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Social Identities: Journal for the Study

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Becoming a black Jew: cultural racism

and anti‐racism in contemporary Israel
a
Uri Ben‐eliezer
a
University of Haifa
Published online: 24 Jan 2007.

To cite this article: Uri Ben‐eliezer (2004) Becoming a black Jew: cultural racism and anti‐racism
in contemporary Israel, Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture, 10:2,
245-266, DOI: 10.1080/1350463042000227371

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 Social Identities, Volume 10, Number 2, 2004

Becoming a Black Jew: Cultural Racism and Anti-Racism

in Contemporary Israel

URI BEN-ELIEZER
University of Haifa
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ABSTRACT: Many scholars consider ‘identity’ and ‘identity politics’ to be among the
most important means for cultural minority groups to challenge a discriminatory
reality. Others caution that these processes might result in the polarisation of
differences, potentially fuelling hatred, harsh conflict, exclusion and even violence. The
tension between these two views is presented in this article through an examination of
the way young Ethiopian Jews whose parents immigrated to Israel in the late 1980s
and early 1990s have developed their own particular identity precisely in the course of
and as a result of the encounter with Israeli society and its mechanisms of exclusion,
discrimination, and control. The state declared a policy of assimilation, but in practice
relegated the new arrivals to a status of inferiority and marginality. As a result, young
Ethiopian Jews reconstructed a new, complex and hybrid Israeli identity, in which
blackness is one important element. This unique identity is presented in the paper as
a crucial response by the youths to a discriminatory reality of cultural racism.
However, the essay also raises doubts concerning their success in minimising their
subjugation and in ‘de-racialising’ Israel.

A few years ago, an Israeli film director named Daniel Waksman made a
television documentary that shows young Israeli Jews of Ethiopian descent
who live in the Central Bus Station of Tel Aviv, the biggest city in Israel. These
youngsters had left home, or had no home to begin with, and had turned the
station’s basements and stores into their home. As gradually becomes clear,
they steal for their living. The protagonist of the film is a handsome boy named
Gadi, and its recurring theme is the yearning he and his friends express for
Ethiopia. Gadi’s mother is still there and his one desire is to eat the injara she
makes. This is a traditional Ethiopian food, consisting of a pita with vegetables
and meat, eaten with the fingers. In Israel, too, Ethiopian Jews eat injara, but
Gadi misses his mother’s dish — a subject he talks about constantly throughout
the film. The motif of the return home to Africa, which is widespread among
black communities around the world, is actualised in the film when the
director stuns Gadi by giving him a ticket to Ethiopia. Thereafter, Gadi and the
director are busy with a protracted search for Gadi’s mother, which after a
lengthy journey yields results. Gadi falls into his mother’s arms in a remote
village, and the two enter the house, while the local villagers prevent the
cinematographer and the director from following. In the next scene, they are
1350-4630 Print/1363-0296 On-line/04/020245-22  2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/1350463042000227371
 246 Uri Ben-Eliezer

back in the Tel Aviv Central Bus Station. ‘Why didn’t you stay in Ethiopia?’ the
director asks, and Gadi replies, ‘Forget it, there’s nothing for me there’. Silence
ensues. ‘Did you at least get to eat your mother’s injara?’ The youngster
hesitates for a moment and then says, ‘Are you out of your mind? We can’t eat
their food — you can get a disease’.1
The ‘motif of return’ could not survive this special case of its actualisation.
Its existence, however, as a new exilic motif among the young generation of
Ethiopian Jews living in Israel is symptomatic of phenomena of both racism
and anti-racism now evident in the country with regard to this particular
community. The Ethiopian Jews arrived in Israel mainly in two large-scale
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operations. The first, ‘Operation Moses’, was in 1984–1985, and the second,
‘Operation Solomon’, occurred in 1991. Today some 80,000 Ethiopian Jews live
in Israel (Kaplan and Rosen, 1994). According to testimonies, the Ethiopian
Jews have followed Jewish customs since at least the twelfth century. They
believe that they belong to one of the lost Israelite tribes that existed in biblical
times. Being completely isolated from world Jewry until the second half of the
nineteenth century, their form of Judaism differs in many respects from the
forms practised by Jews in other parts of the world (Kurinaldi, 1989; Parfitt and
Trevisam Semi, 1999).
In their appearance the Ethiopian Jews were similar to other Ethiopians.
The Jews differed in their way of life, tradition, and religion, and were called
‘Beta Israel’ or Falashas, meaning foreigners. Many of them were illiterate and
lived in remote insular rural villages far from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital.
On their arrival in Israel they were initially welcomed with an unprecedented
outburst of enthusiasm. Within a few years, however, the new immigrants
displayed downward mobility and were relegated to the bottom of the socioe-
conomic ladder. How did such a process of marginalisation come about so
rapidly, and could not the newcomers have found means to avoid it? These are
the main questions of this article.
My main argument is that the causes of the Ethiopian Jews’ socioeconomic
inferiority and low position in Israel are deeply entrenched in new racist and
anti-racist discourses that have evolved in contemporary Israel. Among
Ethiopian Jews, those most exposed to racism and likely to generate anti-racist
responses are youth, either of the Israeli-born second generation or those taken
there as infants. Second-generation children of immigrants are reputed to have
more identity and status problems than the ‘generation of the desert’)
(Liebkind, 1989; Portes and Rumbaut, 2001). This article focuses on the modes
of discrimination they have faced and their reactions to them.
New forms of racism and anti-racism have emerged in post-World War II
Europe as a result of globalisation and the structural changes that might be
termed ‘late modern’ or ‘postmodern’ (Harvey, 1989; Miles, 1989; Beck, 1997;
Best and Kellner, 1997). In Israel as well, racisms have evolved within a context
of social and political transformation that the country has been undergoing in
the last twenty years or so. Moreover, as in Europe, in Israel the racist
discourse that has evolved in reference to Ethiopian Jews is mainly a form of
‘cultural racism’, in Etienne Balibar’s sense of the term (Balibar, 1991). This
type of racism has become prevalent as notions such as assimilation and
 Becoming a Black Jew 247

amalgamation have almost completely lost their relevance in the Jewish state,
being replaced by new ones such as (cultural) differentiation and separation.

