Some Israeli Jews are apparently more equal than others. The refusal by Ethiopian Israeli soldiers to report for reserve duty in the future is a drastic decision, coming after Israel’s top police chief suggested that Ethiopians were more responsible for crime than other Israelis. The suggestion by the police commissioner Roni Alsheich that it is natural to suspect Israelis of Ethiopian descent of crimes more than others hit a raw nerve among Ethiopian Israeli soldiers who say they are sick and tired of their state’s demand that they continue to honor a contract according to which they are citizens with obligations but not rights. As such, they say they will embark on a course of civil disobedience, the first of which will be their refusal to report for reserve duty.
The decision of the soldiers comes against a background of growing unrest among the Ethiopian community in Israel about police discrimination and brutality toward the minority group, with street protests taking place last year following a police attack on an Ethiopian soldier. The uncharacteristic violence and now outright rebellion by members of the Ethiopian community in Israel is a direct result of years of accumulated frustration against the Israeli state and especially the police. From the time of their arrival in Israel 40 years ago, when Israel first opened the country to Ethiopian Jews true to its Zionist dream of being a haven for Jews, there has been broad acknowledgement that Israel failed miserably in absorbing the Jewish Ethiopian community. From the outset, they faced appalling discrimination, racism and a lack of empathy from the Israeli establishment. Ethiopian Jews suffer from the highest poverty rate among Jews in Israel, and suffer much higher levels of police stop-search, arrests and incarceration. It was this cycle of discrimination, racism, poverty, hopelessness and higher levels of lawbreaking that led to clashes in the streets of Israeli cities between Ethiopian Israelis and the police.
Now the Israeli chief of police comes along with his assertion that immigrants are invariably more involved in crime than others, and that when a policeman encounters a suspect, “the policeman’s mind suspects him more than it would if he were someone else”.
Alsheich is taking a page straight out of America where some police automatically consider black men more dangerous. This is textbook racial profiling: young Ethiopian Israelis look like what Israeli police think bad guys look like, so they treat them differently. It's also dehumanizing and leads inevitably to abuse. Profiling makes sense if you believe that only people who look a certain way are capable of committing a certain crime. However, this is not only unfounded but also relies on bigoted thinking about who might and might not commit crimes. No one understands this more than the people living in communities where racial minorities are disproportionately targeted by police and arrested.
This is about more than just Ethiopian Israelis. It's also about Palestinians and the occupation - the overall system that makes death at the hands of Israeli police and soldiers disproportionately common.
Alsheich is in effect declaring that the whole Ethiopian Israeli community is a community of criminals. He is justifying to the police their systemic racism and violence toward Ethiopian Israelis. He makes it seem understandable why police officers deal violently with black people and Arabs. His remarks reinforce stereotypes that portray all young people from both communities as delinquents and criminals.
Israel must quickly and radically change its treatment of the 130,000 Ethiopian Israelis many of whom live on the periphery of society. The failure to fully and genuinely integrate minorities into the rest of Israeli society, whether Ethiopian or Arab, sends a message of exclusion.
