This is a follow up to my October 2022 post Black and Jewish activists share a long history of collaboration and is about the actions of Israeli governments, not Israelis or Jewish people in general.
Since Israel’s creation in 1948, much of what successive Israeli governments have done has been pro-Israel – and anti-Black. Being pro-Israel is largely what they got elected to do, being anti-Black isn’t.
This started with Israel’s complex relationship with South Africa’s apartheid regime – which South Africa also started in 1948.
[Note: Much of what follows is taken from the Wikipedia post Israel-South African relations which I have indicated with quotes. I enclose things I’ve added with square brackets.]
“The Union of South Africa was among the thirty-three states that voted in favour of the 1947 United Nations (UN) Partition Plan, which endorsed the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. On 24 May 1948, nine days after Israel’s declaration of independence, the South African government of Field Marshal Jan Smuts became the seventh foreign government to grant de facto recognition to the State of Israel. Two days later, Smuts was voted out and the new South African government was formed by D.F. Malan’s National Party (NP), which had run on a platform of legislating apartheid. This result was of interest to Israel primarily because of the presence in South Africa of a large Jewish population: by 1949, there were 120,000 Jews living in South Africa, the overwhelming majority of whom were Zionists….[According to Oxford Languages a Zionist is “a person who believes in the development and protection of a Jewish nation in what is now Israel.”]…many of whom had provided important financial support to the Zionist movement…After its election to government, the NP apparently overcame its earlier tendency towards “virulent anti-Semitism”. The South African government granted de jure recognition to Israel on 14 May 1949. Formal diplomatic relations between the countries began in the same year, with the opening of Israel’s consulate-general in Pretoria…In addition to granting Israel diplomatic recognition, Malan…relaxed South Africa’s rigid currency regulations to permit the export of commodities and foreign exchange to Israel…Annual flows of funds to Israel from South Africa were estimated at $700,000 by [1959], and in all it was estimated that South African Jews sent more than $19.6 million to Israel between 1951 and 1961.”
This friendly start to Israeli-South African relations quickly changed. In the 1950s and 1960s, Israel began taking positions opposing South African apartheid at the United Nations. During this time, UN General Assembly debates over apartheid had become increasingly vociferous. “This had begun in the very week of Israel’s accession to the UN in May 1949, when it had supported a motion requiring South Africa to enter into roundtable discussions with Pakistan and India over apartheid and its implications for Indian and Pakistani citizens. In December 1950, [Israeli] diplomat Michael Comay wrote in an internal memo that the Israeli strategy in such votes was to:
“generally refrain from condemnation of South Africa, and from passing any judgment on the specific merits of the issues… On the other hand, we can and should refrain from any express or implied support for the South African caste system…”
In a letter in December, Comay summarised this position as responding to the need to “find a compromise between our principles and convictions on matters of racialism, and our desire to maintain friendship with South Africa”. According to legal historian Rotem Giladi, during the 1950s this manifested in frequent “equivocation” on apartheid by the Israeli mission to the UN – though Giladi also argues that Israel’s speeches and votes on apartheid were nonetheless “considerably more progressive” than those of many Western states. And, during the 1960s, Israel became increasingly consistent in its criticism of the South African government; it frequently voted against South Africa and apartheid at the UN.
In October 1962 at the UN General Assembly, Israel voted in favour of the landmark Resolution 1761, which strongly condemned apartheid and called for voluntary sanctions against South Africa. Members of the Israeli legislature, the Knesset, approved the measure in a 63–11 vote. [In 1962, Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, was serving for his second time as prime minister and head of the Mapai party, a democratic socialist political party that was the dominant force in Israeli politics until its merger into the modern-day Israeli Labor Party in 1968.] The following year, Israel announced that it had withdrawn its envoy to South Africa…It also announced that it was taking steps to enforce an embargo against the South African military, as called for by Resolution 1761…In the 1960s, senior Israeli politicians frequently framed diplomatic opposition to apartheid as a matter of principle: in October 1963, Golda Meir, then Israel’s Foreign Minister, told the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “deep abhorrence for all forms of discrimination on the grounds of race, colour or religion… stems from our age-old spiritual values, and from our long and tragic historical experience as a victim”. Israel also had strategic reasons to distance itself from South Africa: as a counterbalance to the hostility of the Arab and Soviet blocs, it increasingly sought closer ties with black African states, which were gaining their political independence during that time and which strongly opposed the apartheid policy and South Africa’s regional hegemony. These moral and strategic considerations had to be balanced against the concerns of South African Jews…”
Then something happened that would draw Israel and South Africa back together…
“In 1967, Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War and subsequent occupation of the Sinai and the West Bank alienated it diplomatically from much of the Third World and black Africa, whose nationalist movements began to view Israel as a colonial state. At the same time, Israel became the object of admiration among parts of the South African white population, particularly among the country’s political and military leadership. An editorial in Die Burger, then the mouthpiece of the South African National Party, declared:
“Israel and South Africa… are engaged in a struggle for existence… The anti-Western powers have driven Israel and South Africa into a community of interests which had better be utilized than denied.”
