In April 2025 two MPs from the ruling Labour Party, on a fact finding mission to Israel, were detained by authorities there and then deported, both were women of colour. Yuan Yang is the UK’s first Chinese born MP and identifies as a Quaker. Abtisam Mohamed is the UK’s first Yemeni -British MP and of Muslim heritage. According to UK corporate media source Sky News, Yuan Yang has only once publicly spoken about Israel – calling for safety for journalists in Gaza. The same sources state that in Parliament “Ms Mohamed has spoken on Israel-Gaza five times.” Their treatment at Israeli hands was all too predictable. In 2006 Nobel Peace Prize Winner, South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu on a UN fact finding mission, accompanied by Professor Christine Chinkin, was similarly blocked entry. If politicians had acted on past history, and also listened to the demands of the constituents that they’re paid to represent, it’s likely, the recent mistreatment of these women, might not have happened?
In 2021, there was a UK public campaign, calling for a Parliamentary vote to introduce sanctions against Israel. Citizens were urged to demand that their constituency MPs vote for this policy. The online petition triggering the Parliamentary debate received 388,518 votes. The resulting debate was scheduled for mid-June of that year. Certain UK MPs of dubious grassroots democratic credentials, have used the Covid crisis, as an excuse for ending or minimising face-to-face surgery meetings with their constituents. Consequently, one constituent instead wrote to his MP – a Blairite neoliberal Labour MP – in support of the campaign, also requesting that the MP ask that the UK government publicly warn BAME Britons of the dangers of visiting Israel, given that its Apartheid policies similarly impact Jewish people of colour (LGBTQ citizens are issued these type of warnings). A list of sources was provided in the correspondence below.
4 June 2021
Dear Xxxxx MP
I am sure you are aware of the debate pending 16th June proposing sanctions on apartheid Israel. Most people who will have approached you on this issue will no doubt have done so on the basis of the appalling inhuman treatment of the indigenous Palestinian people.
I by comparison would like you also to consider the threat this apartheid country poses to Black British citizens – even should we be Black Jewish – and demand that you take our side, over what is merely a foreign white colonial state.
Israel has subjected Black Jews to forced contraceptive injections. In 2013, Haaretz and the Times of Israel put the figure of suppressed Black Jewish reproduction at 50 percent. The same year, and invoking the horrors of Nazi practices and illuminating the reality of modern-day eugenics, even Forbes magazine described this as “forced (if temporary) sterilization.
In 2009, Israel’s Ynetnews revealed that there were Israeli neighbourhoods operating whites-only housing polices—designed specifically to keep out Black Ethiopian Jews—citing the town of Ashkelon as an example. In 2012, Israel’s Jerusalem Post was still citing whites-only housing practices – citing the city of Kiryat Malachi.
In 2017, the US Daily Beast reported that Tel Aviv was racially segregating its kindergartens to keep Black and white toddlers apart. In 2018, Israel’s Haaretz further confirmed this segregation of children.
Given the Black experience in Israel, in 2016, the U.S. San Francisco Bay View National Black Newspaper reported that “over three hundred Black Jews have announced their intention to refuse any military order to report for reserve duty, accusing the Israeli government of state-sponsored racism against citizens of Ethiopian origin.”
Victims of the white settlers have also historically included, genuine middle-eastern Jews. In 2017 both the Jewish news agency Mondoweiss and the BBC reported on ‘Israel’s Yemenite Children’s Affair’. In the original conquest of Palestine, indigenous middle-eastern Yemeni-Jews were subjected to human experimentation too brutal to be described here, and new-born babies were taken from Yemeni mothers – deemed too primitive to raise their own children – for forced adoption to childless western parents (both news organisations cited Israel’s Knesset/Parliament’s admissions on these crimes). So, we have examples of eugenics both at Israel’s birth and in its recent history too, and the victims are Jewish people-of-colour.
More recently Middle-East Eye and countless news agencies have cited the fact that Israel is not recognising Black Uganda Jews as actual Jews and is denying them entry. Clearly as an exploitative white colonial state there is no reason to give Israel privileged status over former Rhodesia or Apartheid South Africa.
When North Carolina posed safety threats to the UK LGBTQ communities, our political representatives and media warned them of the dangers of visiting there. So far BAME Britons are getting no equivalent protection from our representatives. At the 2011 census British Jews were listed as 0.5% of the population – 1-in-200 people only a proportion of whom support apartheid Israel. Black Britons are 2%, Asian Britons 7% and mixed-race Britons 2% – making 12% in total and 24 times the size of the British Jewish population. Most of this BAME population resembles the people apartheid Israel oppresses. Do you not want our votes?
Shouldn’t BAME Britons be warned about the potential dangers of Israel’s non-tourist areas? Shouldn’t Israel, like Rhodesia and Apartheid South Africa, be condemned for the international example of racism it represents?
I look forward to your response. I expect it to deal with the issues raised rather than some generalised public relations release.
Yours sincerely
Yyyyy
Sources were provided as follows.
The debate actually went ahead on 14 June 2021 but instead curiously only citied a considerably smaller petition of only 11,687 signatures asking government to merely “Condemn Israel for their treatment of Palestine and Palestinians.” The Conservative government took a preexisting position also then posted in response to the larger three hundred thousand signatory petition that, “The UK is firmly opposed to boycotts or sanctions against Israel. Our close and varied relationship means we are able to express clearly when we disagree.” Amidst the procedural slipping and sliding, the local MP did not – as requested – call for sanctions, which was also being campaigned for by Labour Party traditionalists “Richard Burgon, Jeremy Corbyn, Diane Abbott and Bell Ribeiro-Addy”. Nor did the MP ask the Foreign Office to issue a warning to Black Britons about the potential dangers of Israeli Apartheid. After being sent some prickly reminders, and provided more sources on Israeli racial oppression, the MP finally responded to the original correspondence some month and a half later.
