Unsuccessful PR stunt

On June 1, Ashager Araro, an Israeli army reserve lieutenant of Ethiopian Jewish descent, released a video on Instagram captioned ‘My Zionism’. In the almost three-minute clip, Araro accuses those who consider Zionism to be an “imperialist idea”, of “actively” deleting “the history of Brown and Black Jews”.

She claims that such a stance dismisses “our stories, struggle, and survival” and ignores “the fact that the Zionist cause have [sic] built a safe home for Jews like us”. She explains that the opposition to Zionism is “especially hurtful when it comes from people who know exactly how it feels when your history is being tossed aside, when your heroes are not being remembered.”

You would be forgiven for thinking that the video is a harmless statement in which a Black Jewish woman is sharing her feelings, especially given the message of ‘peace’ at the end. But the clip appears to be part of an Israeli PR campaign trying to repair its image after the latest bout of brutal violence against Palestinians caused worldwide outrage.

Israeli government officials, military personnel – including Mohammad Kabiya, a Palestinian citizen of Israel who reposted a video defending the Israeli army – and various supporters of Israel have all been active on social media trying to challenge growing pro-Palestinian sentiment in the West.

Araro’s video seems to particularly target narratives that draw parallels between the Palestinian struggle against Israeli colonialism and the struggles of other native and oppressed people facing colonial and neocolonial forces.

It attempts to shut down the debate on Israeli settler-colonialism through a mixture of guilt and affective language, which puts Araro’s “lived experience” before the Palestinian reality.

She makes a case against the erasure of Black and Brown Jewish communities by aligning herself with a political ideology that is based on the erasure of the Palestinian people. She references Jewish Ethiopian migration to Israel in the face of anti-Semitic persecution to portray Zionism in a positive light, but makes no mention that Jewish migration has resulted in the mass expulsion, death, and systematic oppression of Palestinians. She seems to be excusing the brutal subjugation of an entire people because it supposedly delivered relief for another.

Araro relies on lazy identity politics which imagines a hierarchy of persecution. She uses frequently the word “white” to challenge the arguments against Zionism and creates the illusion that the criticism of the Israeli settler-colonial project pit white activists against a Black version of Zionism.

The truth is, even the “safe home” that Zionism has provided for Ethiopian Jews is, at best, tenuous. A brief look at the facts confirms the very point she is trying to argue against: Israel is a European, settler-colonial, and therefore racist state – even for its Ethiopian Jewish citizens.

Since the 1980s, more than 80,000 Ethiopian Jews were brought over to Israel in state-sponsored operations to save them from famine and conflict. Although their “Jewishness” was recognised by Israeli religious authorities, it continued to be questioned, as the community faced wide-ranging racism from Israeli institutions and society at large.

In the 1990s, for example, Israel’s national blood bank was found to be destroying blood donations from Ethiopians out of fear that as Africans, they carried HIV. In the 2000s and early 2010s, the Israeli authorities were injecting Jewish Ethiopian women with contraceptives without their knowledge or full consent. Some in transit camps were even threatened with a denial of entry to Israel if they did not accept the injection. Others were led to believe it was a disease-preventing drug.

Today, Ethiopian Jews continue to be discriminated against in education, employment, and housing and suffer high levels of poverty.

Excerpted: ‘‘My Zionism’: Israel’s latest unsuccessful PR stunt’

Aljazeera.com