Ethiopian Crisis Modernization

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Multicultural society and everyday cultural racism: second generation ofEthiopian Jews in Israel's 'crisis of modernization'Uri Ben-Eliezer

First Published on: 03 October 2007

To cite this Article Ben-Eliezer, Uri(2007)'Multicultural society and everyday cultural racism: second generation of Ethiopian Jews inIsrael's 'crisis of modernization'',Ethnic and Racial Studies,31:5,935 — 961

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Multicultural society and everyday

cultural racism: second generation of

Ethiopian Jews in Israel’s ‘crisis of

modernization’

Uri Ben-Eliezer

Abstract

The core of this article sets out to examine the extent to which a

multicultural society can prevent cultural racism, which, like multi-

culturalism, is by definition based on a culture of diversity and

separation. The ‘first modernity’ was organized along national lines,

with a centralist state that opted to create an essentialist and uncontested

national identity. Immigrants, especially those who came from ‘third

world’ countries, were expected to undergo a process of assimilation, and

to integrate into the dominant culture by relinquishing their particular

past and tradition. Multiculturalism, which emerged historically as a

criticism of that perspective, aims at creating a kaleidoscope of associa-

tions and cultural communities, which inevitably presents a challenge to

the one ‘truth’ of the nation-state with the argument that this ‘truth’

favours some groups over others. Within the multicultural model, identity

politics of various groups is perceived as a means to achieve recognition,

acceptance, respect and even public affirmation of differences. However,

do multicultural society and identity-related differences provide a

solution to cultural racism as well?

Investigating the second generation of the Ethiopian Jews, who

migrated to Israel during its transformation from ethno-national repub-

licanism to a neo-liberal, multicultural society, can help answer this

question. By presenting their patterns of association, character of protest

activities and the newly formed hybrid identity that Ethiopian youth have

developed as a means to liberate themselves from a discriminating reality,

and by examining the Others’ reaction to that challenge, this article

uncovers certain mechanisms and methods of action through which a

multicultural society, having a thin and mild version of multiculturalism,

does not diminish cultural racism, particularly its everyday non-institu-

tional version, but in fact augments it.

Ethnic and Racial Studies Vol. 31 No. 5 July 2008 pp. 935�961

# 2008 Taylor & FrancisISSN 0141-9870 print/1466-4356 onlineDOI: 10.1080/01419870701568866

Downloaded By: [EBSCOHost EJS Content Distribution] At: 01:39 25 March 2009

Keywords: Cultural racism; multiculturalism; immigration; identity politics;

ethnic relations; Ethiopian Jews.

They arrived in Israel mainly in two waves of immigration: the first,called ‘Operation Moses’, in 1985�6, the second, ‘Operation Solomon’,in 1991. About 100,000 Jews of Ethiopian origin now live in Israel.Although their past is not entirely clear, testimonies about theexistence of Jewish communities in Ethiopia exist from the ninthcentury and recur in the twelfth century. Until the end of thenineteenth century these communities had no contact with otherJewish communities; thus their Judaism differed in many respects fromthe customs and religious forms of the rest of world Jewry. It is aJudaism that is fraught with elements dating from biblical times,intermixed with elements of Ethiopian Christianity � the milieu inwhich they lived (Kaplan and Rosen 1994; Parfitt and Trevisan Semi1999).

In their physiognomy, the Jews in Ethiopia resemble otherEthiopians. However, they are differentiated from them in customs,lifestyle, traditions and religion. In Ethiopia they were known as the‘Beta Israel’ or Falasha, which means ‘strangers’. Thus they lived as‘strangers’ in their own land and for hundreds of years, like many Jewselsewhere, suffered hardship, discrimination and persecution becauseof their religion. And, like other Jews, they developed the idea of thereturn to Zion. The second half of the twentieth century still foundthem in Ethiopia as villagers, illiterate like almost all their fellowcountrymen, and subject to deprivation and poverty caused in part bythe civil wars and political upheavals which have battered Ethiopia inrecent decades. By the time they reached the collection points in theSudanese desert from which they were flown to Israel, a fifth of themhad died on the arduous journey. When they arrived in Israel �indigent, hungry, exhausted both psychologically and physically �they were received with an outburst of enthusiasm and joy temperedwith sorrow and compassion for their condition. Governmentministries devised elaborate plans to integrate them into the Israelisociety and presented them with a great fanfare. However, the planswere not implemented properly and the expectations went largelyunrealized.

Within a short time the Jewish immigrants from Ethiopia wereshunted to the bottom rung on the class ladder and to the fringes ofthe Israeli society, suffering from neglect, unemployment, poverty,crime and alienation in hostile surroundings (Ofer 2004). In time itbecame clear that this was not a temporary situation, typical of thefirst years of migration, but that the young members of the second

936 Uri Ben-Eliezer


generation, most of whom were born in Israel or came to the countryat an early age, remained mired in the same situation.

Most explanations given so far of the failure of Ethiopianintegration within Israeli society have been related to a number offactors or to their amalgamation: the failure of the melting-potassimilation process that was used by the absorbing institutions; thelow scale of human and material capital of the immigrants fromEthiopia; doubts concerning their Jewishness; cultural distance fromIsraeli society; a very high rate of single-parent families; and instantvisibility (through skin colour) (Kaplan and Salamon 2004; Kimmer-ling 2001; Swirski and Swirski 2002; Yonah 2005, p. 153). True, theEthiopians were not the only immigrants to arrive in Israel withnothing but what they carried on their backs. Moreover, they were notthe only ones whose Judaism was doubted. More than 30 per cent ofthe one million Russian immigrants who arrived in Israel at the sametime were not Jews at all.1 Still, it was the amalgamation of thesefactors that made the Ethiopian immigrants uniquely vulnerable.

Another explanation, which has not been given sufficient theoreticaland empirical consideration, is that of racism, which can serve as acontributory factor to the failure absorption of the Ethiopians. Fromthe outset, Ethiopian immigrants were facing discrimination due totheir different pigment composition. Given the fact that, since theirarrival in Israel, the country has been facing an extensive transforma-tion � as all Israeli scholars noted (e.g. Kimmerling 2001; Peled andOfir 2001; Shafir and Peled 2002; Al-Haj and Ben-Eliezer 2003; Ram2005;Yonah 2005) � when ethno-republican and assimilation principlesgradually evolved into neo-liberal values amid a multicultural situa-tion, this article wishes to probe whether the transformation Israel isundergoing is likely to increase racism against the Ethiopian Jews or,alternatively, decrease it.

Cultural racism in the ‘crisis of modernization’

As a country of immigrant absorption, Israel posited the ‘melting pot’idea as its central ethos from its inception. It did not take long,however, before � already in the late 1960s and 1970s � the assimilationideology was perceived by various groups in the Israeli society as aninstrument that was serving to subject them to discrimination anddeprivation.2 The term ‘racism’, however, was not yet consideredrelevant and was not in discursive use. It seems that only when about amillion emigrants from the former Soviet Union streamed into Israelin the 1990s, along with the tens of thousands from Ethiopia, did itbecome impossible to understand the Israeli reality without this term.

