On Sunday, as Israeli security forces were rounding up activists who were trying to enter Palestine, a racist conference was held in Ramle and a middle-aged woman was beaten for protesting racism. Welcome to a frightening Israel, where being non-racist is dangerous Even though almost all of the “Welcome to Palestine” participants were prevented from reaching the West Bank, the campaign was a success. As the international and local media watched, 79 internationals were refused entry to Israel. But they weren’t trying to enter Israel. They were trying to get to Bethlehem, in Palestinian Authority-controlled Area A. And they brought…

Israeli youth today has no fear of saying what it really thinks about Arabs. The youth featured in the video below are not only are they happy when children die, but one girl said she has no problem with taking a weapon and killing innocent Arabs February 16, 2012. A bus full of kids north of Jerusalem hits a truck and turns over. Kids are burned to death in the fiery crash. As the reports start to surface, so does the ugly Israeli. On Facebook, on the news sites. In the street. You can’t miss it. First it starts with…

A Tel Aviv city councilman is appealing to the state to allocate separate buses for African refugees and migrant workers, according to an article published on Mynet on Thursday Last week, Tel Aviv City Councilman Binyamin Babayoff (Shas) sent a letter to Tel Aviv Mayor Ron Huldai, Minister of Transportation Israel Katz, and Dr. Moshe Tiomkin, a Tel Aviv councilman and the head of the city’s Transportation, Traffic and Parking Authority. In an excerpt published by Mynet (local online Hebrew news affiliated with Ynet), Babayoff wrote that “illegal foreign workers fill the buses…” leaving no room for Jewish Israeli residents…

If you ask Nicole Raidman, a star in one of Israel’s most popular reality TV shows, Shakira is a disgusting Arab and anti-semite, Arabs raise kids to be terrorists and hate Jews. Does she represent the typical Israeli? Racism exists everywhere. In every country. And as we all know, it exists here in Israel, in abundance. I don’t have the tools to measure racism and compare, or to say that Israel is more racist than this country or that one. But I do believe that the reports we’ve read in the media over the past few years, and focused on…

An Israeli youth basketball league limits the number of non-Jewish "foreigners" who can join--excluding children who were born and raised in Israel. If a team goes over the cap, it is barred from district competition. Two Filipino boys play a one-on-one basketball game in South Tel Aviv, an area where many migrant workers and their Israel-born children live. The kids shout at each other in Hebrew as they dribble, shoot, and score. As local as they might seem, these boys are likely to be excluded from a local league due to a little-known policy that prevents many non-Jewish “foreigners” from…

A landlord's request for religious tenants only points at dangerous impulses within Israeli society I’ve got a new gig in Jerusalem, so I’ve been busy apartment hunting lately. Here’s one of the odder listings I’ve seen on the website yad2: I’m sorry for the racism but the flat is just for religious people. This statement points to several currents running through Israeli society. The first is obvious—the landlord doesn’t want Palestinian renters. The second relates to the carving up of Jewish Israeli identity. It’s not just that the apartment is off-limits to Arabs; it’s also off-limits to another “race”: secular…

Racist attitudes against Arabs are widespread in Israel. Numerous official policies segregate and separate Jews from Palestinians, with a vastly discriminatory effect and intent. Justifications alluding to security needs, or alleging that separation is based on citizenship rather than ethnic origin, do not withstand close scrutiny. One of the most acrimonious controversies surrounding Israeli policy concerns the accusation that it has created a system of apartheid between Jews and Palestinian in territories under its control. The issue is so sensitive, that some activists have come to refer to the term as "the A-word". While bickering over nomenclature is, in my…

Last night I posted one of my “Izzie in HolyLand” pieces. It was about the collective punishment Israel rewarded the West Bank village of Awarta, after the murder of the Fogel family from Itamar. In the post, I made Izzie have a nightmare about the same treatment Bat Yam would have had if a murder took place in nearby Jaffa. Something that would never happen, of course. That piece of satire was written with a lot of anger, a lot of frustration. It wasn’t the first time. I’ve written about the racism in Bat Yam with similar anger, when demos…

Israel's most widely circulated newspaper covers the growing tide of hate for asylum seekers. Israelis try to portray these "foreigners", who number 0.4% of the country's population, as a dangerous burden, but it seems refugees fleeing genocide have more to fear from Israelis than the other way around Yedioth Aharonoth, Israel's most widely circulated newspaper, is covering, for the second day in a row, the tidal wave of racism which is gripping the country. The tone of coverage is strangely ambiguous in a nation where every sentence seems to end with an exclamation mark. It is as if the editors…

I’m traveling all over the country these days for a project, and I mean all over. I’m visiting every town large enough to possess a central bus terminal. The article deals with these terminals and their general state of neglect. I vowed to visit them all. Yes, these places are in suffering from disrepair, but something else that becomes apparent to a traveler in Israel today is the state of disrepair of the nation’s psyche. To put it bluntly, you cannot even fathom how much racism and ethnic prejudice I encounter every day. I wouldn’t have imagined if someone told…