28 July 2021
Dear Yyyyy,
Thank you for your email and please accept my apologies for the delay in my reply.
You raise a number of matters of concern. Although international attention has tended to focus on their repression of the Palestinian people, I agree the Netanyahu government also had a very poor record on equalities for ethnic minorities within Israel.
I was not familiar with all the allegations you have outlined in your email but I am aware of the discrimination faced by Ugandan Jews in being denied Israeli citizenship. I was also concerned by the Nation State Law passed by the Netanyahu government which legally entrenched discrimination against Arab Israelis.
The safety of constituents is a priority for me so I am always willing to raise concerns Britons may face abroad which are not reflected in government advice with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. With that in mind, although the allegations you have outlined in your email are worrying from a human rights perspective, there is no specific link demonstrated between them and potential threats to the safety of Black, Asian and Ethnic Minority Britons. If you have any further evidence of this I would be happy to consider it.
For the reasons described above (among others), I was glad to see the end of the Netanyahu government this year. While I am aware of the difficulties likely to be faced by a coalition government formed of parties with very little in common other than opposition to Netanyahu, I am hopeful that the presence of left-wing parties within the coalition such as Labor and Meretz will improve life for BAME citizens in Israel.
Thank you once again for contacting me about this important issue.
Yours sincerely,
Xxxxx MP
Clearly the MP citing a change in Israeli Premier was irrelevant in relation to the evidence of ongoing colonial structural oppression in the country. In reaction to being provided with more sourced evidence of Israeli racism, the MP merely pointed out that he’d expressed his concern to government about violence in Gaza – thereby repeating establishment gesture politics that had done little for Palestinians over the years. Two months after his initial campaign correspondence, the constituent sent a last email to the local MP, that has some significance for both women MPs, later to be detained and deported by Israel.
5/08/21
Dear Xxxxx
Thank you for your acknowledgement.
I would only add that you might wish to consider your resulting position, should given the evidence to which you’ve now had access, even one BAME Briton should visit Israel and be hurt, victimised or even killed?
Yours sincerely,
Dr Yyyyy
The year of this correspondence – 2021 – was also that of the England & Wales Census, the subsequent publication of which, now reveals a far larger potential pool of UK citizens who’d potentially experience threat in Israel. “Asian ethnic groups made up the second largest percentage of the population (9.3%), followed by black (4.0%), mixed (2.9%) and other (2.1%) ethnic groups” making a total of 16.2% people of colour or 18.3% when ‘other ethnic groups’ are added. The Jewish population is 0.5%. This means that for every single Jewish citizen – only a proportion of whom support Israel – there are between 32.4% and 36.6% of the population having their citizenship and potentially safety undermined by British/Western support for colonialism in Palestine. This potential for racial oppression reaches right into Western societies.
During the pro-Israel moral panic following the 2024, 2-month bombing of Gaza – which killed 2252 Palestinians, of whom 551 were children – British women of colour, supportive of Palestinian human rights, were smeared often with unproven anti-Semitism accusations. One of the victims, activist Jackie Walker is Jewish, Jamaican-British and therefore also part of the extended African diaspora. Her UK citizenship and even safety was treated as second-class, subordinate to the interests of Israel, despite the experiences of Ethiopian women there, which are largely downplayed by the British media. At the time, Malia Bouattia was the first female Black British and Muslim leader of the Nation Union of Students, she and Naz Shah a Muslim MP, both faced similar media smears. Shah was later career intimidated into apologising for merely sharing Professor Norman Finklestein’s joke about moving Israel to the US as a 51st state. Again, given the sexist and sexualised nature of colonial violence in Israel its worth reflecting on the potential risk to women like them, capable of being mistaken for Palestinian during this period. In 2014 (IBTimes), former Israeli state security professional and Bar-Ilan University lecturer Mordechai Kedar publicly suggested “The only thing that could deter a suicide bomber is knowing that if caught, his sister or his mother would be raped,”. In 2009 IDF members and veterans were found to be wearing ‘One shot, two kills’ t-shirts (CBS 2009) which glorified shooting pregnant Palestinian women in the womb, so as to also kill the unborn foetus.
In the US African-American academic and broadcaster Dr Marc Lamont Hill similarly found his US Black citizenship status secondary, when he was sacked by CNN for criticising Israel. Celebrated ethnic minority Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh and Turkish-American human rights activist Ayşenur Eygi, were killed by Israel but this didn’t stop President Biden from continuing to arm the genocide in Gaza. Put simply Israel is now proving to be a threat also to Western Democracies and the multi-cultural stability of those societies.
Afterword:
Ethiopian Eugenics Forced Contraception Scandal: The Israeli government has investigated and attempted to exonerate itself aided and abetted by a few tame whitewashing columnists, denying equivalent ‘Me Too’ status to Black Ethiopian-Israeli victims. However, the original journalistic sources about this scandal are still published, accessible and intact- Forbes, Haaretz, Times of Israel, Atlanta Black Star, OurWeekly, The Peoples Voice, Salon, – forcing Israel to withdraw Depo-Provera, the 3-month strong, powerful contraception drug, that it had been using on the women. There are academic accounts from Bayan Abusneineh, Diane Tober etc, and interviews with tv reporter Gal Gabai, whose show broke the story.
ZNetwork is funded solely through the generosity of its readers.
Donate
