The following is an excerpt from “Israel: Democracy, Race, Ethnicity, and More” (Fragments #2).
by Dr. Fekade Abebe, PhD
translated by Maya Rosen
When I first wrote these words in the spring and summer of 2023, Israeli society was grappling with an acute, existential, internal crisis. Civil forces had been in the streets for several months protesting and resisting what they perceived as a radical change of regime in Israel. At the same time, to the extent that the protest continued, its strength and persistence revealed its problematic limitations. The protesters claimed that they were protesting on behalf of Israeli society as a whole, but they left out two distinct minority groups: Ethiopian Jews and the Arab1 society — much like Israeli society ignores them every day.
The fall of 2023 changed many things. The Hamas attacks of October 7 and the subsequent war led the government to clamp down on protests. The emergency war cabinet paused work on domestic issues, including what the government called the “judicial reform,” although the pause itself was only partial: The government left the Supreme Court without a president and is refusing to fill vacancies on lower courts, which the state and society need to function during the war. Socially, too, much of Israeli society closed ranks; for the moment, the war response had eclipsed democracy as the main issue. The High Court’s January 1, 2024 ruling against the reform set the stage for a potential constitutional crisis, a stage frozen with the curtain down until some future time. As I write now, in March, that future is still unknown; we are holding our collective breath. But the underlying tensions and dynamics have not gone away. Not only have the social problems, which peaked during the protests against the government’s attempted coup, not disappeared, but many fear that they will return with renewed force. The debate and controversy over whether to continue fighting or negotiate a deal to return the hostages are only a preview of what’s to come. In this respect, these issues deserve our attention if we want to build a more democratic society once this war is behind us.
The instigators of the coup used the absence of Ethiopian and Arab Israelis to defame and discredit the protests. One of their favorite tactics was to point out the protests’ disconnect from much of the public, who did not attend the protests en masse.
As an example, in a tweet in March 2023, the government’s Public Diplomacy Minister Galit Distel Atbaryan raised a series of rhetorical questions meant to embarrass the protesters and their leaders:
Why are they alone on the field? Why doesn’t Arab society take to the streets en masse? Why does the Ethiopian community leave the arena empty? Where are the ultra-Orthodox? Where are the women of South Tel Aviv? Where are all the minority groups who are supposed to be burning the streets now to defend themselves against the reform? Why does the wealthy Left remain alone in this protest? Does anyone know? (Emphasis in original.)
There is no doubt that the Minister of Public Diplomacy and the entire government are taking advantage of the mass absence of Ethiopian Jews and Arab society for their political benefit. And yet, while most attempts at delegitimizing the protests were far-fetched and concocted tales, this particular claim has a grain of truth to it and is worth taking seriously — although not in the way the government wished to use it.
In this essay, I focus on my community — the Ethiopian Jewish community — and offer two explanations for why we have not attended the protests en masse:
(1) In their struggle for social change, Ethiopian Jews in Israel have experienced many years of public protests that had no long-term and sustainable impact on their status and condition.2
(2) A lack of solidarity in Israeli society. (The absence of Israel’s Arab sector from the democracy protests is a separate story with different dynamics.) Hopefully, this can shed light on where Israeli society needs to grow in order to become more democratic.
A brief history of Ethiopian Israeli protest movements
The history of Ethiopian Jews in Israel is full of tumultuous and impressive protests, but each of these protests — powerful as they were — passed without causing a fundamental change in government policy, and the general public remained indifferent to the difficult situation of this community. Although each specific protest by Ethiopian Jews arose as a result of an outrageous incident (as will be described below), their repetition shows that they fail to significantly shake the political system and do not influence decision-makers. In other words, a protest alone, without a long-term political-social agenda that builds enough power that it can threaten the government, is not effective.
From the moment that Ethiopian Jews first walked on the ground here in Israel, other Israelis have had a difficult time coming to terms with our presence. And because of this, the existence of this community, which numbers approximately 168,000 people, is primarily marked by struggle and resistance, or in the succinct phrase of the scholar Uri Ben-Eliezer in the 2008 book Racism in Israel, “People from Ethiopia are in a state of abandonment and neglect.”
