Israel’s Campaign to Combat Racism Against Ethiopian Jews

Most people are familiar with the Israeli-Arab conflict in the Middle East, but how much do you know about anti-Black racism in Israel?

It certainly exists, and in recent years the Ethiopian-Israeli community, along with non-Ethiopian Israeli supporters, have come together to protest the racism that Jews of Ethiopian descent have endured in the country for decades. As a result, the Israeli government embarked on a years-long initiative to expose and eradicate racist policies and practices throughout the government, its institutions, and the country at large.

In this edition of UpCurrent, I continue my series on racism abroad (following previous newsletters about racism in Germany and Spain and France and the United Kingdom) to share the experience of Black Jews—Israelis of Ethiopian descent—as well as what has come of the government’s recent efforts to address the challenges facing this group.

It starts with the assault of Damas Pakada.

The protests begin

On April 25, 2015, Damas Pakada, a 21-year-old Ethiopian-Israeli soldier, was walking his bicycle toward his home in Holon, south of Tel Aviv. A police officer was cordoning off the street and signaled to Pakada to turn around and leave the area. Pakada asked if he could cross the street instead, but the officer pushed Pakada’s bicycle to the ground, then shoved and hit him. A moment later, another officer arrived and both began to pummel Pakada, who eventually broke free and picked up a rock, initiating a standoff.

According to Pakada, one officer told him, “I can do whatever I want,” and “If I need to put a bullet in your head, I would do it.” The officers arrested Pakada for assault.

Later, security camera footage proved that Pakada had not attacked the police officers, but that they had indeed attacked him. Both officers were suspended and the police promised an investigation. “I feel terrible and humiliated,” Pakada told a television news reporter the next day. “This is a disgrace to the State of Israel. It’s because of [my] skin color,” he said.

The violent encounter seen on the video triggered widespread anger over institutional racism directed at the Ethiopian community. Five days later, on April 30, 2015, people gathered for a nine-hour protest in Jerusalem to highlight police brutality against Ethiopian-Israelis. During the protest, police used tear gas, stun grenades, and water hoses against the crowd, while protesters blocked streets and threw stones and bottles at police.

On May 3, 2015, another, larger protest was organized in Tel Aviv. It was initially peaceful, with both Ethiopian (i.e., “Black”) and non-Ethiopian (i.e., “White”) Israelis chanting and marching together. Later, however, the protest turned violent as roughly 3,000 people descended upon Rabin Square. Dozens of protesters and at least 23 police officers were injured.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called for the restoration of order and promised to look into the issues raised by members of the Ethiopian-Israeli community. His comments were supported by President Reuven Rivlina who said, “We have failed to see and listen enough. [...] Today’s battle is not against external enemies, but against invisibility and injustice.”

The media expressed skepticism. Journalist Nahum Barnea wrote that the racism experienced by the Ethiopian-Israeli community had been condoned, or even encouraged, by Israel’s politicians. “Israeli society is infected with racism,” he wrote. “It doesn’t start with Ethiopian immigrants and doesn’t end with them. There is racism of skin color, whose victims are foreign workers, Israelis of Ethiopian descent, and sometimes Israelis of Yemeni descent and Israeli Arabs [...] and it cannot be erased through budgetary decisions.”

An op-ed in The Jerusalem Post blamed the government directly: “Given the failures that have characterized efforts to integrate Ethiopian Jews into the Jewish state, the turmoil that ensued was as predictable as it was lamentable. [...] We brought Ethiopian Jews home, but now we must make them feel at home, for their sake as well as ours.”

The history of Ethiopian Jews in Israel

Ethiopian Jews had started “coming home,” so to speak, after 1950 when the newly established Israeli parliament passed the Law of Return, which gave all Jews of the diaspora, as well as their children and grandchildren, the right to relocate to Israel and automatically acquire citizenship on the basis of their Jewish identity. They called the relocation “making aliyah,” which many religious Jews described as a return to the Promised Land. They regarded it as the fulfillment of God’s biblical promise to the descendants of the Hebrew patriarchs, and it became a central tenet of Zionism.