Racism takes the form of exclusionary and discriminatory practices,deriving from an attitude taken towards certain people, who are

Multicultural society and everyday cultural racism 937


perceived to belong to an inferior inclusive category based onbiological or phenotypical traits, be they real or imaginary (e.g.Blumer and Solomos 1999, pp. 3�17; Fredrickson 2002, pp. 1�13). Infact, every phenomenon of racism, Miles writes (1989), involves first ofall a process of racialization in which certain people are judged byothers as belonging to a separate category. When this is manifested bynegative representations and is accompanied by practices of exclusionand discrimination, racialization becomes racism.

The new type of racism that appeared in the second half of thetwentieth century was no longer based expressly on the idea of geneticand biological differences. It is known as ‘differential racism’, ‘culturalracism’ or ‘new racism’: ‘differential’ because of the element ofseparation it advocates; ‘cultural’ because of the grounds adducedfor it; and ‘new’ because, in contrast to the past, not only has thecriterion for its existence changed but its self-denial is integral to it(Taguieff 1990; Balibar 1991).

The new racism is more suited to the immigration situation inEurope, especially for those who came to the West after the SecondWorld War from the ‘Third World’ in a time of rapid transformationand change (Goldberg 1990; Solomos and Wrench 1993; Vasta andCastles 1996). In the new racism, the differences between ethnic orreligious groups are emphasized and used as a kind of warning sign toprevent the immigrants’ integration into the society and to make clearthe danger they supposedly represent to the society’s unity. In contrastto the past, the new racism is not based solely on ‘heterophobia’ (fearof the other, the different) but on ‘heterophilia’ (love of difference) andon ‘mixophobia’ (fear of mixing) (Balibar and Wallerstein 1991;Massey and Denton 1993; McDaniel 1995; Taguieff 1990).3

Manifestations of cultural racism can be institutional, engenderedby the state and its various agencies, whether directly or indirectly,overtly or covertly. However, racism is expressed in everyday life aswell. Indeed, since its public presentation became unacceptable,especially after the Second World War, everyday manifestations ofracism have become more widespread than institutional manifesta-tions in democratic countries (on the difference between the two, seeEssed (1991)).

In various places racism often accompanied a universal conceptionof assimilation and the melting pot. As such, it indirectly accordedadvantage and preferentiality to the strong groups in the population,in whose image the principles of unity were created. The transition to amulticultural model of integration derived to a certain degree fromcriticism of the promise of assimilation � a promise, the subalternsmaintain, which was never fully realized either fairly or justly.4

Undoubtedly, multiculturalism represents another promise and anopportunity for reducing racism. However, can it always be realized?

938 Uri Ben-Eliezer


The phenomenon of multiculturalism has various meanings andinterpretations. In the way we use it, the term ‘multicultural situation’or ‘multicultural society’ refers mainly to a situation in whichpluralism and group differentiation are recognized and become partof the democratic discourse. Unlike multiculturalism, these terms donot practically assume an official attempt or a success, in organizingthe various groups within society on a basis of equity, equality, fullrecognition, mutuality, etc. Thus, ‘multicultural situation’ or ‘multi-cultural society’ is both a descriptive term, which suggests that acertain society is composed of numerous cultural groups or well-organized communities living by their own different systems of beliefsand practices, and an ideology or a philosophy based on a perceptionabout the way the society should be organized, given the fact that theassimilatory project of modernization has failed. On the other hand,multiculturalism is a social policy and a set of special institutions andofficials practices, as exists in countries like Australia or Canada,which are designed to implement principles of participation, access,equality and equity to various groups including new immigrants andsubalterns, without fostering any dominant culture or set of rules (e.g.Vasta 1993; Wieviorka 1998; Parekh 2000; Yonah 2005; Yonah andShenhav 2005).

Multicultural society is closely related to identity and identitypolitics, in which individuals and groups freely construct their uniqueidentity and cultural distinctiveness, and develop claims which mayoffset the monolithic, collectivistic ‘truth’ of the nation-state. In fact,their communal and even ‘familial’ character allows them to developnew modes of relations, new forms of otherness, a plurality of ideasand even new experiences of time and space. Armed with this ‘culturalammunition’, described by Melucci (1985) as a sort of ‘symbolicamplifier’, these groups are ready both to challenge basic frameswithin their nation-state and also to criticize the institutionalizedarrangements which, in their view, give priority to certain dominantgroups over others. Such challenge to reality is not necessarily basedon class principles, but on cultural issues, which are manifestedthrough life-styles, status and respect, rights, discrimination andrecognition (Larana, Johnston and Gusfield 1994; Appiah and Gates1995; Melucci, 1996; Cerulo 1997) � thus the observation by Taylorthat ‘the understanding that identities are formed in open dialogue,unshaped by a predefined social script, has made the politics of equalrecognition more central and stressful’ (1994, p. 36) and the reflectionsof others, such as Hall (1996), that identity and identity politics maysolve problems of inferiority and discrimination as well.

The ample research on identity and identity politics and on thereflexive groups that are fully aware of the significance of their activityhas contributed much to the understanding of the changing, hybrid



and fluid world in which we are living. However, are identityconstruction and identity politics, accompanied by the transitionfrom a monolithic society into a more diversified, multicultural one,the solution to cultural racism?

A study of the second generation of the Ethiopian Jews whomigrated to Israel can help us answer this question. It is our claim that,even though the young Ethiopians living in Israel have developed theirown identity and culture out of dismay at the manner of theirabsorption in the Promised Land and as a means to achieve freedomand recognition, cultural racism did not disappear. Instead, with thetransformation of ethno-republican Israel to neo-liberal amid amulticultural society, cultural racism appeared in new forms as well:less as institutional racism and more as everyday racism; ‘societal’racism’ more than ‘state racism’, and, lastly, not a semi-inclusionarydiscrimination, typical to the assimilation process, but an inclinationtowards an exclusionary racism. This kind of racism is in no way lessinfluential than any institutional racism. What for the racist is a slip ofthe tongue, an occasional practice, a non-binding joke, a case ofinattention or even ignorance is for the victims of racism part of anongoing life experience bearing comprehensive, long-term ramifica-tions. Indeed, as the article will demonstrate, the distinctive style ofhybrid identity, new norms and patterns of protest which weredeveloped by the young generation of Ethiopian descent not onlyfailed to improve their status, but may be having the opposite effect,contributing to cultural racism and its by-product, exclusion, bypresenting cultural differences as essentials and by reinforcing theheterophilia and mixophobia of the others.

If the thesis of the study is proved, it would call for a more carefulexamination of the relations between multiculturalism, identity politicsand cultural racism in the global era of the second or reflexivemodernization.5 More specifically, it can present the difficulties ofreducing cultural racism in multicultural societies. In these societies,mild, thin multiculturalism � which is not an official policy but asituation of recognized differentiation, pluralism and the existence ofclaim-making groups only � can actually exclude weak groups throughtheir own cultural traits and encourage their being discriminatedagainst in everyday life.

