The January mobilization of 10,000 Ethiopian immigrants in Israel, outraged over the government's secret policy of throwing away their blood donations, puts a spotlight on the racism that is inherent to the Zionist state in Israel.
The state of Israel has its roots in the desire of the imperialist powers to have a colonial outpost in the Middle East to counter the rising struggles of the Arab peoples for independence from British, French, and now U.S. domination.
Following World War I, the British government backed the plan of the World Zionist Organization to colonize Palestine with Jews from Europe. This was done through the forcible dispossession of some 700,000 Palestinians living there at the time, and through bloody wars against the neighboring Arab countries.
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were killed or driven into exile in the following decades. To this day the Arab population of Israel is denied equal rights and faces segregation and discrimination. Palestinian workers, both within the borders of the Zionist state and in the West Bank and Gaza, serve as a pool of cheap labor for the bosses in Israel.
The racist attitudes and ideology bred in order to maintain the Zionist state against the Arab population extend to Jews of a darker skin color, who face discrimination and make up a disproportionate share of the country's wage workers. The decision to reject Ethiopian blood - for many the final straw in a litany of abuse - brings this fact home.
This is the particular form that capitalist rule has taken in Israel - with the national oppression and superexploitation of the Palestinians allowing the employers to divide and weaken the entire working class. The fight by Ethiopian immigrants for equal rights in Israel is a boost to the Palestinian struggle. It is another blow to the strength and stability of the Israeli state.
The historic demand of the Palestinian liberation movement for a democratic, secular Palestine where Jews and Palestinians - regardless of skin color - can live together without discrimination shows the way forward for all working people and oppressed nationalities in the area. It is the road to unite toilers of different nationalities and religions, get rid of the Zionist state that breeds and depends on racist oppression, and open the door to the fight for socialism.