white or black. These demonstrators are nothing like the bunch of racism rabbis who signed a petition against leasing apartments to Arabs. Their problem with the infiltrators is not their origin, but rather, what they do to their neighborhoods. They did not come out to protest against the refugees, but rather, against the State of Israel.
Government ignores problem
After all, the State of Israel is dealing with the infiltrators the way it always deals with problems it failed to handle: It ignores them. The decision to build a fence on the Egypt border was made by the previous government already, and the current government approved it too, but we still have no fence.
We heard a hundred promises to put an end to the “revolving door” courtesy of the Interior Ministry, yet it continues to revolve. The infiltrators, just like the illegal laborers who escaped the immigration police, arrive at the center of the country almost uninterruptedly and immediately end up in the only place they can afford to live in: The nation’s poorest neighborhoods.
Those who argue that the recent rallies against migrants are racists are self-righteous, and worse than that, seek easy solutions. The poor are not the ones who are supposed to handle the State of Israel’s welfare problems, the poor are not supposed to take care of our policing problems, they are not supposed to resolve the issue of housing for even poorer people than them, and they are not supposed to, and cannot, deal with the infiltrators. Things are difficult for them as it is.
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