A picture titled "A List of Victims," followed by 11 names of Ethiopian Israelis supposedly killed by the police since 1996, is being shared online. Naturally, anyone who looks at it – certainly members of that same ethnic group – will be filled with rage toward the police. But does it accurately represent the facts? Not exactly.
A probe by data analyst Nehemia Gershuni-Aylho* indicates that only four of the 11 were killed by cops. The rest committed suicide, and their deaths are claimed to have been the result of police violence. But unfortunately, suicide is all too common among Ethiopian Israelis – from 1981-2005, 234 Ethiopian Israelis have committed suicide. While this is an undeniably tragic statistic – which points to a serious problem that must be addressed – it also indicates that it is not certain that the suicides included in the list of "the 11" were actually caused by how the victims were treated by the police.
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So we are left with four cases of police shootings, one in 1996, one in 1997, and two more from 2018. In each case, we could debate whether or not the police officer in question could have avoided firing the shots, but in all the cases the claim that the cops shot the victims because of their ethnicity is a hasty conclusion. In three of the instances, the police officers were not found guilty of unjustified shootings.
So, is it true that "only black people get shot?" Here, too, the answer is no. Gershuni-Aylho looked into 31 cases of police shooting civilians over the past 16 years and found that most of the victims were not of Ethiopian descent. In most of the cases of fatal shootings of civilians, no grounds were found to indict the police officers. In cases in which indictments were filed, the police officers were exonerated. In the rare instances where it was found that the police officers had no cause to fire their weapons, the officers in question were found guilty of death by negligence or manslaughter.
Therefore, the data do not indicate any tendency by the police to "kill Ethiopians." Very rarely, police fire at and kill civilians. That is a tragedy that should be prevented but is not always possible. If police officers hesitate too long when firing their weapons, their lives or the lives of those around them could be in danger. And as we've seen, in most cases, the shootings were found to be justified. The claim that the Police Internal Investigations Department whitewashes cases like these is bewildering. The Internal Investigations Dept. is not a unit of the Israel Police – it is part of the Justice Ministry and therefore has no interest in covering up police violence.
If there are no police killings, are Ethiopian Israelis the target of "overpolicing"? The accepted answer is yes, but the reason for that is not necessarily racism, but rather the unfortunate fact that there is a higher crime rate in the Ethiopian community, mostly among its younger members. That is not something invented by the police or the legal system. That's the reality, and it's not necessarily the result of institutionalized racism either. When a traditional community cut off from a modern way of life is suddenly dropped into the hustle and bustle of modern-day Israel, an intergenerational gap develops, and with it additional social issues. Often, government plans to help the community create institutionalized racism. It's a fact that most of the Ethiopians who arrived not as part of the large organized aliyah missions integrated into Israeli society with relative success, and avoided many of the troubles that afflict their brethren.
A difficult social situation does not have to be the result of discrimination or intentional racism. It is often the result of historical circumstances, and occasionally the result of good intentions. It might be less convenient to admit because there are no specific people to blame, but that appears to be the truth.
*Nehemia Gershuni-Aylho is the writer's brother.
