By Anshel Pfeffer, Haaretz.com
“The absorption was hard and painful,” said Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, and mistakes were made. The Ethiopian Jews wanted to be a drop returning to the sea and were accepted with open arms, but there was also estrangement and isolation, and there were also clear manifestations of racism.”
Olmert was talking on Wednesday night at a three-hour long gala event honoring the Ethiopian community in Israel and marking a hundred years since the birth of Yona Bogale, the legendary Ethiopian Zionist leader. It was an utterance that should have deserved more attention, for what he said but also for what he didn’t.
Olmert wasn’t clear about where this racism came from and what form it took. Was it casual racist slurs from Israelis in the street, religious schools who refused to accept Ethiopian children, was it bad treatment by the low-ranking officialdom who made little effort to help in their absorption, or discrimination on a much higher level within government ministries depriving an underprivileged group of much-needed resources. Or perhaps the racism was actually within the Ethiopian community itself, which is fragmented in many places along lines of family prestige and geographic origin, Tigreans and Amharics not marrying with each other, while many within the community shun the Falashmura. All these, of course, occur, but are any of them “clear manifestations of racism?”
I have no idea to which of these racisms Olmert – or perhaps his speechwriters – were referring, but if the prime minister is going to come out with a very rare admission about racism in Israeli society, it would pay to be a little more specific.
In 1997, then-opposition leader Ehud Barak caused a major fuss within the old Labor Party establishment when he apologized, in the party’s name, to the Israelis who emigrated from Arab countries for the injustices inflicted on them during their absorption process in the 1950s and 1960s. Historians and sociologists can argue over whether the Mapai leaders had anything to apologize for, and Barak’s move had more than a whiff of political opportunism to it, but at least he was making a clear point about who had been wronged and the establishment that had been at fault.
So in the absence of any other hints in his speech, since Olmert is the head of government, I am going to assume that he was referring to the government’s policy at large toward the Ethiopians as having been tainted at one stage or another by racism.
Various charges of racism can be leveled at Israel with varying degrees of justification, which are mainly based on how you define racism to begin with. Is having a Jewish state in itself racist? From there on, the slope gets even slipperier so let’s get back to the Ethiopian issue. Over the last 35 years, Israeli governments have constantly changed their policies on the desirability of bringing over large numbers of Ethiopians claiming to be Jews. Is this a racist debate?
At times when the government was reluctant to do so – as it has been recently over the question of whether to end the absorption of the Falashmura group – their lobbyists, particularly Jewish activists from North America, have repeated the accusation that “it’s strange that the only Jews who Israel is not so eager to welcome just happen not to be white.” This is a spurious accusation.
Never was there an aliya in which Israel invested so much money, manpower and diplomatic capital than the Ethiopians. It’s true that at times, the government was reluctant to go to such efforts and had to be pressured in different ways to do so – but that wasn’t due to their skin color, but simply to the fact that due to their isolation and lack of full historical evidence, a significant proportion of historians, anthropologists and yes, even rabbis, are certain that they are not really descendants of the historical people of Israel.
And despite this the government was still motivated to do what it did. Israeli society as a whole has serious racism problems, mainly concerning Palestinians and foreign workers. There were also serious mistakes concerning the Ethiopian immigrants, some of them still ongoing, but they had nothing to do with racism, which toward Ethiopian Jews is only on the margins, if at all.
If Olmert wants to confront racism in Israel, he should quit pandering and address it where it really exists. There are enough “clear manifestations.”