The study is based on in-depth interviews conducted from 1999 to2005 among students of Ethiopian origin at the University of Haifa �Israel’s third largest city � which for years has been a magnet forsecond-generation Ethiopians who are pursuing academic studies.Interviews were also conducted with youths of high-school age, whocustomarily gather every day at the community centre located in aneighbourhood in a southern town known locally as ‘Harlem’ becauseit is populated largely by Ethiopians. Additional information about the

940 Uri Ben-Eliezer


young generation of Ethiopian descent was collected from the dailypress and from weeklies which were written for and by Ethiopians. Thevarious representations which appear in all these sources and thenumerous practices they reveal expose the discourse within multi-cultural Israeli society which constructs cultural racism that is aimedat the Ethiopian Jews.

What follows is divided into three parts. The first part deals with thedifficulties in the assimilation procedure, which accompanied theprocesses of absorption of the immigrants from Ethiopia. Thesedifficulties appeared in various fields in the form of an institutionalracism. The second part describes the cultural modes of the younggeneration of Ethiopians reactive to what they called ‘racism anddiscrimination’. This reaction, in the form of identity-related differ-ences, or identity politics, appeared at a time when Israel wasundergoing profound changes from a monolithic republicanism intoa neo-liberal, laissez-faire kind of multicultural society (albeit, withoutany substantial multiculturalist policy). The third part of the articlepresents the relations between identity politics and cultural racismwhich is directed against ‘weak’ groups within the context of amulticultural society. While identity politics may contribute to thetransformation of institutional racism into daily racism, it neverthelessdoes not reduce racism but has often the contradictory effect ofexacerbating it.

Difficulties in the assimilation process

In one sense the arrival of the Ethiopian immigrants in Israelconstituted the end rather than the beginning of a process of culturalcolonization, which, starting in the second half of the nineteenthcentury, involved the transformation of the ‘Beta Israel Falashas’ into‘Ethiopian Jews’ who are in effect ‘modern, even Western Jews’(Halevy 1994; Trevisan Semi 1999, 2006). It included the disseminatingof the dichotomous conception concerning the difference between thedeveloped, progressive West and backward Africa, the abyss dividingJudaism and Christianity, two religions which the Falashas viewed aseffectively existing along a continuum with many points of conver-gence (Pankhurst 1995), and, of course, already in early 1950s, the ideaof the Jewish state in which every Jew must aspire to settle as thesolution to their condition. Gradually, through Jewish emissaries fromIsrael and abroad, the Beta Israel learned about Jewish holy days,ceremonies and customs � that religious male Jews wear skullcaps, thatHebrew is the language of prayer and so forth (Kaplan 1995; Kaplanand Salamon 2004).

The project of cultural colonialism reached its peak with the firstwave of immigration of Ethiopian Jews to Israel, in the mid-1980s.



Israelis doted over the ‘sweet and beautiful’ children and lavished giftson them. They were struck by the Ethiopians’ exotic beauty, theirleanness (caused in part or largely by a lack of proper nutrition), theirskin colour and their unusual quiet. The amazement was typical ofcolonialist and orientalist perceptions and images. By the same token,the feelings of pity � human in themselves � which accompanied thenew arrivals attested to the onset of a paternalistic attitude toward theOther, especially if he or she is perceived as different, exotic, savage,primitive or even weak, in need of cultivation or a victim needing help.Here lies the beginning of a stereotypical viewpoint which tends to seethe newcomers in generalized terms.

In contrast to the ‘European’ immigrants from the former SovietUnion, the Ethiopians were immediately subjected to the bureaucratictreatment that marked their entire absorption. True, the passage toIsrael generated culture shock and countless difficulties among peoplewho had never before seen a car or water flowing from taps, who couldnot read or write, were not accustomed to using cutlery and, in somecases at least, had never seen ‘white’ men. The bureaucratic treatmentstarted already at the airport when representatives of the JewishAgency arbitrarily gave the Ethiopian children and adolescents Israelinames in place of the names they had received at birth. In a while,most of the children and youths who arrived were separated from theirparents and sent to religious boarding schools � even though about 70�80 per cent of Israel’s Jewish citizens do not define themselves asreligious. It was a semi-ethnocide situation, perhaps comparable to1950s Australia where Aborigine children were still taken from theirfamilies and fostered in homes or institutions, to ensure that theybroke with their cultural environment and acceded to modernity(Wieviorka 1998, p. 895). The bureaucracy of absorbing the Ethiopianyoungsters into boarding schools had the effect of separating them notonly from their parents but also from the native Israelis. Promisesmade by the Israeli ruling establishment that the Ethiopian youngpeople would attend school with other Israelis were not kept. In someinstitutions 70 per cent of the students were of Ethiopian origin. Theresult was segregation rather than assimilation. Moreover, the young-sters in the religious boarding schools were exposed to a process ofregionalization. The Judaism that was taught there was vastly differentfrom their own, alienating them from their past, their community, theirtraditions and their language (Holt 1994; Weil 1997a; Leshem andShuval 1998).6

In the years that followed, no fewer than 90 per cent of theyoungsters of Ethiopian origin would grow up and reach maturationin these boarding schools, whose educational level was almostuniformly low. Even if the absorptive institutions’ purpose was tocreate a category of ‘white Jews with black skin’, the project was

942 Uri Ben-Eliezer


doomed to failure (Weil 1997a; Swirski and Swirski 2002; Mula et al.2004).

Another aspect of that failure was fomented in housing the newimmigrants. State representatives declared the idea of settling theEthiopian Jews in the centre of Israel and not in the peripheries.Moreover, as a step which was particularly generous, the newcomerswere given the opportunity to purchase their apartments with the aidof a government mortgage which was effectively a grant. However, akey element of the housing plan � that they would constitute no morethan 2 to 4 per cent of a neighbourhood or community � was notimplemented. Similarly, they found themselves on the fringes of poorneighbourhoods characterized by high crime rate. Their homesgradually lost about half their worth, so their residence in each localewas ‘perpetuated’ (Leshem 1994; Swirski and Swirski 2002).

However, the gravest problem the immigrants from Ethiopia andtheir children encountered concerned their religious practice. Eventhough they had been declared Jews back in the 1970s by the SephardiChief Rabbi of Israel, Ovadia Yosef � indeed, this is what made theirimmigration to Israel possible following the Law of Return � theyquickly discovered that informally they lived under a permanent cloudof suspicion that they were not, after all, Jews. The problems wereespecially blatant in their contacts with the Ministry of ReligiousAffairs, which was all-powerful in matters of religion in a countrylacking official separation between religion and state, and withrepresentatives of the ‘Chief Rabbinate’, who possess a state monopolyin matters relating to the Jewish religion. From the viewpoint ofOrthodox Judaism, Ethiopian Jews were not considered ‘full’ Jewsbecause they were cut off from Rabbinical Orthodox Judaism forthousands of years.

