Next week, we will mark the one-year anniversary of the killing of Ethiopian-Israeli youth Solomon Tekah by an Israeli police officer. The tragic event set off a series of violent protests by Ethiopian Israelis that shut down an entire country and took over the public discourse. The wing that controlled the discussion, to be referred to as the progressive tribe, lent moral and logistical support to the violence, making its struggle against "racism" and "oppression" more attractive. But a broader look at the issue reveals that this stance is detached from reality and even functions as ideological camouflage.
Follow Israel Hayom on Facebook and Twitter
In truth, there is racism in Israel, both open and hidden, toward Ethiopians, Arabs, and Mizrahi Jews. It's a disgrace. However, anyone who espouses the "Racism, period!" doctrine is mistaken and misleading others. The root of the deception lies with a characteristic of all radical movements everywhere in the world: they blatantly ignore local realities, which naturally requires acts designed to dupe and engineer public thinking.
Here are the facts and manipulations:
In the past 30 years, slogans and values embraced as effective antibodies to racism have flourished in America and in Europe: "variety," "multiculturalism," "social acceptance." These buzzwords fell like ripe fruit into the hands of the progressive tribe in Israel, and they ran to import them. The import process, the dissemination, and marketing was done blindly.
They see the local content, which promotes these values in the context of Jewish tradition – the ingathering of the exiles, integration of the exiles, the Tribes of Israel joining together – as something archaic, belonging to the old, naïve Israel.
A more serious issue is the inconceivable gap between the Ethiopian sector's collective memory and history, and the alternative-progressive story. The parents and grandparents of the young Ethiopian-Israelis made aliyah in daring operations, at great danger to themselves: men and women died in the Sudanese desert, all for the sake of fulfilling the generations-long dream of reaching "Yerusalam." Of course, this is the total opposite of the story of African-Americans, which is rooted in a bitter history of slaves brought to American to be traded in iron chains. The difference is writ large, but the leaders of the progressive tribe don't care.
Because they have considerable control over the channels that create consciousness and public taste, it's no wonder that the truth is forced into hiding. The expectation is that a young Ethiopian who appears on a broadcast will cry "Racism! Social justice!" and the truth will evaporate on campuses, where young Ethiopian Israelis are expected to imbibe the messages of Frantz Fanon and Edward Said, thinkers who wrote an indictment of white men in a different cultural context.
The progressive message is clear: The Ethiopians in Israel are merely a local arm of the American reality, the same as cotton-pickers in Alabama, and Solomon Tekah is just a local version of George Floyd.
Silence, erasure, and ignoring the preexisting background of the subject and the community are telltale signs of what is defined in education as indoctrination. Brainwashing. Nevertheless, the progressive insists on waging an aggressive campaign. There is a less obvious reason for this: if the young Ethiopian Israelis internalize the message and cut ties with the nation, it will call into question Israel's legitimacy as the nation-state of the Jewish people, and then they can go on to the next stage of their grand plan: turning Israel into a state of all its citizens.
The progressives are optimistic: they identify "forces from below that challenge the hegemony," in the form of young people who are fighting a glorious revolution. They also see a different kind of young people, mostly traditional and kippa-wearing, who aren't breaking into wild horas. The ideological "insanity" prevents them from looking into the truth, which is that the youngsters are rejecting the subversive message that insists on a racist division between black and white and ignores the Israeli national context – they do not recognize the Afro-global identity as their own. In truth, they are bitter and demand solidarity and social justice, but not in the name of the universal ideology, but rather as Israelis and as Jews. Progressives aren't required to acknowledge religious or national traditions; they do have to recognize the right of members of the group to self-definition.
Friends, be consistent!
Subscribe to Israel Hayom's daily newsletter and never miss our top stories!
