David Sheen’s lecture “the Bullet, the Ballot, and the Boycott” (Part 4)

14 min David Sheen is an independent journalist and filmmaker originally from Toronto, Canada who now lives in Dimona, Israel. Sheen began blogging when he first moved to Israel in 1999 and later went on to work as a reporter and editor at the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz. He now writes for a variety of local, regional and international outlets including Alternet and Electronic Intifada. Sheen is currently writing a book about African immigrants to Israel and the struggles they face. His website ishttp://www.davidsheen.com and he tweets from @davidsheen

On Tuesday, November 10, 2015 at University of New Orleans, David Sheen presented his lecture “the Bullet, the Ballot, and the Boycott” about Israeli incitement to racist violence, the focus of his on-the-ground reporting for the past five years. The core of the presentation concerns the dehumanizing discourse towards Palestinians, Africans and other non-Jews by top Israeli political and religious leaders, and the vigilante attacks they inspire, which spiked during last summer's assault on the Gaza Strip.

People generally assume by the title “the Bullet, the Ballot and the Boycott” that journalist David Sheen is going to be speaking about boycotting Israel, but in fact, Sheen is speaking about Israel Boycotting. Boycott is defined as a “withdrawal from social or commercial interaction or cooperation with a group,” and David Sheen contends Israel boycotts its non-Jewish residents in many facets of life in this first part of a series that will highlight Sheen’s recent New Orleans stop on his lecture tour of the United States.

In Part 1, Sheen exposes the false dichotomy of Democratic and non-Democratic (territories) Israel. The rights and privileges are not accorded to people by the basis of their citizenship but by the basis of their ethnicity. Even worse, there are forces within the society who are trying to take that ethnocracy and turn it into a theocracy. In the second part of his lecture, “the Bullet, the Ballot, and the Boycott,” Sheen describes Jewish Diminunist groups sweeping into power in Israel today—Chabad, Jewish Home Party, and L’hava—groups whose goal is theocracy, whose strategy is race war, and whose tactic is arson. Further in the third part of this lecture Sheen explores the governmental eugenics program and its discourse combatting intermarriage of Jews and non-Jews and, specifically, Africans. Sheen explores the desert detention center that houses refugees from Sudan and Eritrea, the last stop in a governmental plan to “make their lives miserable,” coercing these refugees to self deport.

In part 4 David Sheen explores how Israel keeps out people of color from their communities:

-The government has declared more and more cities as "sundown towns," an explicit exclusion of Africans from communities in -Israel.
-In the 1980s an Israeli military operation went to Ethiopia and brought back Ethiopian Jews, as citizens of the state, and Sheen asks the question why did it take so long? Before this time, the Israeli government discouraged Black Jews from visiting for pilgrimage by charging large fees.
-In recent years, Ethiopian Jews have taken to the streets and protesting, demanding an end to police violence and state-sanctioned violence against them. The protests were met by racist police brutality.