Cultural Racism in Post-Hegemonic Israel

In the Israeli nation-state that was formed in 1948, the term ‘racism’ was not a
part of the national vocabulary. The Israeli-Arab conflict was introduced as a
national conflict only, whereas conflicts between Ashkenazi Jews (those who
immigrated to Israel from Europe) and Mizrahi Jews (who immigrated from
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North Africa and the Middle East) were depicted as conflicts within ‘the
family’ that must not hamper the ideology and practice of the ‘Ingathering of
the Exiles’ (mizug galuyot).
For decades Israel followed an ideology known as Statism (mamlakhtiyut). It
was based on the idea that the state represents the monolithic truth, the
‘general will’, so everything should be managed, concentrated, and supervised
from above (Migdal, 1989; Levi, 1997, pp. 25–56). The attitude toward many
immigrants, especially those who entered the fledgling state from traditional
societies, was that they had to adapt to the integrating society and to its main
ethos of rationalisation and modernisation. If not, state mechanisms would do
it for them, mainly through socialisation, or ‘re-socialisation’, as it was called,
within the school system or the national army (Shuval and Leshem, 1998). It
was a classic melting-pot ideology, akin to the way Gunnar Myrdal and his
associates reduced, in the 1940s, the ‘problem’ of blacks in the United States to
one of assimilation and amalgamation with white America (Kazal, 1995).
It did not take long for many minority groups in Israel to perceive this
orientation as a means of domination that discriminated against them while
preserving their status as ‘weak populations’. The arrival of Ethiopian Jews in
Israel in the mid-1980s (a time when the immigration rate to the country was
very low) did not bring about a change in the declared ideology of assimilation.
Gradually, however, it became clear that Israel was experiencing a crucial
transformation, which exerted enormous influence on the process of immigrant
absorption (klitat aliya).
The transformation was the result of a combination of factors. One was an
economic rationale. At the time, Israel was moving from a centralised, collec-
tivist economy characterised by extensive government involvement to a decen-
tralised market economy with little government control. Essentially, a kind of
‘bourgeois revolution’ took place, propagating a neoliberal outlook that bore
similarities to trends that gained popularity in Reaganist America and Thatch-
erist Britain (Shafir and Peled, 2000; Ram, 2000).
There were also initial indications of the emergence of a civil society
engaged in domestic affairs, one cognisant of global changes, especially the end
of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Members of this society
were assiduously working to improve their quality of life and lifestyle — so
much so that they persistently pushed toward peace with the Palestinians and
the Arab states and became the main supporters of the peace accords that Israel
signed in the early 1990s (Peled and Shafir, 1996).
 248 Uri Ben-Eliezer

Another element that contributed much to the changing face of Israel was
the crisis within the party political system. With the downfall of the Labour
party that ruled over Israel for more than fifty years, a political crisis character-
ised the Israeli party system. During the 1980s, national unity governments,
which included the two largest political parties, were established to overcome
this crisis. The solution, however, only exacerbated the problem. A sort of
political paralysis set in, in the wake of which the public became disenchanted
with party politics and its practitioners. Many were roused to direct action,
which eventually led to collective protests by various groups and associations
of a kind that Israel had never previously known (Ben-Eliezer, 1999).
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Gradually, Israel was moving from a country with one collectivist ethos, a
relatively unitary state structure, a highly centralised regime and a developed
welfare state, to one with an ethos of individualism and differentiation, a
post-materialist perspective, a typical neoliberal economy, a relative decline in
state authority, and an embryonic civil society that tried to legitimise diversity
and pluralism. This transition, which may be termed post-hegemonic or
post-modern, became apparent in the late 1980s and 1990s (on these terms in
regard to Israel, see Shuval and Leshem, 1998; Ben-Eliezer, 1999; Kimmerling,
2001; Shafir and Peled, 2002).
Around this time, 850,000 Russians, citizens of the former Soviet Union, not
all of them Jews, immigrated to Israel. These newcomers were incorporated by
a new method of ‘direct absorption’, in which the immigrant was immediately
free to choose his or her place of residence and occupation, in keeping with
market demands. The means for this method was dubbed the ‘absorption
basket’, whereby the immigrant was given a number of grants and a sum of
money instead of services, and thus could make decisions on his or her own
(Adler, 1997; Zaban, 1997). The new method, which was introduced in the late
1980s and early 1990s, partially simplified the bureaucratic maze that existed
previously. It reflected a dramatic change in absorption policy; but it was not
applied to immigrants from Ethiopia, who comprised 5 per cent of the total
number of immigrants to Israel. Unlike most of the immigrants from the former
USSR, Ethiopians were considered an ‘immigration of distress’ (aliyat metsuka)
that required bureaucratic attention before beginning a ‘normal way of life’.
Was such a perception the first sign of impending racism?
Racism is a way of treating people and determining their destiny on the
grounds of appearance, phenotypical differences, and ‘typical’ characteristics,
be they real or imagined. After World War II, arguments about biological
superiority were no longer popular. Since the 1960s and 1970s, with the vast
immigration to Europe from the ‘Third World’, cultural claims have substituted
for biological ones. A new form of racism, less overt and more indirect, has
emerged, emphasising cultural superiority and social capability and serving as
a means to ‘bleach’ biological claims (Essed, 1991, p. 29; Vasta and Castles,
1996, pp. 27–31). As Balibar (1991) suggests, cultural racism does not deny
differences between racial, ethnic or religious groups. Rather, it posits the
‘insurmountability of cultural differences’ (Balibar, 1991, p. 31). Such racism
encourages the preservation of these differences, while it warns against any
attempt to assimilate those who are different in their appearance, style of life,
 Becoming a Black Jew 249

