Understanding life as a Black Israeli

Kali Holloway

 Yehuda biadga, a 24-year-old israeli of ethiopian
descent, was suffering from combat-induced
PTSD—which had curtailed his military service
two years earlier—when he was gunned
down by Israeli police in January 2019. In June
of that year, Solomon Tekah, an 18-year-old Ethiopian Israeli,
was shot dead by an off-duty police officer. A 2020

New York Times article reported on "Israeli's festering police brutality
problem,” noting that “lethal force, while rare, is wielded almost
exclusively against Arabs and other minorities.” With the killings of
Biadga and Tekah, Israeli police snuffed out the lives of two young
Black men in just six months.

After both shootings, Ethiopian Jews took to the streets by the thousands,
just as they had after two earlier instances of police misconduct
against their community. The protesters decried not just Israeli police
brutality but the pervasive anti-Blackness that causes the community to
be overpoliced yet so underprotected that “their blood [can] be spilled
with impunity,” as the Ethiopian Israeli journalist Danny Adeno Abebe
writes. Protests also erupted this past August, after the fatal hit-and-run
of a 4-year-old Ethiopian boy garnered a slap on the wrist for the driver.

The conversation about Israel’s devastating occupation and war in
Palestine should perhaps also urge a discussion about the state of the
country’s Black residents. In addition to nearly 170,000 Jewish citizens
of Ethiopian heritage, they include some 10,000 Muslim Afro-Bedouins;
3,000 Black Hebrew Israelites, who are not Jewish but claim
Israelite ancestry; and nearly 30,000 African nationals seeking refuge
from political persecution in Eritrea and the ravages of war in Sudan,
most of whom emigrated between 2006 and 2014.

Israel does not have America’s legacy of Black chattel slavery and
the one-drop rule. Still, in effect, a nation-state founded primarily to
deracialize Ashkenazi European Jews inevitably
created an inverse racial order with the Ashkenazim
on top. Mizrahim, or Middle Eastern
and North African Jews (along with Sephardim,
originally used as a term to designate Jews expelled
from Spain but now sometimes used interchangeably
with Mizrahim as a sort of catchall
for non-Ashkenazi Jews), long suffered under
discriminatory policies. Then the arrival of Ethiopian
Jews beginning in the 1970s and continuing

into the 1980s and ’90s firmed up a racial hierarchy
in which “the Ethiopian community has the lowest
status of Israel’s [multiracial] Jewish communities,”
the Ethiopian Israeli scholar, activist, and writer
Efrat Yerday, who is also chair of the Association for
Ethiopian Jews, told me. The country’s estimated
200,000 people of African descent differ vastly in
their ethnic, cultural, and religious identities and
are not politically aligned. (In a state “where racism
runs rampant and is statistically increasing,” the
Israel-based journalist David Sheen has written,
“any alliance with non-Jews is guaranteed to make
the Ethiopian movement lose popularity amongst
religious-nationalist
Jewish Israelis.”)

And even that status was hard-won. Ethiopian
Jews, despite practicing a 2,000-year-old,
pre-rabbinic form of Judaism, were not counted
among diaspora Jewry with a “right of return”
until 1973. (Even then, an Israeli government report
warned they were “completely foreign to the
spirit of Israel.”) The difference in treatment, Yerday
writes, illustrates “the State of Israel’s desire
to secure a Jewish majority and at the same time
[its prioritization of] the European component of
the immigrant identity over the Jewish component.”

Ethiopian Jews continue to need special
permission from the Israeli government before
migrating—unlike Jews making aliyah from the
US or elsewhere—and must undergo a conversion
to the dominant rabbinical Judaism to attain citizenship.
And there have been scandals, such as in
1996, when it emerged that Magen David Adom,
Israel’s national blood bank, had been dumping
donations from Ethiopian Jews due to fears over
HIV/AIDS. In 2012, reports that Ethiopian women
were forced to take a long-acting birth control
injection—though denied by the government—
sparked fears of attempted genocide.

A 2018 study from the Israel-based research
nonprofit Myers-JDC-Brookdale Institute found
that the average income of Ethiopian Israelis is
29 percent lower than the general population’s.
Less than 4,000 Israeli students of Ethiopian descent
are currently attending college, according to
Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics.

The plight of Eritrean and
Sudanese African refugees, who
make up more than 90 percent
of Israel’s asylum seekers, is
even starker. The government’s
refusal to recognize them as
refugees creates a legal limbo,
enabling Israel to avoid openly
flouting the prohibition under
international law of deporting

refugees to life-threatening homelands. (Just 31 Eritreans and
Sudanese have been granted asylum as of this writing.) In 2012,
Israeli immigration law was amended to define all incoming
non-Jewish African migrants as “infiltrators,” and the government
initiated a campaign to drive them out. Anti-migrant
rallies have featured Miri Regev, of Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party, calling
Sudanese migrants a “cancer,” and right-wing mouthpiece turned
elected parliament member May Golan declaring that she was
“proud to be a racist.”

Avera Mengistu is an Ethiopian Israeli soldier who has been
held captive in Gaza since 2014. Last January, Moshe Tal, a former
IDF official, acknowledged on a national radio broadcast that
the return of “other citizens from other backgrounds and socio-economic
statuses” would probably generate “a bit greater interest.”
In November, as the Israeli bombardment escalated, Michal
Worke, an Ethiopian Israeli artist, told NPR: “Avera’s story is my
story, and it’s the story of the entire Ethiopian community. Nine
years he’s been a hostage in Gaza, and no one cares.” 

NATION