MK Shlomo Molla (Kadima) on Wednesday called for Attorney- General Yehuda
Weinstein to open a criminal investigation following a Tuesday night segment on
Channel 2 about a Kiryat Malachi neighborhood council whose residents signed a
pledge vowing not to rent or sell houses to Israelis of Ethiopian
descent.
“I am appalled by the evilness and hatred shown towards
Ethiopian Israelis,” Molla said, adding that the southern Israel town “is a
model of absorption of Ethiopian immigrants. But this segment reveals that some
of its residents are simply evil and racist.”
RELATED:Driver, Egged to compensate passenger for racist incident Ethiopian-Israelis protest outside 'ghetto' school Molla, who immigrated to
Israel from Ethiopia at the age of 19, told
The Jerusalem Post he sees the
incident as “as very severe,” and added that he is very familiar with such
stories, and knows dozens of Ethiopian-Israelis who have endured discrimination
in housing.
In the Channel 2 segment, one resident of the Bar-Yehuda
neighborhood in the poor development town can be heard saying “the only good
Ethiopian is a dead Ethiopian.” Another resident said Ethiopians “have a stench
like an atomic bomb.”
An additional resident of the 120-family
neighborhood said that Ethiopians will bring down the real estate values, before
adding that he wouldn’t rent to an Ethiopian even if he was the IDF chief of
staff. The same resident said Ethiopians who move into the neighborhood will
start holding elaborate African rituals in public spaces, including slaughtering
cattle and setting up tents “like they do there [Africa]”.
It also
included a segment where two students from Sapir College took a hidden camera
into a meeting with a real estate agent who, when they asked if the building had
any “cockroaches” (Ethiopians), were reassured that they had nothing to
fear.
The segment also hit close to home for Gideon Ambay, who works on
housing-rights issues for Ethiopian-Israelis in Ramle for the NGO
Shatil.
Ambay said that the phenomenon is one of the reasons for the
development of Ethiopian “ghettos” in Israel, but added that he doesn’t think
it’s something that is unique to the Ethiopian community.
“Today there
are neighborhoods in Israel that are entirely Ethiopians, it does help lead to
this. But I think that all of us have a tendency to form our own ghettos. It’s
very hard for people to accept people who don’t look like them, or don’t come
from their culture.”
Ambay added that he believes the incident in Kiryat
Malachi shouldn’t be blown out of proportion as revealing some sort of endemic
Israeli racism towards Ethiopians, saying instead that it represents shifting
currents in Israeli society as a whole.
“People have begun to look away
from mutual understanding and helping one another and have become more
capitalist and individualist, and are leaning more towards their ethnic
surroundings that are more familiar,” he said.
The issue was seen as far
more grave on the beteisrael.co.il website, an online forum for Israel’s
Ethiopian community.
In an editorial column on Wednesday entitled “Kiryat
Malachi = Mississippi,” the website’s editors compare the situation for
Ethiopians in Israel to that of African-Americans in the Jim Crow South. The
column includes Lawrence Beitler’s 1930 photo of a lynching in Marion, Indiana,
along with a reference to Abel Meeropol’s anti-lynching poem “Strange
Fruit.”
“Blacks in the US and other countries achieved their rights
through blood, sweat, and tears,” the column stated. “We’re not there… We must
begin with the sweat and tears that we have already shed and enter the next
phase: blood.”
In a statement issued on Wednesday, Kiryat Malachi Mayor
Moti Malka said he was appalled by the segment and called on the local police to
investigate the matter. He also said that he called a meeting with the heads of
the Bar-Yehuda neighborhood committee in order to clear up the
issue.
According to Malka, Kiryat Malachi has taken in the highest
proportion of Ethiopians of any city in Israel and that there is no separation
between Ethiopians and anyone else in the city’s schools or
neighborhoods.
He also said that the city’s success in integrating
Ethiopians should serve as a model for other cities and that all night long he
was fielding phone calls from residents who were horrified by what they saw in
the Channel 2 segment.