and perception of reality, and who may thus threaten the unity and integrity
of the whole nation. The new racism may serve to replace the old, but it may
also supplement it. Analytically, the first type of racism considers the ‘other’ an
inferior being, whose place is on the lower scale of society; whereas the second
type considers the ‘other’ fundamentally different, an invader who must be
kept at a distance and who has no place in society. An important characteristic
of the so-called ‘new racism’, ‘cultural racism’ or ‘differential racism’ is the fact
that it essentialises ethnicity and religion, and traps people in supposedly
immutable reference categories, as if they are incapable of adapting to a new
reality or changing their identity. By these means cultural racism treats the
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‘other culture’ as a threat that might contaminate the dominant culture and its
internal coherence. Such a view is clearly based on the assumption that certain
groups are the genuine carriers of the national culture and the exclusive heirs
of their history while others are potential slayers of its ‘purity’. To avoid any
mixing of cultures the new immigrants are usually conceived by the racists as
those meriting clear-cut separation, detachment, removal, and in extreme cases,
even extinction (Balibar, 1991; Taguieff, 1999).
The new type of racism evolved in Europe with the vast immigration from
the ‘Third World’ noted above and the relative decline in the centrality of the
nation-state. At the beginning of the 1990s Israel faced the same situation with
the influx of huge waves of immigration from the former USSR and Ethiopia.
In many respects, the immigrants contributed much to the transition to a
post-hegemonic era in Israel, as most of them were motivated by economic
rather than ideological incentives, and were part of a post-Cold War global
trend of migration from ‘weak’ to ‘stronger’ areas in the world (Shuval and
Leshem, 1998; Anteby, 1999).
At first the Russians suffered discrimination and even racism (Leshem,
1994). Rapidly, however, they succeeded in minimising that effect, without
giving up their unique culture. Even the fact that many of them (approximately
30 per cent) were not Jews did not prevent their integration in the new country.
One of the many reasons cited for this is that Israeli nation-state wanted
Russians to counterbalance politically, culturally and demographically the
Palestinian population (Lustick, 1999). With the advent of the Russian immi-
grants, many hoped that Israel would become a more pluralist and democratic
society. However, as Kimmerling (1998) rightly notes, the new situation in
Israel reflected more a multiplicity of cultures than a multicultural democracy.
This was most clearly evinced by the attitude toward the Ethiopians, who
arrived in Israel at the same time. In the following sections, I examine the
modes by which cultural racism developed against the young generation of
Ethiopian Jews, and their reactions to it.
The work is based on in-depth interviews that were conducted with
students of Ethiopian descent at the University of Haifa in the north of Israel.
Interviews were also held in a youth club in southern Israel, where most
participants were teenagers of Ethiopian origin.2 Supplementary materials are
daily and weekly newspapers and journals (some written by and for Ethiopi-
ans) that deal extensively with the Ethiopians’ destitution and the proposed
solutions. The article is divided into three sections: the first describes the
 250 Uri Ben-Eliezer

various mechanisms whereby cultural racism relegated Ethiopian Jews to an

inferior and marginal status within Israeli society. The second section presents
the way the frustration and affront felt by the young generation of immigrants
from Ethiopia erupted in the ‘blood affair’, and the third and final section
considers the modes of resistance that the youth have developed. These include
the construction of a new identity and deep involvement in a process of
identity politics.

The ‘Problem’ Begins with Faitlovitch

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Or perhaps even with his teacher, Joseph Halevy, who was the first Western
Jew to make contact with the Falashas, visiting their villages between 1867 and
1868. Both Halevy and Faitlovitch took some Falasha youths with them back to
France, with the idea that they would undergo European acculturation and
then be sent back to their native land (Halevy, 1994; Trevisan Semi, 1999). Here
was the beginning of a cultural colonialist process, with a classic ‘domesticating
the savage’ motif, in which the Beta Israel became Ethiopian Jews. Since then
they have gradually adopted European normative Judaism — of which they
had known nothing — including the Talmudic-Rabbinic traditions and the oral
law (Kaplan and Rosen, 1994).
This process continued in the early 1950s, when Jewish institutions, notably
the Jewish Agency and the State of Israel, ‘enlightened’ the Beta Israel with
new truths. These included dichotomising narratives on the difference between
the highly developed West and backward Africa, and on the perennial rivalry
between Judaism and Christianity; until then these religions had been per-
ceived by the Beta Israel as existing along a continuum, with many mutual
influences (Pankhurst, 1995). Gradually, through delegates that were brought
to Israel, and Jewish envoys that were sent to Ethiopia, Beta Israel were taught
about Western Jewish festivals, ceremonies and manners, Hebrew as a lan-
guage of prayer, the importance of the state of Israel as a Jewish state, wearing
a skullcap, and so forth (Kaplan, 1995).
The project of cultural colonialism was brought to light with the first mass
influx of Ethiopian Jews into Israel in the mid 1980s. The Israelis welcomed the
newcomers with a deluge of affection and gifts ranging from clothing to
candies. Israelis were intrigued by their different colour and facial features,
were amazed at their leanness (which was ascribed to their race more than to
the difficult conditions that had accompanied their immigration), their special
beauty, and their inner quiet. And as in any other fairy tale, in this one too the
Israelis were delighted with the ‘happy ending’: the arrival of the Ethiopian
Jews in the ‘promised land’.
This tremendous enthusiasm and outpouring of benevolence should have
been a warning sign. After all, a discriminatory attitude toward newcomers
often perceives them as exotic, wild, or primitive, as a problem, or as victims
who require salvation. Such a paternalistic outlook was part of the Israeli
perspective as well; moreover, it went hand in hand with the notion that all the
Ethiopian Jews belonged to one generalised category only. The inability, or
unwillingness, of veteran Israelis to see the diversity that existed among these
 Becoming a Black Jew 251

immigrants was a harbinger of future racism (on a similar phenomenon in

Australia, see Vasta and Castles, 1996, p. 22).
Unlike Russian immigrants, Ethiopians were exposed immediately to the
mercilessness of the process of assimilation. It started right at the airport,
where they encountered a Jewish Agency employee who replaced their
Ethiopian names with new Israeli-Jewish ones. Those who during the twentieth
century adopted many of the customs of Western Jewry were now about to
become ‘Israelis’.3
Changing names was not enough. The transition to Israel was traumatic for
these immigrants, many of whom had never seen a car, could neither read nor
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write, and were unfamiliar with a flush toilet. Many of the interviewees noted
that the first ‘white’ men they had ever seen were the Jewish Agency officials
in the camps in Sudan. Some said that they had never heard of white Jews
before arriving in Israel. Such a starting point, which immediately contrasted
with Israeli society’s espoused ethos of rationalism and Western self-denomina-
tion, led to intense state management.
Herzog (1999) describes how the absorption centres to which the Ethiopian
immigrants were sent created and then heightened their dependence on state
officials. The absorption centre produced a bifurcated world, the part within
and the part without, where the officials who mediated between the two
possessed great power in determining the immigrant’s every step. The fact that
many Ethiopian immigrants remained in the absorption centres for long
periods of time (some of them for years) created a culture of dependence in
which the immigrant, now an Israeli citizen, lost most of his or her freedom.
Dependence was created very rapidly within the educational system as
well. Driven by the notion of ‘weak populations’ on the one hand, and
assimilation on the other, the state separated the youngsters from their parents
and families and sent them to boarding schools. The idea was to assimilate
them to Israeli values and culture and to distance them from the ‘generation of
the desert’, their illiterate parents. Beyond the emotional harm it inflicted, this
policy severed the youngsters from their past, their community, traditions,
customs, and even from their language. The educational system exposed most
Ethiopian children to the disciplinary aspects of an encompassing institution,
and, moreover, a religious one. In the following years no fewer than 90 per cent
of Ethiopian children and adolescents were raised in these institutions. The
religious institutions were based on one particular definition of Israeliness, a
combination of nationalism and religion, which represents the way of life of
only 15 per cent of the entire Jewish population. It was more like a process of
domination. Promises made by the establishment that the young Ethiopians
would study with other Israelis were not fulfilled. In some institutions 70 per
cent of the students were of Ethiopian origin. Warnings about de facto segre-
gation, however, went unheeded (Holt, 1995; Amir, 1997; Weil, 1997).
A politics of spatial separation developed as well in relation to the Ethiopi-
ans; segregation in housing was the unintended consequence of the authorities’
policy. The state introduced a mortgage system that allowed the newcomers to
buy apartments for residence. But the only apartments they could buy with the
money they received were located on the outskirts of the cities, in poor,
 252 Uri Ben-Eliezer