From 1948 to 1953, nearly 750,000 Jews, mostly from Eastern and Western Europe, immigrated to Israel, more than doubling the country’s population. Though the origin and authenticity of each immigrant’s claim to Judaism was central to Israel’s offer of citizenship and acceptance into society, given the Law of Return, most were eagerly welcomed.

Jews in Ethiopia had long suffered religious persecution and many sought to emigrate to Israel. But within Israel, their authenticity as Jews had been questioned, in large measure because their worship customs were different. The matter seemed to be settled by 1975, after the Sephardic and Ashkenazic chief rabbis of Israel declared Ethiopian Jews to be “authentic,” descended from the Tribe of Dan, one of the Ten Lost Tribes.

Two years later, the Israeli government declared that the Law of Return applied to Ethiopian Jews, allowing their admittance immediately, and has since taken steps to increase Ethiopian immigration. Two Israeli rescue operations—Operation Moses in 1984 and Operation Solomon in 1991—were employed to relocate the Jewish community from Ethiopia to Israel.

By 1993, virtually every Jew in Ethiopia—45,000 in total—had been brought to Israel. Despite the Israeli government’s efforts and the religious declaration of Ethiopian Jews’ authenticity, from 1972 to 1984, the Chief Rabbinate ruled that since Ethiopians had been separated from other Jews for so long, they had to undergo a modified conversion ceremony consisting of ritual immersion (a bath of purification), a declaration accepting rabbinic law, and, in the case of men, a symbolic re-circumcision.

Because the ceremony had not been required of White Jews from Russia—or Jewish immigrants from any other country—many Ethiopians considered it to be racist and an insult to their piety and loyalty to Judaism through 2,000 years. From 1985 onward the Ethiopian community in Israel organized a resistance campaign, encouraging the community to stop cooperating with rabbis, calling the practices “forced conversion.”

In the meantime, the Israeli government formally facilitated the integration of Ethiopian immigrants into Israeli society by providing or arranging housing, primary and higher education, language and customs classes, and employment. The government recognized that the immigrants would need a planned process of socialization and re-education to ease their transition from a rural, agrarian environment into an urban, technologically advanced society. The process, called “absorption,” was overseen by the Ministry of Aliyah and Integration and carried out by social workers and educators.

Despite decades of effort, in 2016, the government noted that there were “significant gaps between [the Ethiopian-Israeli community] and the whole of Israeli society” and that the “voices that expressed great dissatisfaction with the way the state chose to reduce the gaps [had become] stronger.”

“A New Way” of government action

Two years prior, in 2014, the Israeli government adopted a resolution to form a committee to recommend new policies to promote the integration of Ethiopians into Israeli society. For the bulk of 2014, the Committee engaged in a planning process, designated “A New Way,” that involved consulting with a broad array of stakeholders, including politicians, public activists, academics, NGOs, and the general public—particularly Ethiopian-Israelis.

After the beating of Damas Pakada in March 2015, a variety of Ethiopian-Israeli participants, including veterans, clerics, politicians, and young people, demanded that the Committee take action to address the racist behavior of the police. Many made statements about the racism they had personally experienced from public institutions and made clear that they believed it went unrecognized by the government.

Perhaps surprisingly to some, Prime Minister Netanyahu called for the Committee’s work to be accelerated and ordered the responsibility for carrying out the resolution to be transferred to the Prime Minister’s Office, where he would personally chair the Ministerial Committee on the Integration of Israeli Citizens of Ethiopian Origin.

Activists worried that while the Committee’s approvals of the 2015 plans addressed important social needs such as education, employment, and housing, they left open the question of how to address the psychological indignity as well as physical and mental health consequences of experiencing systemic racism. “Governments tend to deal with social questions by addressing needs but not the pain,” Prawer said. So, they decided to create a committee to directly investigate the pain and indignity of institutional racism as well.

