African Migrants

Frontline Reporting: My Coverage of the Eurovision 2016 Finals

By / November 30, 2020

One of Israel’s most famous haircuts – and also a singer – did not emerge victorious at the 2016 Eurovision contest in Sweden on Saturday night, but it wasn’t due to a lack of effort. Sparkling like he’d been attacked by a 12-year-old with a spray can of foam on Independence Day three nights earlier, he took to the stage with “Made of Stars,” a ballad that was either dark or uplifting, and packed with nonsense lines like “You ride a …

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Black lives matter? The closure of an infamous police brutality case

By / November 30, 2020

The words of a bereaved mother can often pierce the heart, and this time was no different. Sitting in a Knesset committee hearing last week, Farnus Salamsa shouted “I’m burning!”, and told a senior police commander to shut her mouth and hear the pain of her loss and that of her children, who she said no longer sleep at night. Salamsa’s son Yosef committed suicide in July 2014, months after he was abused by the Israel Police during an arrest in …

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Variants of Vigilantism

By / December 1, 2020

It would be funnier if it wasn’t real life and the stakes weren’t so high: a vigilante who tried to lynch a terrorist is arrested by police and then set upon by a mob which now mistakes him for the attacker. That scene actually unfolded last Monday evening in Netanya, minutes after an attacker stabbed an elderly woman and was shot and subdued by police. The vigilante – who in trying to get to the terrorist scuffled with police – was …

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This used to be my synagogue

By / December 1, 2020

Few pilgrimage sites have seen more Israeli politicians and journalists over the past year than a two room African migrant bar on Rosh Pina street next to the Neve Shaanan pedestrian walkway in south Tel Aviv. They come in groups on guided tours, and as they stand in the first room, the guide will point to the doors leading to the second room – aged, solid wood, with two large Stars of David set at eye level. The message is clear …

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Wanted: A nuanced debate

By / December 1, 2020

Despite a series of unqualified statements and inflammatory, racist language directed towards African migrants, (called simply “infiltrators” – a word typically only used in Jpost articles when quoting official statements by politicians or protestors), a June 8 article by prominent Israeli journalist and commentator Ben Caspit entitled “South Tel Aviv: Abandoned by the State” didn’t make the sort of online stir I thought it would. On January 17, the African Refugee Development Center issued a press release criticizing the article, posted …

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‘The rapist was not a foreigner’

By / December 1, 2020

A young Israeli man lurked after a teenage girl walking home in the Yemenite Quarter close to midnight Saturday. As the girl made her way up the stairwell of her apartment building on Hakovshim street the man pounced on her and a struggle ensued. The woman began to scream, awakening her mother, who came to the stairwell, causing the would-be rapist to flee into the night, police said. Speaking to a Tel Aviv police spokesman about an entirely different subject Sunday …

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