dilapidated and neglected neighbourhoods. Moreover, due to anti-immigrant

sentiment and objections to the government’s ‘open door’ immigration policy,
the Ethiopians became isolated and alienated from their surroundings (Leshem,
1994).
Gilroy (1989, p. 69) notes that any assimilation into a national structure
places the immigrant in a problematic situation regarding concepts such as
nation, patriotism, or historical memory. These ideas effectively leave the
newcomer outside the normative boundaries. Ethiopian immigrants to Israel
had not experienced the Holocaust of European Jews, their forefathers had not
suffered pogroms in Russia, nor had their sons fought in Israel’s War of
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Independence in 1948. In the national narrative, ‘those who were there’

established their national identity by representations that excluded the others,
while the newcomers’ experiences, for example, their anguished journey to
Israel, interested no one but themselves.4
This tendency was most prevalent, and proved utterly devastating, in the
domain of religion. Although the Ethiopians were allowed to immigrate to
Israel following their definition as Jews by one of the most important Israeli
rabbis, Ovadia Yosef, problems with the Chief Rabbinate soon arose, indicating
a culturally racist attitude towards the newcomers from Ethiopia. Jewish
religion in Israel is divided into several sections. One is the Ashkenazi
ultra-orthodoxy, the most highly esteemed group in religious Judaism and
bearing the highest authority in religious matters; it does not recognise the
Ethiopians as Jews. Another sector is the Mizrahi ultra-orthodoxy, which does
recognise them as Jews. A third sector, the national-religious group, regards
them as a human resource that can be used politically. It has therefore invested
much in the future of Ethiopian youth through its educational institutions.5 The
latter two religious groupings, however, have less influence on religious
matters than the Ashkenazi ultra-orthodoxy, which, among other things, con-
trols the Rabbinic institutions and has a monopoly on crucial questions, such
as ‘who is a Jew’. Questioning the Jewishness of the Ethiopian immigrants, on
their arrival the Rabbinate demanded their ritual immersion and totally re-
jected the authority of the kes, the respected religious leaders of the Ethiopian
Jewish community.
The Ethiopians refused to undergo the simple immersion ceremony, which
to an outside observer may seem puzzling. The insistence on immersion,
however, was traumatic to them. For centuries they preserved their Jewishness
in difficult conditions of isolation and persecution. It was only on arrival in
their ancestral land that other Jews cast doubt on their identity and beliefs.
Moreover, having lived for centuries in a traditional society characterised by
profound ethnic cleavages, they perceived their religion through an ethnic
prism. The demand for symbolic immersion, and the denial of the important
role of their respected religious leaders, who in the unwritten culture of
Ethiopia determined who was a Jew and who was not according to genealogy,
threatened to undermine the entire basis of their ethnic identity as Jews, and
questioned — although this was unspoken — their legitimate right to be in
Israel according to the Law of Return (Kaplan, 1988; Kaplan and Rosen, 1994,
pp. 73–74; Salomon, 1994; Weil, 1997).
 Becoming a Black Jew 253

As the immigrants from Russia — Jews and non-Jews — did not collectively
have to undergo stringent religious tests in order to ‘buy’ their right to live in
Israel, it gradually became clear to the Ethiopian Jews that the Israelis did not
want to integrate them but to exclude them, and that they were being
discriminated against due to their skin-colour and the perception that ‘they are
different’, or that they ‘do not look like Jews’.6 Ethiopians responded to the
Chief Rabbinate’s attitude towards them with demonstrations and a month-
long strike in the fall of 1985 in Jerusalem. The demonstrations and the long
strike did not gain the support of most Israelis, who saw it as a religious
controversy only (Kaplan, 1985). For Ethiopian Jews it was another sign of
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Israeli support for separation. This interpretation was accurate, as the chief
rabbis, regarding themselves as the gate-keepers of a supposedly integrative
culture, took a stand against those who they believed might threaten (or
‘contaminate’) the particularity (or the ‘purity’) of a Jewish religious-national
state.7 Thus, the attitude of religious institutions towards Ethiopian Jews was
fundamentally racist. In fact, throughout the 1990s, segregation and separation
of Ethiopian Jews became apparent in various fields, such as education,
housing, employment, marriage, and religion. It was just a matter of time
before the situation would explode.

All That Was Missing Was a Cause

Which appeared on 24 January 1996, when a newspaper report stated that for
the past 12 years the Blood Bank had not been using the blood donations of
Ethiopian Israelis for medical purposes because of its possible contamination
by the HIV virus.8 This scoop generated protests of a sort rarely seen in Israel.
Some 10,000 Ethiopian immigrants from all over the country held a protest
outside the Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem. It was a moment of truth,
when individual feelings of frustration and discrimination assembled and
assumed a collective name and meaning. The violent clash went on for hours,
and dozens of policemen and demonstrators were injured. The crowd carried
placards that exposed a newly-broached issue within Israeli discourse, that of
racism: ‘We are black but our blood is red’ and ‘We are Jews like you: stop the
racist apartheid’. A 17-year-old girl who went to Jerusalem for the demon-
stration from the Haifa area, where she attended a boarding school, said, ‘I
came to protest against what is being done to the blacks because of the color
of their skin. I am ashamed of my nation, of the white Jewish nation’.9 The
Chief of the Jerusalem District Police, Aryeh Amit, labelled the demonstrators
‘young savages’. Indeed, the demonstrators did not perform the caricature of
the passive, ‘quiet boy savage’. ‘They think they know better than we do what’s
good for us’, one of the participants said, summing up the frustration of people
who were treated as if they were unable to solve their problems on their own.10
To understand the full significance of the Ethiopian outburst, consider first
that the chief criterion for citizenship in Israel is ius sanguinis, so the blood bank
policy questions whether Ethiopians are ‘full citizens’. Second, in Ethiopia
blood was a very important symbol in the Jewish belief, as it distinguished
Jews from Christians in three areas: ritual slaughter of animals, the dietary
 254 Uri Ben-Eliezer