Establishing the Inter-ministerial Committee to Eradicate Racism Against Those of Ethiopian Descent

In February 2016, the government established the Inter-ministerial Committee Eradicate Racism Against Those of Ethiopian Descent and appointed Emi Palmor, then Director-General of the Ministry of Justice, as its chair.

When they started recruiting participants to join the Committee, they wanted to engage the most meaningful representatives of the Ethiopian-Israeli community, but due to widespread skepticism, they also knew they’d have to gain peoples’ trust for the Committee to be effective. They invited social activists as well as representatives from the Ministries, NGOs, and members of the public. One activist recruit, Avi Yalew, who was born in Ethiopia but raised in Israel after his family made aliyah, shared his difficulty in trusting the initiative. “It is a challenge to work with the government when you don’t trust your government,” he said. “And [we] don’t trust the government because they kill us.”

Committee Chair Emi Palmor also invited public participation, welcoming any member of the public to join the Committee—a highly atypical move for a government initiative. She was pleased to see 140 people sign on to aid the Committee’s work, with 64 people joining it fully.

The Committee’s guiding principles

Knowing the work was urgent, the government gave the Committee six months to produce a plan for creating a “turning point in the dimensions of the phenomenon [of racism] and its expression,” and set a timeline of three years for it to build the infrastructure to support new “norms of behavior.” They anticipated that additional tools would be developed in the future to more fully address the root of the problem.

The government asked the Committee to review existing legislation to find out what about racism and discrimination was written into law but not implemented and what had yet to be legislated. It required the Committee to focus its recommendations on three levels:

1. Increasing the availability of information about racist incidents, statements, and encounters (including online) directed against Ethiopians

2. Formulating remedies and procedures in cases of racism or discrimination, and ways to increase deterrence

3. Promoting measures to increase the positive imagery and presence of Ethiopians in the media and public sphere

The Committee agreed that policies and programs to address racist behavior should be deployed throughout all spheres of Israeli society, including the public and private sectors. They wanted to create a situation in which “wherever a citizen turned,” they would find a resource that would enable them to document, denounce, or address racist behavior. They planned to give special attention to programs addressing racism against males aged 12-30, as they were believed to be the primary targets of racism.

The Committee’s mandate was to focus on eradicating racism against Ethiopian Jews, however, many community representatives were strongly critical of that limitation. They believed politics to be the reason the government was focusing on racism against Ethiopian Jews and not all minority groups (e.g., Palestinians or Israeli Arabs). “The first thing I said when I came to the Committee,” said Avi Yalew, “is that the racism in Israel is not only against the Ethiopian community. Racism is racism, period. You can't say ‘I fight racism against the Ethiopian community’ but continue to be racist against Arab people [...] or refugees in Israel.”

Understanding racism against Ethiopian-Israelis

To better understand the concept of racism and determine the best courses of action to eradicate it, the Committee invited Professor Eran Halperin, then Dean of the School of Psychology at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, to describe how racism affected Ethiopian-Israelis. He argued that Ethiopians are perceived in Israeli society as “warm” people, modest and gentle. Although this is a seemingly “positive” stereotype, it actually allows Israeli society to further justify the discriminatory status quo in that the community itself is not interested in an uprising against the system or in the struggle for its so-called rights.

Along with the “positive” stereotypes, Halperin noted that Ethiopian-Israelis also have several negative stereotypes attributed to them due to their skin color: primitive, backward, weak, non-threatening, submissive, and incompetent. “These negative stereotypes,” he said, “reflect their dehumanization in Israeli society.”

The Committee also gathered data and conducted interviews, through which they uncovered several examples of institutionalized “well-meaning” racism. For instance, the Ministry of Education had established a policy that every Ethiopian-Israeli child be given extra tutoring in reading and writing upon entering first grade. Although the policy was established to help children of newly arrived immigrants, it was applied to every child born in Ethiopia or with Ethiopian parents—regardless of need. The daughter of one of the activists on the Committee was automatically enrolled in the tutoring program despite being assessed as gifted. “Just because her parents were born in Ethiopia, she was tagged as needing help,” Palmor said. “When I tell that story, people get angry that I call this institutional racism. But this is what it means. It is a policy based on race, even with the best intentions.”

