A meme by the twitter account @AnarchoZionist in Dec. 2014, to spam various Palestinian-rights hashtags (#...) including the particular one #Blocktheboat to support Longshoremen's Union refusal to unload Israeli-registered Zim cargo ships in Oakland, CA and Long Beach, CA seaports, was exposed less than 1 year later when the actions of unionized seaport employees had ended.
Musodza leaves out, in retelling 2001 Ben Netanyahu opposition speech to the Durban UN World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, the faith-based restriction on Blacks Israel took out of Africa, to free not to enslave as a free labor source. Netanyahu spoke a lie of omission not lie of commission. Operation Moses, referred to by Musodza, was only to free Black Africans who could prove that they were Jewish.
My journey begins in the city of Chitungwiza, Zimbabwe, 2001 with a CNN interview of Benyamin Netanyahu during the UN-sponsored World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance which was being held in Durban, South Africa. The conference was trying to add Zionism to the list of different forms of racism. [bold emphasis added] An indignant Netanyahu pointed out that Israel is the one country in recent memory to take Blacks out of Africa not to enslave them, but free them. Although I was aware of Operation Moses, I had never given this fact about Israel that much consideration. Looking back, it was like an ideological immunization jab, rendering me invincible to the kind of propaganda that is tailored for African and Black audiences.
Racism, at least expressed as ignorance of head coverings, informs Masimba Musodza's childhood impression of Arafat. Calling a keffiyeh a "tablecloth" is as dehumanizing and racist as much as later USA military terms "raghead" or "towelhead" for mostly Iraqi 'enemy' to illegal war and occupation 2003-11 and chaos since during the USA continued role providing advisory services in stabilizing Iraq. Even USA construction and landscape maintenance workers wear similar head and neck coverings, such as a t-shirt or bandanna tied into a knot or secured with a baseball cap, to keep cool in hot sun by covering the back of one's neck as well as the head.
Zimbabwe is predominantly a Christian country, although many Zimbabweans adhere to varying degrees to the pre-colonial ancestor-veneration religion. This has shaped the general perception of Israel and Jewish people. [bold emphasis added] However, the regime of Robert Mugabe has ties to the PLO. Yasser Arafat was a frequent visitor, I saw him a few times as a child, this avuncular man in military khaki with a tablecloth on his head. His representative, Mr Ali Halimeh, was Dean of the Diplomatic Corps until 2002, when he was posted to Ireland. That was the year Mugabe won for himself another term in office, and many Zimbabweans began to leave the country.
Masimba Musodza's quote of a ChiShona saying "it is inappropriate to remind to someone at a social gathering they have problems at home" is logically inapplicable because the second session of a training program in screenwriting isn't a social gathering. It's training for work possibly writing hasbara (Israeli government propaganda to explain and justify policies) that can be turned into soundbites illustrated with pictures or short videos (.gif format) rebranded as memes.
Before I left too, I was selected to take part in a training programme conducted by Idit Schechori of the School of Screenwriting, Tel Aviv. In the second session, she overheard us discussing reports of a bombing in Tel Aviv. Apparently, the Embassy had kept that news from her (or she wasn’t watching CNN like the rest of us) but Idit immediately rang up someone in Tel Aviv. [bold emphasis added] Had we known that she had been in the dark about the incident, we would have had the good sense to not mention it in her presence. In ChiShona, the saying goes, Afirwa haatariswi kumeso (literally: “One does not look at the bereaved directly in the eyes”), meaning that it is inappropriate to remind to someone at a social gathering that they have problems at home. Nevertheless, we asked her what it was like to live in a country where a ride on a bus or a trip to the mall was a life risk. That took me back to that time in 1987 when a bomb went off at Avondale Shopping Centre near my school. That is the closest personal experience I have that I could possibly dare compare to what Israelis go through.
17 years later in his 4th term as Prime Minister, Ben Netanyahu puts into practice his faith-based exclusion of Black Africans fleeing conflict from refugee status in Israel with thousands of deportations. Netanyahu even reneged on Israel's 1951 signatory obligation
On
Tuesday, April 3, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reneged on
a deal with the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR). The day before,
Netanyahu had announced a deal with UNHCR that would determine the fate
of 42,000 Africans—mostly from Eritrea and South Sudan—who live in
Israel. The UN Agency would relocate 16,250 of the African residents to
Western states, such as Canada, Germany, and Italy. In exchange, Israel
would give temporary legal status to an equal number of Africans. A day
later, however, Netanyahu said that the agreement was dead.
under the Convention on Refugees to grant refugee status to people with a well founded fear of persecution if deported back to the country they fled.
In the long term between Dec 1, 2014 and April 3, 2018 @AnarchoZionist on twitter and Masimba Musodza in 2015 on the Times of Israel web site, the pictured subject of a 2014 hashtag-spamming (or disrupting) meme, were both abandoned by the 2018 actions of the Prime Minister of Israel whose policies they supported in in 2014 and 2015.