As a rough generalization, the history of Ethiopian Jews’ struggle can be divided into two periods, during which they took different strategic approaches. Those active in the first period, which began in the 1960s, showed patience and trusted the state and its political system — including institutions such as the Jewish Agency for Israel or the Chief Rabbinate — regarding promises they had made about immigration and absorption. Therefore, the struggles around delays in immigration for family members who had stayed behind, the de facto nullification of degrees of religious leaders called Kesim (also known as Kahen or Cohen), the issue of conversion for the sake of stringency, and the inability to marry according to the community’s traditions all took place while trying not to excessively defy the establishment. The second period began in 1996, with the explosion of what was known as the “Blood Dumping Affair.” It came to light that blood donations by Ethiopian Jews were being thrown out because of a fear of AIDS. The crisis further disillusioned the next generation, who implemented new types of protests and actions.
This watershed moment brought about a new readiness for confrontation with those in power. In response to the Blood Dumping Affair, the community organized a massive protest in which some 10,000 Ethiopian Jews took part – including military veterans and even police officers who left their posts to join. If there had been hope that these unprecedented protests would awaken Israeli society and state institutions, it was crushed even before the wave of protests died out.
The authorities’ maximum effort in the face of this shocking affair was to convene a Knesset committee for discussion. In the article mentioned earlier (footnote 2), my colleague Oded Ron and I show that the inquiry committee was nothing more than an attempt to silence the public and the legal struggle through co-optation of the protest leaders. We know this since the community petitioned the High Court of Justice to order the relevant parties to accept Ethiopian blood donations. However, the petition, according to another ruling of the High Court (which disqualified one of the protest leaders from serving on the committee), was deleted close to the appointment of the committee. It is no wonder that, even a decade later, it became clear that the discriminatory practice continued.
Protests on a similar scale were repeated in different versions two more times, in 2006 and 2013, launching a period of protests and struggles in the Ethiopian community around broader social issues of housing, education, health, and more.
In 2014, Yosef Selamsa, a young Ethiopian Jew, was the victim of police brutality while he was sitting in a public park. A few months after the violent encounter, Selamsa died under unknown circumstances. A year later, in 2015, Demas Fekade, an Israeli soldier from the community, was beaten by two police officers. The incident took place in the city of Holon and happened to be filmed by a security camera on site. The footage was distributed to the media, causing an uproar in the community. (Broader Israeli society reacted to the video with some distaste for the incident, but this was outweighed by a larger sense of opposition to the protests.) Following the decision not to prosecute the officers who had assaulted Fekade, tens of thousands of Ethiopian Jews took to the streets of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv to protest and demand an end to the racism and discrimination against them. During these protests, police used stun grenades, tear gas, and other violent means and turned the protest into a battlefield in the heart of the country. In 2019, there were two additional deaths of young people due to police shootings. Yehuda Biyadga, a mentally ill young man, was shot to death by a police officer who had been called by his family to help him; Selemon Teka was shot by an off-duty police person, not in uniform. These events also brought tens of thousands to the streets to protest against police violence.
These protests were largely led by young Ethiopian Jewish social activists and were the result of a severe ongoing crisis of faith in the relationship between Ethiopian Jews and state institutions, primarily the Israel Police and the Department of Internal Police Investigations. The activists made serious accusations, claiming that the police acted in a racist and discriminatory manner.
In each of these protests, needless to say, the protesters suffered from disproportionate and unrestrained police violence, which only exacerbated the distrust of community members in the state institutions.
Thus, we see that members of this community have been fighting valiantly against the institutional oppression they have experienced for many decades. We tried a non-defiant struggle against the state and its institutions, then we tried a frontal collision. A glorious history of protests, of that there is no doubt. But the question remains: How did they affect Israeli politics? How did they affect the general public? These questions should be answered honestly. Unfortunately, not only were the political achievements of these protests extremely weak, but the attempt to harness the general public’s energy in the community’s struggles was also not particularly successful.
Where to now?
This feeling of being ignored by Israeli society has had long-term consequences. Among many members of the community, last year’s struggle against the regime coup is described as a power struggle between two hegemonic groups: one comprised of white upper-class secularists, the other dominated by the religious-settler upper class. In this view, the Ethiopian Jewish community, or any other minority group for that matter, has nothing to seek in this struggle.