laws, and the perception of women in their menstrual period. In Ethiopian

eyes, discarding blood taken from them was a dreadful act of exclusion from
nation and religion alike (Salomon, 1997; Seeman, 1999).
The Blood affair exposed the way fear can lead to stigmatisation, separation,
and the creation of ‘others’. The huge demonstration, however, did not im-
prove matters. The blood bank managers did not even try to resolve the issue
in a non-binary manner. On the contrary, the Ministry of Health warned that
an Ethiopian blood donor was 34 times more likely to be an HIV carrier than
anyone else, and that the ministry would continue with its policy of not
making use of blood taken from Ethiopians, as they constituted an ‘at-risk
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group’.11 By invoking such terms and by evoking such fears, typical of what
Beck (1992) has termed ‘risk society’, and by using medical terms and suppos-
edly scientific arguments and statistics, state officials concealed the racist
elements embedded in the policy of the blood bank, placing all Ethiopians in
generalised categories and treating them all as one. ‘You’ve all got AIDS’, said
one Israeli to a youngster of Ethiopian descent in a quarrel over a deckchair on
the beach at Haifa, exemplifying the practical consequences of state policy.12
To defend his office, a spokesman for the Health Ministry noted that there
were other at-risk groups as well: homosexuals, drug addicts, people with
illnesses, people with tattoos, etc. The comparisons, however, only underscored
the bureaucrats’ insensitivity and the way they were using dichotomous racist
categories for the purposes of domination, precisely in a post-hegemonic era
when everyone was supposed to be judged as an individual. The Ethiopians,
however, did not yield. ‘Why weren’t the Russian immigrants singled out as an
at-risk group?’, they wanted to know. ‘Why wasn’t the Russians’ blood thrown
out?’ The questions of course were rhetorical. Unlike the Ethiopians, the
Russians were judged individually, and enjoyed a completely different status
in the eyes of the establishment.
Cultural racism appears quite often in the form of definition of an immi-
grant group in terms of disease and fear of contamination (Comaroff, 1993). Dr
Ram Yishai, chairman of the Society of Medical Ethics, illustrated the point by
explaining that Ethiopians constituted an at-risk group because single
Ethiopian women did not abstain from random sexual contact. Elaborating, the
learned physician stated that Ethiopian women were not afraid of AIDS and
that if infected, they displayed no anger at the man responsible. A litany of
familiar terms was invoked again in order to display the ‘others’ as ignorant,
irresponsible, and having a different conception of sex and sexual permissive-
ness that differed from the Israeli norm.13
The Ethiopians’ anger was also the result of not being given information
about the Health Ministry’s policy and not being granted any voice in institu-
tional decisions that concerned them. Israelis perceived the black person as a
child, as too primitive or immature to be told the truth and to cope with it.
Worse still, the policy exposed a central mechanism of cultural racism, which
is related to knowledge and ignorance. Israelis were surprised by the Ethiopi-
ans’ severe reaction to the blood bank policy, as they knew nothing, and did
not want to know anything, about the Ethiopians’ traditions and heritage. A
racist would not allow knowledge to change his or her image about the ‘other’,
 Becoming a Black Jew 255

and would not let ‘facts’ about the other’s history destroy the fantasy he or she
created.
As Gilroy (1989) notes, regarding the other in essentialist terms was one of
the major characteristics of racism in England. Although blacks came from
many different countries and cultures, they were generalised into one category
and thus were deprived of any expression of their diverse identities. The same
fate befell the Jews from Ethiopia. Despite sociohistorical differences (for
example, between those from Gondar and those from Tigrai), the Israeli public
and the establishment adopted a binary approach.14 This entails defining and
cataloguing the other, rendering him or her marginal. Reality is thereby
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distorted, compressed into only two possibilities. The freedoms of those whose
outlook or status is incongruent with the binary, essentialist definition are thus
concealed, restricted, or repressed.
The Blood affair was a moment of truth for the Ethiopians and a crucial
landmark in the process of their becoming an ethnic group within the Israeli
society. The resistance they waged showed that they would not discard entirely
their traditions and their past. ‘Blood is the soul’, I was told by an interviewee
who tried to explain the cause of the violent outburst in the Blood affair, ‘and
the Israelis have shown us what they think of our blood’, she repeated. Indeed,
it was the young generation that started realising from the Blood affair onward
that Israeli Ethiopians were being exposed to a racism based on separation and
differentiation. This understanding became more substantial as Ethiopians
were exposed to racism on a daily basis within Israeli society. Young people
bore the brunt of this discrimination. Their parents usually stayed at home (due
in large part to a 70 per cent rate of unemployment) and attempted to become
Israelis at any price. Entering mixed populations in some schools, in the army,
and in the labour market, the younger generation had to face what can be
termed ‘racism in everyday life’, which, according to Eder (1991) and Donald
and Rattansi (1992), is an ever changing nexus of representations, discourse,
and power.
At times other Israelis did not want to sit next to them on a bus; they did
not receive an equal opportunity in the job market when prospective employ-
ers discovered that they were ‘black’; classrooms and schools emptied out
when young Ethiopians entered them; and private kindergartens refused to
accept Ethiopian toddlers because they were ‘different’ (The Israeli Bulletin for
Children’s Rights, 3 March 1993; Halper, 1985). The more post-hegemonic Israeli
society perceived differences among its members, the more extensive became
the fear of amalgamation. The principal of a religious elementary school in the
city of Hadera refused to register a boy of Ethiopian descent for first grade,
arguing that ‘I have too many Ethiopians in my school’.15 In the town of Yavne,
it became clear how a non-formal apartheid could exist between the students
of Ethiopian descent and the others, as two separated schools existed in the
same building and under the same management. In one of them, 65 per cent
of the 170 students were of Ethiopian origin, whereas in the other, only three
of the 94 students were of Ethiopian descent. Asked for her opinion about the
segregation that existed in her school, one student said, ‘I don’t like their skin.
I don’t like skin of blacks. If I am with them, I might become black myself’.16
 256 Uri Ben-Eliezer