The Ethiopians saw reality in a different way. From the moment oftheir arrival they were subjected by the religious establishment topractices of semi-inclusion which humiliated them and ranked themlow in the Jewish status hierarchy. First, they were made to undergoconversion to Judaism, even if symbolically. This included immersionin water, which the immigrants found especially degrading. Forhundreds of years the Ethiopians’ preservation of their Jewish identityhad included special ceremonies of immersion and purification. Yetnow, when they arrived in what they saw as their ancestral land, otherJews cast doubt on their Jewishness. In their tradition, Judaism is not amatter of choice but part of one’s ethnic identity, genealogy andbloodline. The demand for immersion, so they felt, cast doubt on theirethnic identity and in fact threatened to undercut the whole basis oftheir migration to Israel (Kaplan and Rosen 1994, pp. 73�4; Salomon1994; Weil 1997b).



In the course of wrenching the Ethiopian community from itsspecial form of Judaism, the establishment totally negated theauthority of the kesim, their traditional spiritual leaders. In Ethiopiatheir authority within the community was absolute but in Israel theywere not allowed to perform their duties.7 Only one rabbi has beenauthorized to perform marriage ceremonies for the Ethiopian Jews.The result was a great deal of distress and a long waiting list of couples(Rozner n.d.). Thus, in the process of assimilation, the Ethiopian Jewswere asked to eradicate their heritage and their special form ofreligious practice. So contradictory was it to the expectations withwhich they had come to Israel that they seethed with frustration,which eventually boiled over.

Politics of recognition

As is often the case with such events, the trigger for the Ethiopians’outburst came unexpectedly. A newspaper report on 24 January 1996stated that blood donated by Ethiopian Jews to the national bloodbank were simply thrown out afterwards, for fear that it might becontaminated with the HIV virus (Segev 1996). Israelis, few of whomhad taken the trouble to acquaint themselves with the history ofEthiopia’s Jews or understand their viewpoint, were taken aback bythe ferocity of the reaction. The Israelis had neither the ability nor thedesire to grasp how deeply affronted the Ethiopian community was.They did not know, for example, that blood bore a crucial symbolicsignificance for the Ethiopians, differentiating them in many aspectsfrom the Christians (Salomon 1997; Seeman 1999).

The reaction of the Ethiopian Jews was swift and fierce. More than10,000 members of the community, close to 15 per cent of their totalnumber, from infants to the aged, gathered for a demonstrationoutside the Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem. It was a rare momentof truth, a collective manifestation of painful verities. The resultingviolence went on for hours; dozens of demonstrators and policemenwere injured.

The crowd carried placards which exposed a new issue within theIsraeli discourse, namely racism: ‘We are black but our blood is red’and ‘We are Jews like you: stop the racist apartheid.’ A 17-year-old girlwho came to the demonstration from the Haifa area, where sheattended a boarding school, said: ‘I came to protest against what isbeing done to the blacks because of the color of their skin. I amashamed of my nation, of the white Jewish nation’ (Sokol 1996).

The blood bank defended its policy passionately, arguing that itsmotives were purely medical. In fact, the Ethiopians carried astatistically greater risk of having the HIV virus, and the Ministry ofHealth was probably motivated by a genuine public health interest.

944 Uri Ben-Eliezer


The affair, however, more than reflecting a racial policy by theinstitutions, exposed the cultural barriers that the assimilation processcould not overcome. This led the Ethiopians to conclude that they arebeing discriminated against in Israel through their blood.

The ministry’s spokesman pointed out that there were also other‘risk groups’ in the population that were rejected as blood donors �homosexuals, drug addicts, carriers of certain diseases, people withtattoos and others (Saar 1996). This had the effect of attaching abroader label to the Ethiopian immigrants � all of them, as one � byassociating them with ‘problematic’ publics. The Ethiopians’ questions� ‘Why weren’t the Russian immigrants marked as a risk group?’ or‘Why wasn’t their blood spilled?’ � went unanswered.

For the young Ethiopians it was a moment of truth in the process ofbecoming a racialized group in Israeli society. ‘Blood is the soul’, aninterviewee said as she tried to explain the reason for the violenteruption over this issue. ‘Those Israelis showed us what they think ofour blood’, she added. Indeed, the expression ‘those Israelis’ recurredin every interview with Ethiopian students. When asked, ‘Well, aren’tyou Israelis?’ they immediately replied, ‘Of course’. Nevertheless, theyrefer consistently to the Israeli ‘Others’, not to ‘we Israelis’. All theEthiopians have perceived the Israeli attitude towards them as racist,though it was mainly those of the young generation who drew theconclusions. In certain ways these young people constituted a ‘socio-logical generation’, in Karl Mannheim’s (1972) term. In other words,their social location enabled them to interpret reality differently fromothers (e.g. their parents) and led them to draw conclusions and takeaction on the basis of their interpretation.

The shifting situation in Israel, the ongoing social and political crisisof neo-liberalism, the disillusionment with many of the certaintiesassociated with modernity � especially in regard to the nation-state andits central vision of the melting pot � together with the constantpreoccupation with questions of identity, especially ‘what constitutesIsraeliness’, against the background of the conflict with the Palesti-nians, the waves of immigration and the involvement of variouscultural groups in the new politics: all these developments generatedappropriate conditions for protest by the young generation ofEthiopians. ‘The young people prefer the word ‘‘integration’’ over‘‘absorption’’’, the director-general of the Israeli Association forEthiopian Jews explained. The reason is that ‘absorption meanstaking something and making it identical to you. That is not trueintegration or fusion. . . . The challenge is not to remain in a conditionof being absorbed but to become integrated, to demand one’slegitimate and proper place in the Israeli society’ (Iyov 2004).

They went about this by diverse means. Thus, for example, in Israel,the Sigd, a traditional holy day of Beta Israel which was celebrated in



Ethiopia, indicating the hope to immigrate to the Land of Israel and toreconstruct the Holy Temple, became also an occasion for protestagainst racism and discrimination by the young generation (‘The Sigd,A Pray, Social Meeting, or Protest?’ 2004).

The reaction of the young Ethiopians to discrimination took diverseforms, which Scott (1985) called ‘everyday forms of resistance’ (seealso Kaplan 1999). These ‘tacit scenarios’ through which the group’smembers articulate their common perception indirectly, even covertly,can become an effective form of protest. An example is the decline inthe motivation of the young generation of Ethiopians to serve in thearmy and excel in it. When they first arrived in Israel, their greatestdesire was to stand out in the Israel Defence Forces (IDF). Armyservice, they hoped and believed, was their entry ticket to becomedefinitive Israelis (Borokov 1994). However, finding that the army toowas rife with racism (for example, they were constantly referred to as‘Niggers’), and that the army no longer promises social capital thatcan be transferred to civil life, many reached the conclusion thatmilitary service might actually be aggravating their problem ratherthan resolving it (Ben-Eliezer 2004; Amir, Zehavi and Pargai 1997:283�84).

