To watch the video of Damas Pakada, an Ethiopian IDF soldier, being beaten by a police officer and a passing volunteer is to feel revulsion. It is also a jarring reminder of what Israel and its Zionist dream must face and tackle.
Let’s be clear. For a Zionist, one who believes that the return of Jews to our Homeland is a divinely inspired and holy act, the plight of the Ethiopians is not a source of guilt, but a source of shame.
The story of bringing the Ethiopian Jewish community to Israel is one of the great humanitarian stories of our time. It flies in the face of the institutionalized prejudice that pervades the western world and is a great reminder that Zionism is about the ingathering of all Jews from wherever they might be, regardless of whom they are.
However, the implementation of the integration of the Ethiopian community has been less than exemplary. Part of this stems from the enormous cultural gulf that separated Ethiopians from western Israeli society. Many Israelis sense that Ethiopians are culturally from another planet.
And much of it stems from residual feelings of resentment at the treatment of earlier immigrants towards newer ones: I had to endure this treatment, says the Israeli to himself, so too bad, you do too.
This is hardly a justification, but it is a reality.
However, truthfully, much of it is good old fashioned prejudice. Calling it racism does not do justice to the situation, for such a term conjures up the fundamental racial divide of black and white.
The situation is more complicated because of language, custom, educational and basic cultural disparities. Yes, blackness has something to do with it as well, but Israel is used to people of “color” – Yemenites, most prominently, but also Cochin Jews from the Indian sub-continent, and many dark Mizrachi Jews.
Not that there isn’t some remainingl prejudice against these groups, but the divides have been bridged significantly compared to a few decades ago.
Government policy is well intentioned but less than effective. Ethiopians tend to be segregated, a policy that might have made sense initially, but has outlived its usefulness. With residential segregation comes educational segregation, and this is probably the major impediment to integration.
While the IDF has played its classic role of social integrator and leveler, even here the picture is less than ideal, and waiting until army age to be exposed to larger society is way too late.
I am no social planner, and have no great insights into specific policies that should be implemented to hasten the integration of the Ethiopian community.
However, as a Zionist, as someone who believes deeply that the rebirth of Jewish sovereignty offers the Jewish People the great opportunity to be the Light unto the Nations that we have always been intended to be, I pose that we Israelis need to be searingly honest with ourselves and to demand from ourselves and others a straightforward and non-defensive willingness to do search our hearts, to confront our own prejudices and to re-affirm that all Jews have the responsibility to care for and to respect every other Jew.
The fact that Prime Minister Netanyahu immediately met with and embraced Damas Pakada, and called for change made me proud and hopeful that we will address this problem wholeheartedly.
For at the end of day it is Zionism that is being tested by the plight of the Ethiopians and it is Zionism that must assert itself as the vibrant motivating mindset and ideology that will embrace Ethiopians as part of Clal Yisrael.
We can and must, and, I believe, will rise to this challenge. Lets just do it sooner rather than later.