In another southern town a 17-year-old Ethiopian young man with no police

record was brutally beaten by two policemen. One of them said, as he inflicted
the blows, ‘We’ll send you back where you came from. You Ethiopians
contribute nothing to the state’.17 This is a classic indication of how racial
difference can be the basis of brutal exclusion.
In Yorkshire, England, parents took their children out of a school, arguing
that most children enrolled there were of Asiatic origin. They claimed that they
only wanted their kids to acquire the British tradition and values (Donald and
Rattansi, 1992, pp. 2–3). Likewise in Israel, parents who removed their children
from schools populated with students of Ethiopian descent denied the accu-
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sation that they were racists and invoked a well-worn pretext. ‘It’s only a
matter of cultural differences, we have nothing against blacks’, they told a
young Ethiopian student, an activist in an association for equality in the
education system.18
Everyday life exposed the colour barrier and brought to the surface racist
tendencies among Jews in Israel (on segregation in general, see Massey and
Denton, 1993; McDaniel, 1995). It was the young generation of Ethiopian Jews,
however, who drew the clearest conclusions. In a certain sense, the young
Ethiopians constituted a sociological generation. In keeping with the well-
known term of Mannheim (1972), this means that their distinctive social
location enabled them to interpret reality differently from others, and to act on
the basis of that interpretation. Given the character of Israeli society, which was
in a process of transformation, and realising the price they have paid for the
wish to be Israelis ‘like anybody else’, young Ethiopians began struggling
against racism in their own way.

An Israeli, but not in the ‘Usual’ Sense

A constructivist perspective for understanding racism does not assume the
existence of racially differentiated groups; rather, it traces the social and
political processes that bring about their crystallisation. Such a process is often
based on an ongoing dialogue and a constant conflict around identity forma-
tion (Nash, 2000, pp. 37–38). Indeed, the response of the young generation of
Ethiopian Jews to racism touched on questions such as ‘who are we?’ and
‘what is our place in Israeli society?’
Since the last quarter of the twentieth century, identity has become quite
fashionable as a tool for understanding the social fabric (Rutherford, 1990; Hall,
1996; Cerulo, 1997). Its importance lies in understanding not only immigrant
societies but any society that is structurally fragmented and culturally pluralis-
tic. In its constructivist form, the focus on identity intensified in the so-called
late modern or postmodern era. It represents a concept of ‘we-ness’, of shared,
mutual feelings between people, which are not stable, but always amenable to
social negotiation and conflict. In fact, the term highlights the idea that many
of the struggles being fomented today by various groups are not merely
class-based. Many of the themes they invoke deal with culture, dignity, rights,
discrimination, and recognition, which are directly or indirectly related to
identity and to identity politics (e.g. Larana et al., 1994). In Melucci’s (1996)
 Becoming a Black Jew 257

terminology, those who create new identities seek not only the freedom to have
(a phenomenon characteristic of the modern era) but also the freedom to be.
Individuals and groups construct identities in part as an attempt to struggle
against hegemonic social definitions that have located them on the margins.
Often they attain solidarity and pride by the symbolic development of a new
identity; sometimes they use it as a means of protest and as an instrument for
collective action aimed at changing social conditions.
The postmodern situation has created conditions for identity formation and
identity politics even in Israel. The relative weakness of the Israeli nation-state
and its party system in the late 1980s and early 1990s brought about the
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emergence of new groups and associations that were involved in politics. These
groups and associations, which in their style and actions resembled the new
social movements in Europe, focused on individual rights and identities, and
on local and ecological environments. A wave of public participation and
protest demonstrated the change Israel has undergone. In this regard, the
protest held by the young generation of Ethiopians was part of the new
political culture that reflected disillusionment with the Statist, monolithic,
Zionist ideology (Ben-Eliezer, 1999; Peled and Ophir, 2001; Ram, 2003).
Such disillusionment could be seen in the story of Mula Blai, the third
Ethiopian since 1997 who committed suicide during his military service in the
IDF (Israel Defence Forces). While serving as a cook at an army base, he was
ordered by the base’s doctor to throw out the food in the kitchen. Mula was
deeply offended. He ‘kept his insult in his gut’, as the Ethiopians say, until
finally he took a rifle and shot himself. ‘I am not angry at him’, his 17-year-old
sister said, ‘because they were the ones who killed him, the army’. Mula had
been a good student in high school and wanted to study journalism after his
army service. He was constantly called kushi (‘nigger’) in the army, but he
laughed and shrugged it off. But the doctor was an officer, and Mula was
deeply hurt by the lack of trust and understanding expressed by a person of
rank, so he committed suicide (Hair [weekly], 9 May 1997).
Rumours about suicides of Ethiopians in the army were already circulating
at the time of the Blood affair. The chairman of the committee of Ethiopian
immigrants claimed that twenty Ethiopians had committed suicide in the past
few years. The army spokesmen said that the figure was far lower. The main
point, however, is not the exact number, but the sociological fact of the
rumours themselves testifying to a change in the Ethiopians’ attitudes. At first,
the young people wanted nothing more than to excel in the IDF, to do combat
duty, preferably in one of the elite units. Excellence in the army was perceived
as a rite of passage that would lead, so they hoped, to acceptance, to being an
Israeli ‘like anybody else’, if not to ‘success’ within the Israeli society according
to its basic values (Borkov, 1994). Gradually, however, they realised that army
service, far from resolving their problems, might aggravate them instead.
In the latter half of the 1990s, there was a steep decline in the motivation of
Ethiopian youngsters to serve and excel in the IDF. When asked about that,
many interviewees indicated that within the Israeli army they were exposed to
racism on a daily basis. Others said that the combat soldiers of Ethiopian
descent discovered after being demobilised that they could not translate their
 258 Uri Ben-Eliezer

military service into upward social mobility, and that many of them could not
even make a living afterwards (see also Amir et al., 1997, pp. 283–84). The idea
that military service is ‘a waste of time’ spread like wildfire, being conveyed by
veteran soldiers to their younger brothers, neighbours, or friends; this notion
has become a truism among many youngsters of Ethiopian descent throughout
Israel.
The extreme acts of suicide and the decline in the motivation of young
Ethiopian immigrants to perform military service attested not only to tensions
and discriminations within the Israel Defence Forces but also to what James C.
Scott (1985) calls ‘everyday forms of resistance’. In every disadvantaged group,
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he writes, there are ‘hidden transcripts’ that represent ‘criticism which is

