Matthew Williams/The Conflict Archives: Social inequalities and racial discrimination against black Israeli communities and African refugees and asylum seekers has plagued Israeli society for decades.
George Floyd’s death is rocking the United States and Trump administration, and protests have spread across the world in solidarity with the #BlackLivesMatter movement. Many ongoing commentators and online activists immediately shone a light on the occupation of Palestinian territories by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) and how they respond to Palestinian protesters and activism in the West Bank and Gaza. Direct comparisons have been drawn to the tactics of Israeli police and IDF when dealing with Palestinians and that of the police in the United States currently responding to the current George Floyd protests including mass incarceration, police brutality, the use of tear gas, rubber bullets and stun grenades and the targeting of journalists. Israeli and U.S police departments regularly train together to exchange tactics and strategies, however after the IDF killed over 60 protesters and wounded thousands more in a single day in May 2018, Domenica Gahem, a journalist for Foreign Policy in Focus raised the issues of this troubling relationship.
“The violence has additionally troubling implications for the United States—and not just for its foreign policy, but at home. That’s because U.S. police forces actually train extensively with the Israeli military. In fact, hundreds of federal, state, local, and even some campus law enforcement departments across the country have trained in some capacity with the Israeli forces now gunning down Palestinian protesters in droves…This isn’t a one-sided transfer of tactics. When Israeli forces visit the United States, they also receive training from our police forces on the drug war tactics that have targeted black and brown communities.”
While the costs of police brutality, racism and military occupation are apparent for Palestinians (an issue recently highlighted after an Israeli police officer shot an autistic Palestinian man dead in the Old City of Jerusalem), the consequences of the American exported police model on Israel’s communities attracts less coverage.
Racism has been a longstanding issue in Israel but the crisis made major headlines in July 2019 when the killing of Solomon Tekah by a police officer in June sparked riots outside Haifa and in central Tel Aviv. Solomon, nineteen years old, was killed by a bullet that ricocheted off the tarmac after a police officer approached the teenager and his friends. According to a police statement issued in the aftermath of the shooting, the officer, who was off-duty, claimed Solomon was involved in a group fighting. When the group started throwing stones after his intervention, he allegedly fired his gun in self-defence. This was disputed by parents of the youth involved. The police officer was eventually charged with three years imprisonment for negligent homicide (some activists argued this punishment was lenient) in November 2019 after dozens were arrested and injured in the ensuing protests and riots as Solomon Tekah’s acted as a catalyst for years of growing fury at police brutality, religious differences, and discrimination in housing and employment.
The Ethiopian Jewish community, numbering 150,000, has been in Israel for three decades since a biblical famine swept Ethiopia in the 1980s. Integrated into Israeli society (which included education, politics and military service), many Ethiopian-Israelis made notable accomplishments in military, judicial and political life. However, stark social inequality and discrimination remained a major challenge. The average income of Ethiopian Jews in Israel was 35 percent lower than the average Israeli household, and nearly a third of the community lives below the poverty line. Ethiopian-Israelis were more likely to experience more aggressive tactics by police in response to minor violations by Israeli police departments which often included random arrests and humiliating ‘strip and searches’. Ethiopian-Israelis were also more likely to be indicted and jailed at far higher rates than other Israelis. Since 1997, four Israeli-Ethiopians have been killed by the police (seven deaths were recorded as suicides or died in unclear circumstances after encounters with the police) and nine of those who were killed were under the age of 25.
The relationship between the police, Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government and the Ethiopian-Israelis had soured, particularly after the emergence of Israeli police beating up Ethiopian-Israeli soldier, Demas Fekadeh in 2015. This was little aided by insensitive comments by the police commissioner, Roni Alsheich, who responded to allegations that the police force was systematically targeting the Ethiopian-Israeli community by saying that it was “natural” to suspect Ethiopian-Israelis more than other communities. “Studies the world over, without exception, have shown that immigrants are invariably more involved in crime than others.” Mr. Alsheich also noted that this included other Israeli communities including Israeli Arabs and Palestinians living in Israel. This was rebuked on Facebook by Tabeka, a legal advocacy charity, who accused the commissioner of racism.
The killing of Solomon Tekah was a tipping point, provoking an outpouring of grief and rage against systemic racism and police brutality. “End the killing, end the racism.” was the rallying cry for protesters demonstrating in Tel Aviv in July. According to The New York Times, it was ‘a national reckoning with what black Israelis say is endemic racism’ as the incident in Haifa become the black Israeli community’s #BlackLivesMatter moment, one that is still unfolding in Israel. “Outsiders can’t even fathom. There’s horrible, daily racism that takes place right under your nose,” said Michal Avera-Samuel, an academic who heads the Fidel Association for the Education and Social Integration of Ethiopian Jews in Israel. “Why is it that anything an Ethiopian kid does ends with a police record? Why should I be afraid of any encounter my children may have with the police?”
Activism in the Ethiopian-Israelis has been the bedrock of the community since Ethiopian Jews arrived in the ‘Promised Land’. However under Netanyahu’s government, the most right-wing in Israeli history, the combination of anti-immigrant rhetoric and riots, the increase in mass deportations and mass incarceration of African refugees and asylum seekers in Israel over the last decade and the economic costs of the Covid-19 pandemic to Ethiopian Israelis have seen a surge in activism against systemic racism. According to some Ethiopian-Israeli activists, the increase in racism and hateful rhetoric has been nourished by the prime minister himself (despite his open condemnation of racism against Ethiopian Israelis in June 2019), a clear indication that for Israel to change, much will have to change in the country’s political landscape, not just society.
From Israel to the United Kingdom to Central America to Iraq, the damage done by modeling police departments on those in U.S - militarised for drug wars and major domestic counter-terrorism operations - is apparent. Both the so-called ‘War on Drugs’ and the ‘War on Terror’ have targeted Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic communities predominantly and killed tens of thousands of people. Far from healing divisions, these two conflicts have fuelled rampant human rights violations at home and abroad, increased surveillance, reinforced racial and religious stereotypes and turned tools that were meant to protect communities into tools of repression and terror that have ripped families and communities apart.
Israel’s own problems with racism and police brutality are a microcosm of the consequences of governments across the world adopting U.S police models, a modus operandi now increasingly defined by problems of excessive force, extrajudicial killings, human rights violations and institutionalised racism. Solomon Teka, like George Floyd, and thousands of others around the world are victims of this flawed system of policing where violence begets violence. For real change to occur, countries like Israel must turn away from this toxic model for policing spawned by the drug wars and age of terror while government and society address inequalities, discrimination and prejudices that exist in a meaningful way and enact reforms which bring long-lasting change.