Fighting in defence of Israel’s Ethiopian Jews

VEARLIER THIS year, Netflix released the film telling the story of a covert Mossad mission to rescue Ethiopian Jews.

That and the subsequent airlifts in the 1990s — Operations Moses, Solomon and Joshua — seemed to embody the best of Zionism, gathering the exiles from wherever they may be and bringing them to the Jewish homeland.

Israel’s Ethiopians now comprise a community of around 150,000. But something else this year gave a different and altogether more troubling picture of their experience in Israel.

Four months ago demonstrations erupted after an 18-year-old Ethiopian youth Solomon Teka was shot dead by an off-duty policeman in a Haifa suburb. Even now, protests continue on a smaller scale.

“Unfortunately, it is not the first time we have had big problems,” said Fentahun Assefa-Dawit, executive director of Tebeka, the organisation founded in 2000 to campaign for justice and equality for Israeli Ethiopians. “Historically, there have been too many protests. Each protest has been a wake-up call for the government. I hope this is going to be the last.”

Mr Assefa-Dawit was in London at the weekend with Tebeka’s legal head Tomer Marsha to receive the UK branch of the New Israel Fund’s annual human rights award on behalf of the organisation. It was presented at a dinner attended by 450 people including the Labour grandee Dame Margaret Hodge, historian Sir Simon Schama and novelist Howard Jacobson.

The earliest upset for Ethiopian Israelis was the refusal of the Israeli rabbinate to accept them as Jewish without undergoing a symbolic conversion. While some went through conversion, Mr Asssefa-Dawit said, others felt, “we have been keeping the religion for thousands of years, we have suffered for it and now after we have fulfilled our dream of coming to Jerusalem and being together with out brothers and sisters, we are asked to convert.” Ethiopians took to the streets again when they discovered that blood they had donated was not being stored for medical use but had been discarded.

Then came an incident in 2015 when footage of Damas Pakada, an Ethiopian Israeli soldier, being beaten up by police emerged on social media. It highlighted one of the community’s main grievances, that they were victims of unfair targeting and heavy-handed treatment by the police.

Many young Ethiopians could “see themselves in that film”, he said. “It happens so often. It is not an isolated case, it is a phenomenon and it needs to be eradicated.” When it seemed the officer behind the assault would escape justice, Tebeka lobbied for him to be held to account.

Tebeka director Fentahun Assefa-Dawit

When the organisation was initially told that the authorities were not going to press charges because it would have “a chilling effect on other police officers”, it refused to accept the status quo. “We said we would like that chilling effect to be in place because it will create some deterrence,” Mr Assefa-Dawit said. “If that police officer is brought to justice, others will refrain from doing the same thing. Today that officer is in the court process.”