The words were spoken clearly. Captured on camera and broadcast on national
television in the first week of 2012: “The only good Ethiopian is a dead
Ethiopian.”
Referring to them also as “
jukim,” or cockroaches, a tenant
from an apartment block in the southern town of Kiryat Malachi stated proudly
that he would never sell his home to an Ethiopian family because “it brings down
the value of the neighborhood.”
The man revealed that 120 other families
spanning four residential buildings had collectively signed an agreement with
the neighborhood council not to sell or rent their apartments to families of
Ethiopian descent.
The news report was only the tip of the iceberg. In
the week that has followed the broadcast, members of the Ethiopian community
have galvanized their people, especially the second generation of immigrants, to
speak out against a phenomenon that fails to abate and that spreads far beyond
Kiryat Malachi.
“People always tell us that it will take time; they tell
us to be patient and that it will take another generation for us to feel part of
Israeli society.” says Ethiopian activist Elias Inbram. “But I have lived here
for more than 30 years, I have a law degree and a master’s degree, I served in
the army, so what else do we need to do in order for people to accept us?”
Inbram, who also spent time studying in Chicago, was one of many highly educated
and articulate young Ethiopian Israelis that came out Tuesday to protest the
discriminatory housing policies in Kiryat Malachi and what he calls
“institutionalized racism.”
“This is not something new. We have seen it
in so many areas: in the education system, in the job market and in housing,” he
says. “We keep hearing a lot of promises [from the government] that things will
change but no one does anything.”
“Even though we are talking about
something specific that happened in Kiryat Malachi, this kind of racism against
Ethiopians happens everywhere in Israeli society,” observes Efrat Yerday,
spokeswoman of the Israel Association of Ethiopian Jews (IAEJ), who also joined
in Tuesday’s protest.
Yerday, who was born in Israel to Ethiopian
immigrant parents, adds that “it stems from similar attitudes within the
political system, the education system and even within the police force. It is
everywhere and this is just another event in a series of events.”
Both
Inbram and Yerday – who not only participated in the anti-racism protest in
Kiryat Malachi on Tuesday but also joined other Ethiopian activists in the
Knesset on Wednesday for an emergency hearing in the Committee for Aliya,
Absorption and Diaspora Affairs – say that the second generation of Ethiopian
Israelis (those who came as young children or who were born here) is no longer
willing to sit in silence and suffer from ignorance or racism like their
parents’ generation.
“We can no longer sit on our hands and do nothing
when we are confronted with this kind of racism,” concurs lawyer Itzik Dessie,
executive director of Ethiopian legal rights organization Tebeka, which has
already started to lobby parliamentarians to create specific legislation to
criminalize racism, including harsh punishments for those who are verbally
racist.
He says that in the past, the community tried to be patient and
opted to simply ignore “stupid comments” about Ethiopian immigrants.
“We
would just say, ‘oh, there is another idiot saying something stupid, it will
pass,’ but today we are seeing that it is not passing. It is not only about
individuals in the street who are making racist comments but people in politics
and other areas of public life too,” Dessie laments, adding that the next
generation is ready and willing to take up the battle in a way that has not
happened before in Israel.
“We are not afraid to speak out against racism
anymore,” he continues. “We want to see change. We are sick of the situation and
now there are tools such as Facebook that can reach many other young people all
at once.”
According to Dessie, the story in Kiryat Malachi is the straw
that broke the camel’s back.
“The fact that Ethiopians are prevented from
buying buildings is not really the issue here; it goes much, much deeper,” he
says.
Indeed, just over the last few months, several incidents of blatant
or unwitting racism and forced segregation of members of the Ethiopian community
have been exposed by the media.
In September, attempts to close down a
Petah Tikva public school with a student body comprising almost exclusively
Ethiopian pupils put the spotlight on what the community calls “ghettos” –
neighborhoods where new Ethiopian immigrants are forced to live due to limited
financial means.
The incident also raised awareness to government housing
policies that limit where the new immigrants can purchase accommodation. In
order to receive a subsidized government mortgage, community members are forced
to buy on certain streets and neighborhoods in only 10 specific towns. This
restriction then creates a problem wherein some have an extremely large
concentration of Ethiopian students.
A recent report compiled by the
Israel Association for Ethiopian Jews found that more than 10 schools
countrywide in which the number of Ethiopian pupils is more than 80 percent of
the student body and a further 40 schools in which Ethiopians constitute
40%.
Another example of this problem was discovered last month in Beit
Shemesh, where it was revealed that the municipality had forced the majority of
Ethiopian children in the town to attend one of three kindergartens. The story
was further exacerbated when Mayor Moshe Abutbul explained the policy by
likening the Ethiopian immigrant community to small fish in a dangerous
aquarium.
“In an aquarium there are big fish and little
fish. First you have to take out the little fish in order to help them
grown and stop them from being eaten by the big fish. That is how we are helping
to better prepare Ethiopian children for first grade,” he told local Israeli
media.
“We need to change this situation and break down these ghettoized
neighborhoods,” notes Inbram, suggesting that money raised by international
Jewry to support Ethiopian immigration and absorption could be put to much
better use by focusing more on integration into Israeli society in a holistic
way.
“Not only does there need to be a law against racism and efforts to
enforce existing laws against discrimination but there also need to be better
policies on integration in housing, education, industry and the public sphere,”
he says.
At Tuesday’s protest, demonstrators expressed hope that tackling
racism would now become a central issue in the struggle for social justice among
mainstream Israeli society.
“We hope that this is the first step and that
we can really make a change,” comments 27-year-old student Shira Esayas, who
traveled from Haifa to join the protest in Kiryat Malachi.
She continues:
“We saw our parents being subjected to racism and they tried to protest it but
no one listened.
Now we are here and if we do not speak out loud and
clear then our children will also have to go out and fight
racism.”
Waving a banner with a well-known quote by Martin Luther King,
Jr. – “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” – Esayas said that
she had always been inspired by the changes King made in the US and is hopeful
that this new stand for equality would achieve the same in Israel.
She
points out that fight against racism is not exclusive to the Ethiopian community
but rather a battle that “everyone in Israeli society should be involved
in.”
Avi Yalou, a resident of Kiryat Malachi and one of those who
organized the protest this week, says that he too feels this is a battle
relevant even to those outside the Ethiopian community.
Although few
people – lawmakers, social rights activists or otherwise – from outside of the
Ethiopian community joined Tuesday’s anti-racism protest, Yalou says that “this
is only the start of more things to come.”