This position stems from the fact that, for years, Israel’s general public has hardly supported this community’s protests. At each stage of protest, there was an expectation that parts of the general Israeli society would mobilize their symbolic, economic, and political capital for the struggles of this community as well. But this hope was disappointed time and time again. And so, the most common slogan among many in the Ethiopian Jewish community towards the democracy protests was: Where were you when we took to the streets?
Another reason for the absence of Ethiopian Jews and other minorities from the current protest stems from the feeling that the struggle is to maintain the status quo.
Most bluntly, these communities feel that the 2023 struggles were asking them to save the “Israel of yesterday,” an Israel that prioritized the rights and well-being of well-to-do, white Ashkenazi Jews. For large parts of the Ethiopian community and other communities, the Israel of yesterday is itself the problem. Whether through explicit support for problematic policies, political negligence, or apathy, Israel’s regime has historically mistreated many of the communities who abstained from recent protests.
This is not to say that past protests were completely without achievements. My claim is that a protest is an emergency action designed to curb an urgent and immediate problem — it is not a vehicle for long-term change. And as an emergency operation, it is uneven, irregular, and unsystematic. Therefore, the achievements of these protests were local and temporary and did not change the power relations fundamentally and profoundly. Thus, this community remains with no concrete and substantial political power that would guarantee its members equality, respect, freedom, and a sense of belonging in the country.
Consequently, the continued turn to street protests, beyond their poor achievements, reveals a broader problem that the Ethiopian community in Israel faces: limited political imagination. Years of protests have caused this community to forget that power is achieved through an organized, long-term, and strategic political action process.
Again, the intention here is not to cancel or minimize protest as a political tool. But a protest that does not contain elements of political action such as increasing the degree of political affiliation, creating new social and political circles of identity, and cultivating local leaders who will shape the future face of society is destined to fail — or to succeed temporarily and to a limited extent, even if it was impressive and overwhelming.
In this respect, our role in such protests is twofold: first, to highlight that the “Israel of yesterday” is what brought us to the current crisis. That Israel was indifferent to the condition of Ethiopian Jews and other minorities; it was part of the problem, and there was no reason to fight for it or to fight to maintain it. The struggle is for the Israel of tomorrow, and for that, we must all mobilize. Second, and equally important, the current crisis is a rare opportunity to foster interaction between the general public and the Ethiopian Jewish community in general, and, in particular, political interaction. One’s need for demonstrations and protests is greatly reduced when one has substantial political power to shape or at least influence the socioeconomic policy-making process of society. It is evident that if these two publics can build new circles of socio-political identity, they can better design a social policy that suits their different needs.
However, for this to happen much work is needed on both sides of the barrier. My response to the hegemonic group protesting against the coup is this: Don’t ask the Ethiopian community why they don’t line the streets with you against the coup or why they see you as socio-political opponents. Instead, ask: What needs to be done from today forward so you will view us as your political home? How do we achieve political power together with you and not merely “give” you leftovers in patronage? What are your immediate needs in education, health, housing, policing, etc., that we as policymakers can meet?
And to my community I say: It’s time we ask ourselves how our community can increase its political and social identity circles. How can the protesting crowd from the general population identify with the grievances and needs of the Ethiopian community? How can the two groups give socio-political power to one another? How can a dialogue be developed that will enable political cooperation?
1 My use of the term Arab Israeli citizens, as opposed to Palestinian Israeli, is intentional. There is disagreement within Arab society itself regarding the question of identification and terminology. Some prefer the national Palestinian identity, some emphasize the civil or ethnic identity (the Arab citizens of Israel), and others identify in a mixed way. Since my goal is to call for intra Israeli political cooperation among the citizens of the country, the appropriate expression is the Arab citizens of Israel.
2 Paying special attention to this state of affairs, my colleague Oded Ron and I showed in our 2021 article, “Between Street Demonstrations and Law – Concerning the Position of the High Court of Justice as a Tool for Social Change” (in Ma’asei Mishpat, Vol 12, Hebrew original, Faculty of Law of Tel Aviv University) that protests were the main tool that Ethiopian Jews used over the years to try to motivate the government to act against social injustice.
DR. FEKADE ABEBE, PHD (he/him) is a Research Fellow at The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, in the research group “When the local looks back at the global.” His research focuses on Blackness, identity, and political activism in the Ethiopian community in Israel. In addition, he is a Research Fellow at Molad: The Center for the Renewal of Israeli Democracy. He holds a PhD from Tel Aviv University.
