I’m sure everybody has heard about the protests of Ethiopians in Israel, but I haven’t had a chance to write about it until now:
“Every white person who wants to immigrate is welcome. Every Ethiopian person, regardless of how they practiced Judaism, has been suspect,” said Shula Mola, the chair of the Israeli Association for Ethiopian Jews. “I can’t explain it any other way. It’s about their color.”
Racism in Israel is not limited to Ethiopians, of course: Indeed, some of the weekend’s protesters chanted slogans like, “We aren’t Arabs!”
Ahmad Tibi, a Palestinian member of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, argued that Israeli police were relatively restrained with Ethiopian protesters, compared to how they deal with protests by the Arab minority. “Every Arab wishes to be Ethiopian for a few hours,” he said.
First of all, it’s not “every white person.” Ethnically non-Jewish spouses of Jews who come to Israel are very unwelcome irrespective of their color. And the children of a Jew and a non-Jew are subjected to the humiliating and fascist rhetoric that their very existence is a form of genocide against Jews. I had this told me to my face by the eager idiots in the pay of the Jewish organizations that trawl the world in search of Jews they can lure to Israel. Back in Ukraine, these organizations would gather small children and teach them to hate their friends who were non-Jewish or not “completely Jewish.” (I experienced this personally, and it’s not a good idea to argue with me about this. It is still a very painful memory.)
Ethiopians do have a lousy time in Israel. I’ve heard an enormous number of offensive and nasty comments about them from Russian-speaking immigrants to Israel. These immigrants feel second-class in Israel because they haven’t practiced Judaism for generations and have no idea what it’s all about. So they seek out a group that is even easier to mark as “not completely Jewish.” And the Ethiopian Jews are easy to single out as “even less Jewish than we are” because of their skin color.
These are the costs of trying to build a mono-ethnic state in the XXIst century. And this is just the beginning. As genetic testing becomes more mainstream and people start getting their DNA profiles as a matter of course, the discussions of who is really Jewish / African / white / Middle Eastern / Slavic, etc. are going to become a lot more complex.
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