The 1973 Yom Kippur War, however, came with “the near-complete collapse of Israel’s position in Africa.” [The war was fought from October 6 to 25, 1973, between Israel and a coalition of Arab states led by Egypt and Syria]. By the end of 1973, all but four African states had severed diplomatic relations with Israel. This was partly due to the 1973 oil embargo instituted by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries against Israel’s Western partners, which reinforced a new alliance between the Arab and black African states.
At the UN General Assembly in the 1970s, Israel abstained from some key votes affecting South Africa, such as the vote on granting observer status to the African National Congress (ANC) in 1972, and votes against apartheid in later years.
In the 1970s Israel aided the National Liberation Front of Angola …forces organized and trained by South Africa and the [US Central Intelligence Agency] to forestall the formation of a government led by the MPLA [People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola] during the Angolan Civil War…”
“By 1987, Israel found itself the only developed nation in the world that still maintained strong relations with South Africa.”
Israeli governments’ checkered past regarding treatment of Black people in South Africa mirrors their treatment of Black Israelis.
Following high profile stories of Israel airlifting thousands of Ethiopian Jews to Israel in 1991 far less was heard about how life was for Ethiopian Jews, known as Beta Israel, in Israel.
In a January 2023 article Fighting on Behalf of Ethiopian Jews in Brandeis University’s The Jewish Experience, Penny Schwartz features the story of Ethiopian Jew Shula Mola. Schwartz writes that, “Mola arrived in Israel in 1984 at age 12, but life in the country hasn’t been what she imagined. Ethiopian Jews, in her experience, face mistreatment, discrimination, and injustice. Today, she is one of the community’s leading activists, a board member of the New Israel Fund, a group advocating for equality for Israel’s minorities, and a co-founder of Mothers on Guard, which the Israeli newspaper Haaretz described as the “Black Jewish wall of moms fighting Israeli police brutality.” She was recently named one of Israel’s 50 most influential women by the country’s leading economic newspaper, Globes. Ethiopian Jews started coming to Israel in the late 1970s. As a result of efforts by Ethiopian Jews, the U.S., Israel, several other countries, and activists around the world, many more managed to leave over the next two decades. Today, there are some 160,000 Israelis of Ethiopian origin.”
The article describes Ethiopian Jews experiencing things similar to African Americans and African Canadians. Mola attended boarding school where some classmates taunted her for her dark skin color and challenged her Jewish identity. Her younger brother, a special education high school student, was in a class too large to accommodate his specific needs, and she felt there was a lack of precise diagnosis for his particular learning challenges. She was even more disturbed when she realized that more than half the class was from the Beta Israel community and faced similar circumstances.
Beta Israel income levels remain around 40% lower [than the general population], according to a 2018 report by the Myers-JDC-Brookdale Institute, an Israeli research center.
And Beta Israelis face police brutality as Schwartz writes:
“Mola helped start Mothers on Guard in 2016 in response to a decision by Israeli authorities to close an investigation into the death of Yosef Salamsa, a 22-year-old of Ethiopian descent. Salamsa was tasered by police in Jerusalem two years earlier and found dead several months later. Police were never charged in the incident. Four years ago, when an off-duty Israeli cop in Haifa shot dead an Ethiopian-Israeli teenager, Mola protested for months, demanding reforms in the criminal justice system. In a newspaper editorial, [Mola] recounted a conversation with her son while she was out demonstrating.
“The police killed an Ethiopian boy. Why didn’t you tell me that they are killing us?” he asked her over the phone.
“Sweetheart! My dear child,” she told him. “There are stupid policemen — hotheads who kill people. They’ll pay for what they did.”
According to [Israeil newspaper] Haaretz, cases opened [by police] against Ethiopian minors were 4.3 times their share of the population between 2018 and 2020.
Mola said she’s had to have “the talk” with her son where she instructed him on what to do if the police stop him: “Don’t be smart or cool. Don’t get angry. After that, call your ima,” she told him, using the Hebrew word for mother. “It was the most painful moment,” Mola said in an interview. “It was the hardest thing for me … to realize that I’m raising kids with limits on their freedom.””
In addition to Israeli police limiting the freedom of Black Jewish kids, the Israeli government denied some Ethiopian Jewish women another basic freedom: the freedom to have children. A January 2013 Independent story, Israel gave birth control to Ethiopian Jews without their consent, reported that, “Israel has admitted for the first time that it has been giving Ethiopian Jewish immigrants birth-control injections, often without their knowledge or consent.” The story detailed how Israeli gynaecologists, on orders from the Israeli Health Ministry, had been giving Ethiopian Jewish women injections of “Depo-Provera, which is injected every three months and is considered to be a highly effective, long-lasting contraceptive.”
From support for South African apartheid to arming the wrong side of African colonial struggles to enforcing systemic anti-Black racism against their own Beta Israeli citizens, successive Israeli governments have supported the very policies Black and Jewish activists have a long and rich history of opposing together.