Many of the examples of racism uncovered by the Committee, however, were not well-meaning—especially accounts of encounters with the police. In fact, the data revealed a pattern: police demanded that Ethiopian youth produce identification without justification at a much higher rate than other youth, ultimately resulting in increased arrests of Ethiopian-Israeli juveniles. In Israel, people receive a government ID at age 16. If you were asked for ID at a younger age, you had to get a parent to vouch for you by phone or in person. However, most of the minors of Ethiopian descent were from blue-collar families, where the parents were often working and the children couldn’t always get in touch with them. So, the policemen would take them to the police station.

In addition to arrests, the Committee found that Ethiopian-Israeli juveniles were prosecuted and imprisoned at a higher rate than the general population. Ethiopian Jews comprise about 1.6% of the Israeli population. However, in 2015…

• The percentage of indictments against Ethiopian-Israeli citizens was more than twice the proportion of Ethiopian-Israelis in the population (3.5%).

• The percentage of indictments against Ethiopian-Israeli minors was more than five times their share in the general population (8.5%).

• And the percentage of minors sent to prison was over 10 times the proportion in the population (18.5% of all prisoners as of June 2016).

Ethiopian-Israeli social activists submitted a document to the Committee, summarizing their views:

To gauge public sentiment and priorities, the Committee used a proprietary software platform to ask the general public, “What tools should be included in the team’s work to eradicate racism towards Ethiopians and increase their positive presence in the public sphere?” The prompt yielded hundreds of tips, which the Committee used to formulate the guiding directives for its work. They also held meetings, discussions, and consultations with relevant experts and professionals—all open to the public—commissioned opinions from academics, examined 150 police cases involving Ethiopians, and reviewed existing mechanisms for people to report racism and discrimination.

The Committee’s findings and recommendations

On August 1, 2016, the Committee presented its report, which affirmed that Ethiopian-Israelis had long been the victims of racism in Israel, having experienced discriminatory treatment from institutions and citizens, and having been exposed to physical and verbal abuse. It also described a host of discriminatory actions taken by government actors against Ethiopian-Israelis, including:

• Destroying donated blood

• Injecting women with contraceptives without their informed consent

• Segregating maternity wards and school classrooms

• Removing a larger number of Ethiopian-Israeli children from families caught up in domestic conflicts

• The cruel and unnecessary use of tasers by the police force

The report included 53 recommendations and noted that implementation of all of them was necessary to ensure “zero tolerance” for racism and discrimination. Their recommendations were intended to address the problem in four ways:

1. Raise the visibility of racist behavior, bringing it to the attention of authorities in a position to take active measures. This included increasing the number and variety of reporting mechanisms and creating an advisory body of diverse members.

2. Address racist and discriminatory practices on a civil and criminal level. This included instituting punitive and dissuasive action against police officers, civil servants, and civilians who discriminated against other citizens or exhibited racist behavior, and equipping police with body cameras in cities with a high proportion of Ethiopian-Israelis, among several other initiatives.

3. Improve the public image of Ethiopian-Israelis as a means for changing public attitudes towards them. This necessitated including “positive representations” of Ethiopians in the labor market, media, culture, and the arts.

4. Educate the public about Ethiopian-Israelis to positively influence tolerance and help diminish prejudice. This included creating a database to help place Ethiopian-Israelis in civil service jobs, establishing a speaker’s bureau of experts from the Ethiopian-Israeli community to appear in the media, and increasing classroom instruction of diversity and the history of the Jewish Ethiopian community, among other recommendations.