Another form of collective behaviour which probably contained aprotest element by those who felt they were ill-treated by a racistenvironment was crime. The crime rate among youths of Ethiopianorigin rose steadily; eventually about 10 per cent of them had policerecords (Fishbein 1998; Zarchin 2000). In Australia, the drinkingpatterns of the Aborigines constituted part of the culture of protestagainst the whites’ authority (Cowlishaw 1988). In Israel, similarly,crime, drug abuse and alcohol consumption � which stands at a rate of25 per cent of the young Ethiopians, twice that of Israeli youth � are allgroup phenomena, constituting part of a protest style (Azulai andFreda 2005). Undoubtedly, the high percentage of thefts within theyoung generation of Ethiopian descent reflects their alienation anddistress within Israeli society, which is growing under neo-liberalism,and is probably concentrated on luxurious and expensive products.8

A major aspect of racism that is based on skin colour is theauthoritative construction of norms that privilege traits associatedwith ‘whiteness’ and the pervasive devaluation of things coded as‘black’ (Fraser 1995, p. 81). Faced with this, the young generation ofEthiopian descent began to form a new identity. It challenged thebinary black/white distinction and entailed, especially after the bloodbank episode, the dismantling of the monolithic neo-republican,collectivist Israeli identity and its reconstruction in a hybrid formmore in harmony with the young people’s universe. In Gilroy’s (1993,p. 53) terms, what occurred was a process of deconstruction andconceptualization. Indeed, for the Ethiopian young people ‘Israeliness’

946 Uri Ben-Eliezer


gradually became a hybrid identity, of which blackness is a prominentelement. ‘The time that passes will not change that’, observed oneinterviewee, who possessed a clear awareness of the reality in which shelived. ‘In Ethiopia we were Jews, here we are blacks.’

Africa, Stuart Hall (1990) has noted, is often perceived as themythological mother of all Africans. Through it an image istransmitted of cohesiveness and a shared identity encompassing allthe experiences of dispersal and migration, fragmentation and crisisthat are the lot of Africans around the world. Indeed, in Israel, with itsgrowing multicultural character, the Ethiopian Jews have discoveredthe Diaspora.9 Their inspiration comes from the politics and culture ofAfro-America, of Jamaica and of black Britain. Young people whoseparents in Ethiopia yearned for Zion now live in Israel and long for‘Zion’, though now it is Ethiopia that is signified, as in the songs ofBob Marley (Barkan and Avrahami 2005).

Identity politics creates global and local attachments and the grouprevives the diasporic elements in different ways. Many of these youngpeople have begun to learn and speak Amharic, a language they weredeprived of in early life, when they underwent ‘re-socialization’ in thespirit of the dominant values of the Israeli school system. Now theyare also going back to Ethiopian music, both traditional and modern,music threaded with romantic themes evoking the way of life thatexists there. Some of them are also re-adopting their original names,which were taken from them upon their arrival in Israel. In the colourhierarchy that existed in Ethiopia, the Beta Israel viewed themselves asred (Salomon 1997). Now, though, they have become black, even intheir own eyes. In a certain sense they will henceforth carry the culturaldistinctions which the environment tried to foist on them, but willimbue those representations with a different meaning. They will try toconvert shame into pride and forge for themselves a world which inpart is theirs alone out of what Rutherford calls ‘a politics ofdifference’ (1990, pp. 9�27).

Music, then, is one means to which the young Ethiopians areresorting to underscore their singularity. In recent years groups havesprung up among them whose repertoire consists of protest songsagainst discrimination and racism. ‘Why hip-hop, of all things?’ themembers of one such group are asked, and they reply, ‘Because it isblack music that we are connected to . . . It is a style suited to protest,which the Afro-Americans started and which speaks to us’ (‘TheBunker Cruz’ 1998). Through the music it becomes possible to createan imagined reality, especially in the clubs. ‘We are trying to changethe situation through the music’, says Jeremy Kol Habash, who isconsidered his community’s first rapper. ‘The young people today aretorn between two worlds. Most of them were born in Israel but do notfeel Israeli. The Ethiopians are like a ticking bomb. . . . The parents



don’t understand Hebrew, the children don’t know Amharic. Theycan’t talk to each another.’ Habash also explains, ‘Through the music Iam trying to create for the kids an identity of their own. So they canget to know their roots and culture. I am trying to make them believein themselves.’10 The young people go to clubs that are meant mainlyfor them alone. So they continue the segregation processes that wereimposed on them, this time at their own will. The reggae and the rap,the dancing and the clothes and the hairstyles that match their statusoffer them a haven from the social categorizations that marginalizethem.11

Indeed, global and local are intertwined in the identity of the secondgeneration of the Ethiopian community in Israel. And in regard toidentity, as Hall (1996) notes, both similarity to and difference fromthe near surroundings, both closeness and distance, coexist. Thus theyoung Ethiopians in Israel can set themselves apart from other Israelisand identify with young people of African descent in other countries,yet also view themselves as Israelis and as Jews. As one student put it,‘I am first of all a Jew, then an Ethiopian, and last an Israeli. . . . Infact, I am also Israeli but I am different from these franjis [white].’Gradually, it appeared that the identity order � Jew, black and Israeli,is not consistent among the young generation, and changes from oneindividual to the next and from one location to another. Hybrididentities, after all, possess an ambivalent underpinning. But thefeeling that these are the three components of their identity was sharedby most of them.

A hybrid identity, a claim for recognition and a culture of protestoften make it possible to cope with a hostile and racializingenvironment. Unquestionably, in reflexive modernity, such coping isboth more possible and more available than it was in the past, asindividuals and groups are open for a more heterogeneous and diversereality. Still, the question remains: have these young people found asolution to their situation by replacing skullcap with dreadlocks?

Cultural racism in a multicultural society

The changing character of Israel occurred as it gradually became aneo-liberal state with diminishing government intervention, especiallyin the economy, and with growing privatization (Kimmerling 2001;Shafir and Peled 2002; Filk and Ram 2004). Globalization, as well,exercised a widespread effect, not only by connecting Israel to theworld, but also because under its aegis Israelis began to place anemphasis on life-style and quality of life, on the individual’s well-being,rights and needs. New forms of expression and protest emerged,placing new issues on the agenda, bypassed party politics and soughtnew modes of influence. The demand for recognition became

948 Uri Ben-Eliezer


widespread in Israel, carried by diverse groups, such as the Israeli-Palestinians, feminists, gay men and lesbians, anti-religiousmovements, peace movements and the greens (Peled and Ofir 2001;Ben-Eliezer 2003).

The new immigrants were part of the transformation towards amulticultural situation in which ethnic and life-style groups were thenpermitted to develop their singular culture, and to distance themselves,sometimes expressly, from the assimilating and integrative model of‘the one Israeliness’. Some Israelis viewed these changes as a threat.They talked about the price that was entailed in cultural privatization,absence of solidarity, rampant individualism which engenderedcollective egoism, loss of the goals and aims which had guided thestate since its inception and the danger of disintegration andatomization (Kalderon 2000; Gutwein 2001). Others, though, main-tained that, in a changing Israel, where multiculturalism was takingshape less through official coercive policy than ‘from below’, there wasa greater prospect of recognizing the right of social groups to organizetheir life according to their identity and their desire (Nachtomi 2003;Yona and Shenhav 2005).

