The Massive Protests By Tel Aviv’s Ethiopian Jews Hold A Crucial Lesson For Israel

When several thousand Israelis protested in Tel Aviv on Sunday, in response to the brutal and unprovoked police beating of an Ethiopian Jewish solider, many outsiders immediately asked if there were parallels to the American protests in Ferguson or Baltimore. There's some truth to that comparison. Ethiopian Israelis, like African Americans, are disproportionately harassed by police and broadly marginalized in a majority-white country.

But what's going on in Israel is actually much more complex than that — and says much more about how issues of race and identity function in the country. One sign of that: Israel's Ethiopian community is a group that from its very beginning was both subject to discrimination and a source of immense Israeli national pride. Another sign: after the protests, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu invited the Ethiopian-Israeli soldier to his office for a public meeting, where Netanyahu told him, "We cannot accept this."

The community's status tells us some really important things about identity in Israel: who matters most to the country, and why.

There are about 135,000 Ethiopians in Israel, almost all Jews. Many were first brought to Israel from Ethiopia in a series of airlifts, dubbed Operations Moses (1984) and Solomon (1991), designed to bring the Ethiopian Jewish community back to what they saw as their ancestral home.

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http://www.vox.com/2015/5/5/8553397/israel-ethiopian-protest