Actions and responses from the Israeli Police

Meanwhile, the Israeli police created the Committee for Strengthening Trust between the Israel Police and Ethiopians, composed of senior police officers and community representatives. The plan they created consisted of appointing an Ethiopian-Israeli officer as a liaison to integrate Ethiopian-Israelis into the police force (to fulfill a commitment to multicultural policing) as well as making changes to police procedures, such as instituting new training on taser use.

It fell short, however, of Palmor’s Committee’s recommendations in that it did not address the root causes of the problematic behavior exhibited by the police, nor did it even squarely acknowledge the behavior as racist.

It also did not address the high incarceration rates of Ethiopian-Israeli minors. In an effort to avoid prosecuting minors, Israel favored using alternate “correction” channels, such as community service or group therapy. As a result, there was only one youth detention center in the whole country. When looking into arrest and detention rates among youths, the Committee discovered that, in 2015, 40% of those incarcerated in the youth detention center were of Ethiopian origin, despite them being only 1.6% of the population. In September 2016, the Public Defender’s office acknowledged that about 90% of Ethiopian-Israeli minors who committed crimes were sentenced to prison time—three times the rate for non-immigrant Jewish minors and twice the percentage for Israeli-Arab minors.

Palmor’s Committee had concluded that the most serious allegations of racism and discrimination, however, were lodged against the Police Investigations Department (DIP), which investigated police misconduct. They learned that many cases of alleged misconduct were closed with little or no investigation—a claim that the DIP’s own 2015 report lent credence to. “Any use of force made at the time of arrest should not be labeled as an ‘offense’ and no deviation resulting from unprofessionalism or loss of criminal record should be applied,” it read.

Though Israel’s Public Security Minister, the Police Commissioner, and other senior police officials knew of the Committee’s recommendations, they campaigned both Palmor and Netanyahu to remove them. However, in a complete victory for the Committee, the police were unsuccessful in their attempt. All recommendations were adopted without change.

While the police had no choice but to begin implementing the recommendations after that, they dragged their feet for two years on the report’s chief recommendation—the one most important to the Ethiopian-Israeli community: writing guidelines around demanding identification from Ethiopian youth. Eventually, the Attorney General’s office stepped in to write the guidelines, and the Supreme Court intervened to approve them.

Progress toward racial equity

One of the Committee’s recommendations was to establish a specific body for overseeing the implementation of the recommendations. As a result, the Government Unit for Coordinating the Fight Against Racism (the Unit) was established in 2017. It was also charged with eliminating and preventing institutional racism in government offices and public institutions—on the basis of skin color, origin, nationality, and/or religion—“towards all population groups in Israel, through changes in policy and organizational practice, to promote equality and social resilience.”

The Unit’s first order of business was getting people in the ministries to acknowledge the problem of racism—and call it racism, which people were very reluctant to do. The Unit supervised over 70 antiracism officers throughout the government who were collectively charged with addressing grievances and publishing research on racism. They tracked how many of the recommendations were implemented and at what pace, publishing their findings publicly. At the same time, Palmor gave interviews in the media, keeping the Unit’s work in the public eye. Thus, some level of accountability was established.

Annually, the Unit reported on the government’s progress in fulfilling the recommendations, and in 2019, it was revealed that the percentage of arrests of youth of Ethiopian descent had declined by 50% despite the fact that crime rates failed to rise. This was proof, according to Palmor, that most of the arrests in years prior had been unjustified.

When the Unit first began its work, most of the complaints it received came from the Ethiopian community—40% in the first year. As years passed, though, more Arabs and other groups lodged racism complaints. In fact, to encourage all citizens—including Ethiopian-Israelis—who were victims of racism to file civil suits, victims were given three years of free legal aid. In helping people file lawsuits, they hoped norms for businesses and in society at large would change faster too.