The new situation was congenial to the nearly one million Russianswho immigrated to the country with the hope of leaving behind theprinciples of constructivist socialism and a centralist police state. Thenew arrivals from Russia underwent ‘direct absorption’, a process witha built-in neo-liberal bias, in which the immigrant receives an‘absorption basket’ in the form of a generous grant and other benefitsfrom the state and is free to decide his place of residence and field ofemployment himself (Adler 1997; Zaban 1997). Initially, the immi-grants from Russia were perceived through the prism of countlessstereotypes. Relatively marginal phenomena of crime, drunkenness orprostitution were attributed sweepingly to all the ‘Russians’. Beforelong, however, they integrated into the changing society, forming andconsolidating a real Russian community in Israel (Lissak and Leshem2001; Al-Haj 2002). It was a different story with the immigrants fromEthiopia and their offspring.

Everyday racism against them started spreading in Israel. Theeconomic reform generated social disparities and drove broad sectorsbelow the poverty line. Sooner or later, the Ethiopian Jews were goingto be perceived as responsible for this situation. A well-known Israelijournalist interviewed people of about 30 in a small town in which thepopulation consists largely of ‘Mizrahim’. The town has seriouseconomic problems, and the Ethiopians, for whom the governmentprovides housing there, have become the scapegoats. The young peoplewho were born in the town speak painfully about the flight of the local‘go-getters’, about factories that were shut down. One of them notesthat he sent his children to a school outside the town so they would



receive a better education and not have to attend school withEthiopian children. ‘I don’t want to come across as racist’, he explains,‘but there, in the other school, the kids see others like them, first of allin their color. They [the Ethiopians] are not yet ready to live as part ofour life.’ Another adds, ‘Look at the chutzpah � they brought 5,000Ethiopians here and sent them all to the welfare department. It tookour parents forty years to assimilate into the Israeli society. And justwhen they started to stick their heads out, this wave of immigrationwas brought and sent them back to the bottom.’ Unsurprisingly, thisracist attitude towards the Ethiopians was concentrated among thosewho themselves suffered from discrimination within the Israeli society(Yonah 2005). The reason for that is clear cut. Multicultural, neo-liberal Israel increases rivalries between the underprivileged andencourages them to compete for every form of status, recognitionand rights. In that way, it is hard for them to realize that they all sufferfrom the same problem in a society which is undergoing a process oftransforming from a welfare state into a neo-liberal one, and that theyare both approaching an underclass position (on the term, see Solomosand Wrench 1993, pp. 9�11).

Balibar (1991) notes aptly that racism includes a fantasy ofseparation or prevention, an obligation to purify the social bodyand preserve personal or group identity against any form of proximity,mixing or intrusion. Indeed, the young Mizrahi people continued todivert class problems into politics of identity. They expressed revulsionat the Ethiopians’ eating, cooking and sleeping habits. The motif ofpollution, which is typical of cultural racism, pervades their remarks.Any how, they did not blame the government, the Finance Minister orthe mayor for the economic hard times, they had others to indict.Researchers who studied countries with immigration have spoken of‘moral panic’ among veteran residents (e.g. Vasta and Castles 1996, p.36). Indeed, some people in the Israeli small town had the feeling of aflood that would cover everything in black. ‘Don’t be surprised if thetown has an Ethiopian mayor in the future’, they tell the journalist, asthough this were a mark of eternal infamy (Ben-Simon 2004).

This was indeed everyday racism grounded in both the economicsituation and the cultural differences. A neo-liberal, multiculturalsociety clearly underpins racism, among other things, by encouragingsocial formations on a racist basis.12 Thus, for example, it turns out thatthe residents of a certain Haifa neighbourhood don’t want ‘Ethio-pians’. Sixty families were to have moved there, but the residentsorganized to block the plan. They claimed that this concentration ofEthiopian immigrants would create a ghetto, hurt business and lowerhousing values (Levi 2004). Here, then, we find the other aspect ofmulticulturalism, in which difference becomes threatening. And,concomitantly, a ‘cycle of evil’ is forged, which multiculturalism cannot

950 Uri Ben-Eliezer


repulse, in which racism causes economic adversity (otherwise housingvalues would not decline) and economic adversity fuels racism.

It is not only the residents who ‘do not want Ethiopians’. As part ofthe extreme neo-liberal reform introduced by Finance MinisterBenjamin Netanyahu, the government refused to transfer salaries tolocal governments until they streamlined their activity. As a result,some of them suffered economic collapse. Unexpectedly, the immi-grants from Ethiopia again became the victims of this situation whenheads of local governments, such as Netanya, Ashdod, Gdera, reactedto the developments by refusing to allow the Ethiopian families tomove to their towns, alleging that there was no budget to take care ofthem (Schwartz 1999).13 In one instance, in the town of Or Yehuda, ittook a petition to the High Court of Justice and threats of criminalprosecution by the state before the mayor agreed to allow forty-twoEthiopian children to enrol in the local school system. He too chose tofight the government on the backs of children of 5 and 6 (Charma-chenko et al. 2005).

Some mayors and local councils chose even blunter methods to fightthe ‘invasion’. Thus Carmi Gillon, the head of the local council ofMevasseret Zion, an affluent Jerusalem suburb, said, in a manner, thatthe Ethiopian children in the absorption centre of his community weredefecating in backyards, vandalizing property and sifting throughrefuse bins. In addition, he noted, there had been three complaints ofsexual assault (‘Gillon, The Ethiopians Destroy, Damage and Siftingthrough Refuse Bins’ 2004). The mayor’s words were articulated in apure cultural racism jargon of blaming the Ethiopians with spoilingthe otherwise harmonious outlook of the well-to-do suburb. Indeed,comments like Gillon’s are characteristic in other multiculturalcountries, in which talk about political correctness and againstaffirmative action and a quota policy are common (Vasta 1993; Vastaand Castles 1996).

Educational institutions, which were partially privatized in Israeltoo, and gave much authority to teachers and principals, became acentral arena for everyday racism. Kindergarten teachers in a numberof cities and towns refused to accept toddlers from Ethiopia becausethey were ‘different’ (see The Bulletin for the Child’s Rights 1993). Inschools, too, anxiety about integration developed. The principal of areligious school in the city of Hadera refused to register for first gradean Israeli-born 6-year-old boy whose parents are of Ethiopian origin.His argument was that ‘he has too many Ethiopians in the school’(Trabelsi-Haddad 2006).14

In Yorkshire, England, parents removed their children from a schoolwhere the majority of the students were of Asian origin. All theywanted, they said, was for their children to be inculcated with theBritish tradition and British values. In Israel, in the city of Ashdod,



schoolchildren of Ethiopian origin were separated and placed insegregated classes in the same school, at the principal’s initiative.Ethiopian community activists said the principal capitulated topressure from parents who did not want their children to be in thesame class as Ethiopians. Indeed, the principal confirmed thatassumption. In fact, the children, too, had a clear opinion on thesubject. One girl asked what she thought about the separation in theschool, replied, ‘I don’t like their skin. I don’t like skin of blacks. If Iwould be with them, I might turn black myself.’ In a recurrent pattern,the parents themselves denied what their children had made perfectlyclear. ‘It’s only cultural differences, we have nothing against blacks’,they maintained (Trabelsi-Haddad 2002).15 In a multicultural agecharacterized by the state’s relative weakness, mayoral and parentalpressure on the system becomes far more effective than it was in thepast. At the same time, the Ministry of Education is less able to getschool principals to do its bidding, due to increasing local influences.Everyday racism in multicultural Israel, however, became influentialmainly through the presentation of cultural differences as essentials.