typically expressed openly — albeit in disguised forms’ (in regards to
Ethiopian Jews, see Kaplan, 1999). The means of protest chosen by the
Ethiopian youngsters probably reflected their understanding that no matter
what they did, they would always be regarded as different, even as strangers.
Accordingly, another collective behaviour that could be associated with
resistance was that of crime. Official data suggested a rising crime rate among
young Ethiopians in the late 1990s, by which time 10 per cent of all Ethiopian
youth had a police record (Fishbein, 1998). This may in part reflect racially
disparate law enforcement practices. However, Israeli scholars who dealt with
the high crime rate described it in terms such as alienation, deviance, and
pathology. Israeli social welfare agencies, also appalled by this reported trend,
presented it as an identity crisis that existed among young Ethiopians (e.g.
Shabtay, 2001, p. 16). On the contrary, crime commission can be construed as
a form of criticism and an outcry against a racist society. Those involved in the
crimes (mostly thefts), perhaps in addition to acting out of economic necessity,
were looking for meaning and for a sense of community (indeed, most crimes
were committed by groups). They chose to protest in this way against the
society that had depicted them and other Ethiopians as inferior, passive, and
dependent. It was also a kind of defiance against the stereotypical, racist view
of Ethiopians as modest, quiet and ‘nice’ people.
Some Ethiopian youngsters aged 16 to 18 seemed to suggest that they were
rebelling against the image that had been foisted onto them. Asked how they
reacted to being called kushi (black), a term that connotes a slave in their
traditional culture, they replied unequivocally that whereas in the past they
had been offended and backed off, now they would lash out at anyone who
used the term and ‘let him have it’, in the words of one interviewee.19
Everyday resistance is the weapon of the weak, Scott notes, but he points
out that precisely because of their hidden, indirect character, these practices of
protest can become influential. Did they become influential in the case of
Ethiopian Jews? Gradually, it became clear that their subversive practices were
accompanied by an attempt to construct a new identity that would challenge
the binary structure while exploiting its widening cracks. The identity politics
practised by young Israeli Ethiopians involved deconstructing the ‘one’ Israeli
identity, which was already being gnawed at on all sides, exposing its problem-
atic nature, and reconstructing it with new meanings. In Gilroy’s (1993, p. 53)
terms, this is a process of deconstruction and contextualisation. Fundamentally,
 Becoming a Black Jew 259

though, since the Blood affair, Israeliness for young Ethiopians has gradually
become an identity of which one element is blackness. ‘The passage of time will
make no difference’, I was told by one interviewee, who had a clear grasp of
the reality in which she lived. ‘In Ethiopia we were Jews, here we are blacks’,
she said.
Africa, observes Stuart Hall (1990), is often depicted as being a mother for
all Africans. The effect is to bestow an imagined cohesiveness and shared
identity on Africans’ experience of dispersion and fragmentation, a feeling that
there exists a permanent ‘essence’ of the African, of the quintessential black
experience. However, Hall also points out that identity formation is a far more
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active process, in which those involved attempt to locate themselves in the

space of the present and adapt to changing reality. Indeed, blackness was not
the only distinguishing characteristic of the Ethiopian youngsters. In the
postmodern reality, and under global conditions, the process of constructing a
new identity intertwined similarity and differentiation. The young Ethiopians
could differ from other Israelis and identify with blacks in other countries, yet
they regarded themselves as Israelis and Jews as well. As a young student said,
‘I am first of all a Jew, then an Ethiopian, and finally an Israeli … In fact, I am
also an Israeli but different from these franjim’.20
Franji is the nickname Ethiopians apply to whites. Regarding the dominant
majority in such stereotypical, essentialist terms is often interpreted by the
dominant culture as a phenomenon of ‘anti-racist racism’ that exists among
minority groups (e.g. Back and Solomos 2000, pp. 59–62). Appellations like
franji are invoked to differentiate ‘us’ from ‘them’. Identity politics, expressed
through such words, largely becomes a politics of labels, of insularity. This is
the route that a number of young Ethiopians have embarked on, not because
they want to convince others about their status or importance within Israeli
society, but in order to enclose themselves at least partially within their world,
which they are constructing using what Rutherford (1990, pp. 9–27) calls ‘a
politics of difference’.
Thus, the Israeli experience of discrimination, exclusion, and cultural racism
has metaphorically sent the young generation back to Africa. It was in Israel
that Ethiopian Jews became black. In order to construct their identity, many of
the youngsters have begun to study spoken and written Amharic, a language
that they had almost forgotten while undergoing the drastic Israeli process of
‘re-socialisation’. They like Ethiopian music, both traditional and modern, with
its romantic themes, and they are also taking African names. As one student
explained, ‘A few of us friends got together and decided to go back to our
original names. Why weren’t the Russians made to change their names when
they came to Israel?’
In the colour hierarchy that existed in Ethiopia, the Beta Israel saw them-
selves as red-skinned (Salomon, 1997). However, as the offspring of migrants
in search of their identity they now consider themselves black-skinned. Hence-
forth they will carry with them the physical and the cultural distinction of
blackness and will turn it from shame to pride (on this process, see Anteby,
1999; Shabtai, 2001). Music is a central element in this development, as it makes
it possible to create an imagined reality. The venues where ‘black’ music is
 260 Uri Ben-Eliezer

played, particularly the clubs, are places that spawn an alternative culture (see,
in general, Appiah and Gates, 1995). One long-standing important location is
the Soweto Club in Tel Aviv, where one sees boys in body-hugging white shirts
and oversized trousers; the girls, wearing low-cut white pants revealing their
midriffs and bedecked with jewellery, hang around with the boys and smoke.
Whatever is prohibited at home or in the boarding school goes here. Some of
the boys wear their hair in the intricately curled African style, and some of the
girls ‘attach’ artificial hair to their head. Sexuality is externalised in body
movements. Speak to them and they will tell you that there is nothing for them
in a country of whites; that they want to be back in Ethiopia; that they will not
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enlist in the army because they don’t feel like Israelis, and because all Israelis
are racists. On the following day, in a different location, they will talk entirely
differently.
The content of the music that young Ethiopians are fond of in their clubs is
above all black music of political protest with social messages of equality,
brotherhood, and peace. Usually, they dance to reggae or rap. The fact that
Rastafarianism originated in Jamaica in 1930, after the coronation of Haile
Selassie (who was hailed as the ‘Lion of Judah’) as Emperor of Ethiopia also
helps explain why young Ethiopian Israelis are attracted to this music (Shabtai,
2001). The youngsters want to visit Ethiopia, but the Africa they envisage is not
what they knew as children; it is an imagined Africa, one of rhythm, of special
foods, of customs, of suffering, and of hope. An Africa that is both present and
vanished; but whatever the case, an Africa of blacks only.
Since the late 1990s, a number of black Jews living in Israel have defined
themselves as part of the African diaspora. Its cultural practices draw their
inspiration largely from the politics and culture of black America, Jamaica, and
black Britain. Technological advances in communications bridge geographic
distance — consider MTV and the Internet. Cultural commodities such as CDs,
books, and magazines facilitate identification. People who in Ethiopia lived on
a motif of exile and longing for Zion (meaning Jerusalem) now live in Israel
with a sense of exile and a longing for Zion, which is of course Ethiopia, as in
the song by Bob Marley. True, they came to Israel of their own volition, and for
religious reasons, and from this point of view their history is different from
that of the descendants of slaves who were forcibly removed from Africa.
Nevertheless, the youngsters identify with the history of their ‘brothers’: their
suffering, severance from their past, the discrimination and the poverty they
endured, and their yearning for the lost paradise.21 They have no specific,
concrete political purpose for returning to Africa; nevertheless, the diaspora
element plays a crucial role in their identity formation.
The second generation of Ethiopian immigrants to Israel is engaged in a
new construction of Israeliness, of a type previously unknown. Their feelings
as Jews and their aspiration to be Israelis are both fused with an emphasis on
being black. Identity politics signifies an attempt to create a moral space and
live accordingly. Such an attempt goes hand in hand with the changes Israel
has undergone. Still, doubts remain concerning the status of the Ethiopian Jews
in Israel, and the potential of cultural politics and identity formation to solve
the problems they face in their new society.
 Becoming a Black Jew 261