It worked. When a driver for a private bus company threw six Ethiopian-Israeli children off her bus because she was “afraid they would misbehave,” someone lodged a complaint about the situation with the Unit. This prompted Legal Aid to file a lawsuit against the company for racial discrimination. The company was so embarrassed for being accused of having a racist bus driver, they fired her, and the children won 150,000 Shekels (about $50,000) as compensation. The story was subsequently told in a short documentary on the most-watched news show in Israel, and because of its exposure, individuals and businesses across the country now hesitate to discriminate on the basis of race and individuals know they can be fired or sued for doing so.

By the end of 2018, 87% of the Palmor Committee’s recommendations had been implemented. In May 2019, the Unit’s 2018 annual report was presented to President Rivlin, noting that Ethiopian-Israelis were not the only victims of racial bias and discrimination; complaints had also been received from Arabs, Russian immigrants, people of North African background, and Haredi (ultra-orthodox) Jews.

Palmor understood the criticism that her Committee’s work focused only on Ethiopian-Israelis and neglected concerns about racism directed towards others, particularly Palestinians. Her response to the criticism may sound familiar for readers who recall my newsletter on channel-switching. She said, “I believe in starting change. Because of the political situation, we started here. I started with what was possible.”

Remember, prioritizing DEI efforts in a logical sequence in no way means that you’re leaving everyone else out. By addressing the issue with the greatest significance at the time, you pave the way for achieving justice for every other socially disadvantaged group thereafter. All social justice issues are connected. Justice for one group will necessarily bleed into justice for another group.

The killing of Solomon Tekah

In June 2019, following an altercation, an off-duty police officer shot and killed Solomon Tekah, an Ethiopian-Israeli teenager. The prosecutor concluded that the police officer broke regulations by aiming his gun at the ground to fire the warning shot that ricocheted, killing Tekah. The killing sparked renewed nationwide protests, some of which turned violent, and immediately drew accusations of police brutality and racism from Ethiopian-Israelis.

The next day, Netanyahu made a statement that acknowledged the tragedy of Tekah’s death, but it ended with an admonition of the violence. “We have worked together and we have achieved important things for the Ethiopian community in the country, and we still have work to do,” he said. “But the first thing that I ask and expect is that you will use your influence in order to help stop this violence.”

Two days after Tekah’s killing, activist Avi Yalew published an op-ed titled, “My Fellow Israelis: Black Lives Matter Is Your Fight, Too.” In it, he wrote of his despair over Tekah’s death, saying that it exemplified what it meant to be Black in a White space. “To be Black in Israel, it means to be other, you are not like us. The racism in Israel is not against the Ethiopian community; it is against the Black community,” said Yalew. He felt the killing of Solomon Tekah by a police officer set back their progress by 10 years, and he renewed his call for Ethiopian-Israelis to be treated as equal among equals.

“Our demands are simple, and they’re not just for us,” he said. “When we fight for Ethiopian Israeli rights, we fight for every minority in Israel who has seen their rights trampled—Arab citizens, ultra-Orthodox citizens, LGBTQ citizens, and Israelis living in the periphery.” 

We are playing the long game

These outcomes show that the struggle for equality is not a sprint, but a marathon. We cannot rest on our laurels when undertaking the challenge of racial progress. We must continue to forge ahead, realizing that setbacks are par for the course—but long-term progress is still achievable.

This month’s newsletter also reminds us that racism is not limited to the United States. It is a global disease that manifests in similar ways all over the world. There are clear parallels between the racial discrimination and challenges that plague Ethiopian Jews and those faced by African Americans.

What makes this case unique is that it represents one of the few modern examples of large-scale efforts by an entire country to eradicate societal racism at the national level. The closest comparison might be the efforts of South Africa 30 years ago, and the efforts of the U.S. 30 years prior to that. Clearly, there are lessons that we can borrow, and improve upon, in the Israeli example, as well as cautionary tales about which pitfalls to avoid.

This newsletter is edited from a 2022 case study I co-wrote for the Harvard Kennedy School Case Program with Laura Winig, a senior case writer, with Hebrew translation assistance by Uri Inspector.

If you are interested in reading the full case study, please email my assistant, Louis Mitchell.