The Ethiopian Jews encountered unprecedented everyday racismthrough labels and stigmas. Students of Ethiopian descent, whom Iinterviewed, mentioned three typical categories of stigmatization: thatthey are HIV carriers, that they are different due to skin colour andthat they are not Jews. All three elements are presented as irreversible.For example, just one hour after L. A., an Ethiopian woman, startedwork at a falafel stand in the southern town of Arad in May 2004, thelocal rabbi’s secretary showed up and told the new employee loudlyand aggressively not to touch the food or utensils because herJewishness was in doubt. He did not even bother to ask her if shewas Jewish, but asserted that she was not, based on her skin colour.The woman went to get documents attesting to her Jewishness, but,when she returned, she discovered, first, that the stand’s owner hadtaken fright and had summarily fired her and, second, that the localsecretary has already left the scene. Her documents did not interesthim as much as her skin colour (Yediot Naget 2005).

The fact that the skin colour became meaningful in the protestculture of the young generation of Ethiopian descent, the fact thatthey turned it into a source of pride, did not minimize the frequent useof the colour issue by other Israelis as a means of segregation. Aflagrant form of everyday racism was to place the Ethiopians inparticular ‘slots’ ‘appropriate for blacks’ and then expect them tobehave ‘accordingly’. ‘Colour does make a difference’, said MahartaBaruch, an actress of Ethiopian origin, who played in an Israeli soapopera. The immigrants from Russia, she noted, play Israelis, becausethey are white, but she was considered an ‘Ethiopian actress’ and wasasked to audition only for parts of distinctly Ethiopian characters.

952 Uri Ben-Eliezer


Baruch is considered a success story; others, notably Ethiopianmusicians, are viewed as ‘exotic’. In many senses, this is ‘coercedmulticulturalism’: the Others allow you to be different in areas theydecide are appropriate for you.

Some of the young Ethiopians understand that the multiculturalsituation imprisons the individual within the confines of his ‘race’ orculture. Thus, Shmuel Biru, an actor and stand-up comedian ofEthiopian origin who has enjoyed great success within his community,came up with the idea of writing a soap opera in Amharic which wouldpresent to the Israeli Ethiopians their culture and the stories that areunique to them. When it was pointed out to him that a series like thiswill do little to integrate the community and its actors on the country’scommercial channels, he replied: ‘Integration does not interest me. Ifthe veteran society wants to integrate, then let them try to integratewith us. The soap opera in Amharic will help the veteran societyintegrate into the Ethiopian community’ (Baruch and Peled 2004).

Biru’s words express a wish for a strong form of multiculturalism,which is often called ‘thick’ multiculturalism, in which group member-ship is prior to citizenship (Yates 1992; Spiner-Halev 1999). Such aperspective is often based on the postcolonial analysis which maintainsthat ethnic hierarchies and ‘us/them’dichotomization are outgrowths ofthe distinction that is drawn between the First World and the ThirdWorld, and the ethnocentric conception espoused by the West, whichdefines itself as modern, rational and homogeneous. Biru is not alone inreaching this conclusion, though the idea that the balance of forceswithin Israel will fundamentally be altered to create a polycentricsociety, with the Ethiopians forming one centre among many, is far-fetched.16

Ironically, claims such as those presented by Biru raise anotherproblem of multicultural contexts, in which the ‘right to be different’involves an inversion of racist argument and is a kind of mirror imageto it (Solomos and Back 1996, p. 115). Indeed, the liberal, mild, thinmodel of a multicultural society does not prevent some ethnic groupsfrom using multicultural methods, which overemphasize differences, asa means to discriminate against others. In dance clubs, Ethiopianyouth encounter a non-formal separation policy. ‘Go to your owndiscotheques’, they are being told by the security guards. The fact thatthey indeed have their own discotheques, and music and uniquedances, gives the guards an excuse to treat them not as ‘Israelis’ but as‘Ethiopians’. It does not preclude them, however, from discrimination.As one of them said:

When I finished my army service I went with my buddies [from hisformer military unit] to clubs. Usually they let them in and left meoutside. The guys did not accept this and sometimes they would



tangle with the Russian security guards. But it didn’t help. I wouldstand to the side, ashamed, and get angry at the whole world. . . .The Russians hate Ethiopians and couldn’t care less that I did armyservice. (Puzilov and Ashkenazi 2003)

Indeed, in ethno-republican Israel, discrimination was often con-cealed under various covers, such as the military service. In multi-cultural Israel, on the other hand, being a soldier does not guaranteethe right to enter night-clubs as long as your skin colour is ‘non-white’.What rankles with the young people of Ethiopian origin most is thatthe majority of the security guards at the clubs are of Russian origin.Some of them, they say, are not even Jewish, and they, ‘the Russians’,simply despise ‘the Ethiopians’. Indeed, a multicultural situationcreates the possibility that one migrant group might construct itsethnic culture and its particular form of identity through the negationof another group along the everyday racism line (Wieviorka 1998).

‘To say that we are whores?’ asked Ida Nudel, who was incarceratedin Soviet prison camps and became a national hero in Israel. ‘Even inan anti-Semitic country people never said that about us.’ Nudel wasreferring to the racist image that was foisted on Russian women at thestart of the massive wave of immigration in the early 1990s. However,of the Ethiopians she says:

There is a big difference. We have a very great culture of work. . . . Weknow how to work and there is no such thing as having a cup of coffeeevery five minutes. The Ethiopians are not like that. Most of theEthiopians are desert people. You can see that even by their faces. . . .At Nahal Beka [a temporary mobile-trailer camp for new arrivals]they relieved themselves on the steps and in the street. (Shoan 2005)

Nudel here gives expression to the productive ‘Comtean’ ethos which,in her view, characterizes the immigrants from the former SovietUnion but not those from Ethiopia. Her remarks indicate that, even ina multicultural situation, dominant values exist, such as the ‘culture ofwork’, by which non-European and non-modern cultural particular-ism will always be tested, leading to the exclusion of those who aredefined and perceived as being unfit.

Indeed, the ‘crisis of modernization’ leads to conflicts betweenimmigrant groups trying to leave their mark on the new reality and toconstruct their identity. In this regard, Israel is no different than theEuropean situation in which, as Miles describes it (1993), theconstruction of identity, and the struggle over identity, inevitablyinvolves a pattern of exclusion of ‘the other’. The Russians’ advantagecompared to the Ethiopians’ lies both in their great numbers and in

954 Uri Ben-Eliezer


their compatibility with the new ethos of neo-liberal economics. In thissense, as in many other places, multicultural society appears to begood for the advantaged groups and bad for the disadvantaged ones(Wieviorka 1998).

