This article examines state racism and structural violence inflicted upon Eritrean and Sudanese asylum seekers in Israel by surveying various exclusionary policies and their harmful effects. It situates exclusionary state practices of migration control in Israel’s racialized social dynamics, contextualized in Israel’s origins as a settler society and subsequent national ordering. Israel’s treatment of African asylum seekers is conceptualized as structural violence through an examination of unnecessary, preventable, or avoidable harms that were differentially inflicted upon this distinct, racialized migrant group both directly and indirectly. Claims in the article are based on ethnographic research conducted with asylum seekers who had been detained in Israel’s Holot detention facility. In contrast to Israel’s purported adherence to international commitments to human rights, including asylum protections, understanding asylum seekers’ destitution through the lens of structural violence enables us to place the onus and responsibility for human suffering upon the state.
This chapter looks at the case study of Israel to demonstrate the racialized ways in which criminal subjectivities constructed and rooted in colonial racial hierarchies remain ingrained in national orders over time. The chapter focuses on exclusion, criminalization, and enforcement of state power upon two racialized groups—Ethiopian Jews, constructed as internal others, and Sudanese and Eritrean asylum seekers, constructed as external threats. Examining the treatment of these two groups in discussion of the criminal question—who the state chooses to police or detain, and through a postcolonial lens—enables us to trace a coherent line between them and populations racialized and criminalized before them and alongside them; principally Palestinians. Examination of state acts to differentiate and exclude racialized groups through structural and direct violence, using means developed from British colonial structures, indicates that colonial racism and control mechanisms still operate today. Distinct group exclusions thus emerge as reiterations of the same racialized colonial logics, over time and in evolving forms. Racialization, criminalization, and exclusion of non-white groups emanates from a Eurocentric postcolonial social order of racial differentiation that accompanied Jewish settlement in Palestine. The hierarchical order became ingrained in the state and has evolved over time to exclude different groups of ‘Others’: Palestinians, Ethiopian Jewish citizens, and African asylum seekers. State practices examined in the chapter demonstrate how racial formations and hierarchies animate both penal and citizenship regimes.
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