Conclusion
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Israel underwent a transformation from a
highly mobilised and monolithic society, almost wholly organised around the
nation-state, into a post-hegemonic, heterogeneous, and highly divided society,
organised around neoliberal principles compatible with the process of globali-
sation. During that transformation, and in direct association with it, immi-
grants entered Israel, mainly from the former Soviet Union but also from
Ethiopia. The main argument of this paper is that during this transformation,
Israeli society directed a previously unknown form of cultural racism at the
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newcomers from Ethiopia. The young generation of Ethiopian Jews protested

against the discrimination and racism they faced. The Blood affair served as a
‘critical event’ that led not only to various types of protest activities among
them, but also to the expression of their blackness as a virtue.22
Still, the young members of the Ethiopian community have not forsaken
their Israeliness. In fact, they have developed a hybrid identity that meshes
Israeliness, Jewishness, and blackness. Have they succeeded in escaping their
marginalised status and in establishing their hybrid conception within Israeli
society? To what extent can identity politics reduce social gaps, minimise
discrimination, and bring about a more multicultural and equal society? These
questions go beyond the scope of this article, which is restricted to the cultural
racism and anti-racism that has appeared in contemporary Israel.
Gadi, whom we met at the beginning of the article, lives in the Central Bus
Station. It is a dynamic location where everything is in flux; a place of multiple
identities, of ephemerality, of options to glide into other worlds. Gadi’s life
(although not his occupation) may symbolise the identity of many of the
community’s young members. Their parents took them from remote mountain
villages in a vast land and thrust them headlong into a postmodern era.
Exposed to cultural racism, and struggling for their future, the youngsters
reveal their potential. Like Gadi, they can imaginatively visit Africa, but then
they are back, not only in the Israeli reality, but in its big city’s central bus
station as well.

Uri Ben-Eliezer may be contacted at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology,

University of Haifa, Mount Carmel, Haifa, 31905 Israel, uriben@soc.haifa.ac.il.

Notes
1. Daniel Waxman, Menilek, Black Jewish King. According to an Ethiopian
tradition, Menilek was the son of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba;
he stole the Holy Ark from Jerusalem and took it to Ethiopia.
2. Thirty-one students were interviewed in Haifa, most of them 18 to 24 years
old. Another 13 students between the ages of 15 and 18 were interviewed
in a city in southern Israel.
3. Only 3 of the 27 interviewees who immigrated to Israel from Ethiopia did
not receive a new name upon arrival in Israel. Seven others did not adopt
 262 Uri Ben-Eliezer

the name given to them but retained their Ethiopian name. Many resumed
their Ethiopian names only recently, when they were aged about
20 to 24.
4. Consider, for instance, the story of the monument in Jerusalem that the
Israeli government promised to build as a memorial to the thousands of
Ethiopian Jews who died in vain on their way to Israel. See, for example,
‘Our Death Deserves More Respect’, Yediot Naget, 3 July 1999, p. 3.
5. Involvement of political parties, especially religious parties, in newcomers
in general and in their education in particular has been a well-known
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phenomenon in the Israeli state since its establishment. See Hacohen, 1994.
6. As my interviewees reiterated repeatedly, this is the way many, if not most,
Israelis see them in face-to-face relations.
7. With the intervention of the politicians, the two sides eventually reached
an agreement, although not all the promises of the agreement were kept.
As Kaplan (1988) writes, at the official level, the Ethiopians’ status re-
mained unchanged.
8. Amira Segev, ‘Ministry of Health …’, HaAretz, 26 January 1996.
9. Sami Sokol, ‘Just after the Announcement’, HaAretz, 29 January 1996.
10. Eli Amir, ‘I am thoroughly Ashamed’, Yediot Acharonot, 29 January 1996;
Rali Saar, ‘A Price to the Newcomers’, HaAretz, 29 January 1996; Doron
Meiri, ‘Jerusalem seemed like …’, Yediot Acharonot, 29 January 1996.
11. ‘On Blood and Hypocrisy’, HaAretz, 26 January 1996.
12. An interview with David (2001).
13. Dr Ram Yishai, ‘A Different Perception of Sex and Death’, HaAretz, 31
January 1996.
14. On the vast differences between those who came from Gondar and those
who came from Tigrai, see Rosen (1987).
15. Tamar Trabelsi-Hadad, ‘Ethiopian Pupils? I have too many’, Yediot
Acharonot, 2 June 2002.
16. Tamar Trabelsi-Hadad, ‘Apartheid in the style of Yavne’, Yediot Acharonot,
11 October 2002.
17. ‘You Ethiopians Contribute Nothing’, Zman Darom, 21 June 2002. On the
complex relations between the Ethiopian community and the police in
Israel, see, for example, Yediot Naget (a bi-monthly journal published in
both Hebrew and Amaharic), 14 July 2002, p. 7.
18. The interview with the student activist was held in 2002 in Haifa. Like
many other interviewees he preferred to stay unidentified.
19. Interviews with young people aged 16–18 in one of the Southern City’s
Youth Centre, 2001.
20. ‘Franjim’, and sometimes ‘yellows’, are terms used for ‘whites’.
21. On the concept of diaspora, see Gilroy, 1993. Safran (1991, pp. 83–84)
defines diaspora according to six elements. Not all of them are applicable
in the narrative of the Ethiopian Jews living in Israel, which is why it is
probably better to speak about diasporic elements rather than the diaspora
definitively.
22. On the concept of ‘critical event’ see Das, 1995.
 Becoming a Black Jew 263

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