In the labour market, too, the young Ethiopians encounter constantracism. Data show that only 43 per cent of academics amongEthiopian immigrants are employed in their fields of study. Thirtyper cent are categorized as being ‘underemployed’ � that is, they areoverqualified for their jobs � and about a quarter are unemployed.Thus, educational achievements, which are partly evolved from self-help groups such as the association called Fidel (meaning letters), andthe efforts of the young Ethiopians themselves being more aware to theidea that they should be the masters of their destiny, do not necessarilyhelp.17 ‘When people see me in the supermarket wearing a white shirt’,says a lawyer of Ethiopian origin, ‘they are sure that I am a securityguard.’ Many Ethiopian graduates of law faculties cannot find a lawoffice in which to clerk (Bareket 2005; Azulai 2005).

The peak (so far) came when a 15-year-old ‘white’ girl, MaayanSapir, was murdered by a criminal youth of Ethiopian origin who wason home leave from a shelter for delinquents and was under theinfluence of drugs, alcohol and glue-sniffing. The repercussions of themurder showed the scale on which the cultural differences which areencouraged by multicultural situations are rendered essentialist byeveryday racism which erupts under unexpected, crucial circum-stances. Comments about ‘the Ethiopians’ appeared on the Internetsite of the school the slain girl had attended. ‘Could it be that webrought murderers to Israel?’ one person wondered, and another, a busdriver asked a young girl from Ethiopian descent who was about topay: ‘What has happened to you, did you become murderers?’ Indeed,the informal public discourse dealt not with the one murderer only, butwith all the Ethiopians. Interestingly, the discourse in the Ethiopianneighbourhood of Rehovot, the city in which the murder occurred, wasalso about the whole community. The people there said that themurderer, too, was a victim, and talked about how the state hadcompletely abandoned them (Yediot Achronot 2005; Galili 2005).

The murder heightened the Ethiopians’ denigration. A studentwrote: ‘What’s amazing is that every time someone who is not ofEthiopian origin is hurt by an Ethiopian, the [racist] genie comes outof the bottle and turns Israel into a country where there are onlytwo communities: Ethiopians and all the rest, blacks and whites.Instantly all the other ethnic and national rifts evaporate’ (Admaso2005). Indeed, the Israeli reality exposes a conditioned multiculturalsituation, which in a crisis becomes a dichotomous view of reality.Thus, the idea of multiculturalism, in which people realize theirfreedom and gain recognition through their separated frameworks and



mutual relations with the other communities, does not stand up to thetest of cultural racism, as both are based on the same themes ofdifference and separation.

All in all, these are the mechanisms of cultural racism that werehighly leaned upon and supported by the multicultural society: usingthe desire of separation as a means to create social hierarchy; thediversion of class problems into culture and status; the tendency tojudge the individual according to his group and through a generalizedperspective; the easy and smooth way of transforming constructeddifferences into supposedly essentialist ones and, no less important,the ability of some groups to benefit from the multicultural situationmore than the others.

Conclusions

This article has set out to uncover to what extent a transition from arelatively monolithic society into a more multicultural one, accom-panied by the emergence of diverse groups and communities, reducescultural racism. An analysis of the situation of Ethiopian Jewsfollowing their immigration to Israel provides an answer. The younggeneration of the immigrants, who tried to avoid discrimination andinstitutional racism by developing a distinctive style and a hybrididentity, found itself excluded, marginalized and segregated. Culturalracism has not disappeared but changed its form, from institutionalracism to everyday racism, which appears to be inherent in Israel’smulticultural group classification along the colour line.

Thus cultural differences, instead of acting as a lever for inclusionand mutuality, become a barrier leading to the group’s fixity in apreferential or inferior situation. Under such conditions, the multi-cultural argument often becomes a means by which the preferentialgroups protect their way of life and prevent the ‘Other’, the ‘stranger’,the ‘different’ from spoiling things for them or polluting them. In thisrespect, multicultural society and cultural racism goes hand in hand.This is especially blatant in the case of a weak group of migrants whosecultural difference will be perceived in essentialist terms and whoseattempts to develop a new hybrid identity are liable to be construed asa ‘trespassing’ by a group trying to ‘exceed’ its boundaries and theconfining and delimiting ‘slots’ it has been allotted.

Notes

1. According to the Halacha, the Rabbinic Law, a Jew is one whose mother is a Jew.

956 Uri Ben-Eliezer


2. This feeling was especially potent among the ‘Mizrahim’, the Jews who arrived in Israel

from North Africa and the Arab states, and was directed against the ‘Ashkenazim’, whose

origins lay in Central and Eastern Europe. See, for example, Hever, Shenhav and Motzafi-

Haller (2002).

3. The article is based on the claim that there is a new kind of racism, without questioning

its validity as some researches do, for example, Miles (1993, pp. 36�41).

4. Some would even see multiculturalism as an intellectual movement which reflects the

West’s reduced epistemological status after being confronted with its rebellious oriental

‘Other’. See Joppke (1995, p. 3).

5. On reflexive or second modernization, and on the ‘crisis of modernization’, see Beck,

Bonss and Lau (2003).

6. A similar process of regionalization was contrived for Iraqi Jews forty years before-

hand. See Shenhav (2003).

7. It was not until the end of 2005 that the Prime Minister’s Office instructed the religious

councils to cease the discrimination against the Ethiopian kessim. However, it will take time

to show whether the religious establishment will obey that order.

8. In conversation with teenagers from Ethiopian origin in a southern city in Israel, they

all claimed that thefts are mainly concentrated on products that ‘the ‘Farangi [white] kids’

have, such as sneakers, jeans, t-shirts, cigarettes, wristwatches, necklaces, etc. As data on that

issue are not available, it was hard for me to decide whether these are indeed the typical types

of thefts or, rather, the excuse to justify them. Anyway, it reminded me of Robert Merton’s

venerable article (1938) on anomie in which he described one type as characterized by non-

legitimate means to legitimate ends.

9. Which, of course, is a theme common to many Black Africans all over the world; see

Gilroy (1993) and Clifford (1994).

10. In www.belaynesh.area.co.il.

11. For more on the importance of the music for the young generation of Ethiopian Jews,

see Shabtai (2001) and Avraami and Barak (2005).

12. See Wieviorka (1998) who rightly sees the possibility that non-democratic and racist

groups will flourish under multiculturalism.

13. Detailed reports on many instances in Kav Haofek, no. 18, September 2003.

14. Further instances can be found in Adino-Ababa (2003) and Pomeranz-Berman (2005).

15. See also ‘Violence against Children from Ethiopian Descent’ (2004) and Sarid (2005).

16. Another cultural community which struggles for such possibility is the Israeli

Palestinian community, living in the Jewish state and forming almost 20 per cent of the

total population. See Smooha (1997).

17. On Fidel, see www.selfhelp.org.il.

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BEN-ELIEZER URI is Senior Lecturer in the department ofSociology, Haifa University, Israel.ADDRESS: Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Universityof Haifa, Mount Carmel, 31905, Haifa, Israel.Email: [email protected]



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Ethiopian Crisis Modernization