Black Miss Israel

[Gob]

In February, 21-year-old Yityish Aynaw became the first black Miss Israel.






Born in Ethiopia, Aynaw was orphaned at the age of 12 and her maternal grandparents, already settled in Israel, sent for her and her younger brother. The rest, as they say, is history.

Or it would be, if Israel wasn’t still grappling with its own history of discrimination against black Ethiopian Jews since the first planeload were flown into Israel more than three decades ago. To understand both the significance and the hypocrisy of Aynaw’s victory it is necessary to look at this history.

Suffering from pogroms and persecution in their homeland since the 1970s, the Ethiopian Jewish community was airlifted to the safety of the Jewish state in a series of audacious covert operations beginning in 1984.

In 2011, the last 8,000 Ethiopians claiming Jewish identity were emigrated to Israel with the Israelis achieving the remarkable feat of transporting the country’s entire, 2000 year old Jewish community to a new life in Israel, where they would theoretically be safe from prosecution.

Sadly, for most of these 120,000 immigrants, it is a fairytale that does not have a happy ending. Since the 1980s, Israel’s Ethiopian community has found itself the target of both opportunistic and systemic discrimination.

Living in highly segregated communities, they have complained of being refused jobs, housing, and their children being denied places in schools. This widespread and ongoing prejudice finally prompted thousands to protest in anti-racism rallies last year.

But nothing signifies the endemic discrimination against this community more than the bombshell that was the Israeli government’s admission that it was guilty of systematically sterilising Ethiopian Jewish women, the only immigrant community subjected to this treatment.

While they were still in transit camps in Ethiopia, women were either misled or coerced into accepting injections of Depo-Provera. ‘They told us they are inoculations’, one victim told the Israeli investigative journalist who broke the story. ‘They told us people who frequently give birth suffer. We took it every three months. We said we didn’t want to.’ While some were persuaded to take the inoculation, others were told, point blank, that they could not emigrate if they refused the injections.

Make no mistake; this is a form of ethnic cleansing. The birth rate of Israel’s Ethiopian community has decreased by 50 percent, even as the birth rate of the general population increased with rights groups directly blaming the government’s deliberate drive to forcibly restrict and limit the fertility of Ethiopian women.

So what then, to make of Aynaw’s crowning as Israel’s latest beauty queen (apart, that is, from the irony inherent in treating winning an appearance-based contest as some sort of victory for human rights)?

Aynaw is said to have won the judges over by declaring it was simply ‘time’ for a black woman to take the crown. It is indeed tempting to take her triumph as a sign that things are changing but her victory is at best purely symbolic and at worst utterly cynical.

It is a mistake to assume, when an individual belonging to a marginalised group manages to break through the barriers barring them to success, that suddenly these barriers no longer exist.

This is an argument that is frequently levelled against feminist and other social justice advocates. What do you mean women aren’t equal? Look we have a female Prime Minister! That we do, but in 2010, the year Julia Gillard won minor government, Australia ranked a paltry 17 out of 21 developed nations in a gender equality index formulated by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

Likewise, would anyone seriously suggest that Indian Pakistani and Indian women are ‘equal’ to men because both these countries have had female heads of government?

Last week Aynaw met with US president Barack Obama, who also makes an interesting case study in the dangers of taking individual success as representative of an entire group’s opportunities. Obama may be the first black president but he also presides over a country in which blacks are seven times more likely to be jailed for marijuana use than whites (even though whites actually use marijuana more than blacks). Despite their black president, 500,000 black and brown people get stopped and frisked by the New York Police Department every year, with 90 percent not getting charged with anything. Unarmed black youths continue to be gunned down in the street by police with no legal repercussions.

If anything, the tokenistic number of women and people of colour granted access to privileged positions should serve as both proof and reminder of the continued existence of this very real discrimination. It is, after all, their very rareness that makes their success so notable. Cathy Freeman took our breath away in Sydney precisely because we understand the seemingly insurmountable odds she scaled to get there.

The same goes with Yityish Aynaw. Her victory is so stunning because of the conditions her community has to contend with. Unlike Freeman, Aynaw’s win was largely dependent on other people who granted her victory. And one does not need to be a hardened cynic to be slightly suspicious that this came so soon after the government’s remarkable confession that it had deliberately compromised the reproductive freedom of thousands of Aynaw’s fellow Ethiopian women.

Sadly, despite being created as a safe haven, Israel has found itself to be just as susceptible to racism and bigotry as any other country. As in much of the rest of the world, the darker one’s skin colour, the more discrimination they face . This video captures a racist rally vilifying Sudanese immigrants with chants such as ‘Sudanese to Sudan, Tel Aviv is for Jews’.

Predictably, Aynaw’s crowning was also met with jeers and jibes, with some ridiculing her on Facebook as a ‘toffee queen’ (a racist play on the Hebrew word ‘yoffee’, meaning ‘beauty’).

Fortunately for her, her physical appearance meant she was able to transcend the circumstances of her discrimination. Aynaw, who dreams of becoming a diplomat, comes across as a very astute young woman who will no doubt use this opportunity to effect change.

What she should not be taken for, however, is a sign that Israel’s race problem is history.

[MajGenl.Meade]

Born in Ethiopia
Dreadlock sabra

(cont. p94)

[Sue U]

What, exactly, is Ruby Hamad's point?

[dgs49]

So much to write about...

Well, it's not exactly a BEAUTY contest - the participants and promoters constantly refer to it as a TALENT contest - and it's a good thing it's not a beauty contest. She ain't beautiful, at least physically, by any definition that I could endorse.

But given that these things are abominations to start with, how could they possibly be reduced any further by awarding prizes based on pure tokenism? Pity the other contestants who thought the results would be based on merit.

[Sue U]

She ain't beautiful, at least physically, by any definition that I could endorse.

Oh, fuck you, Dave. Yityish Aynaw:

[Guinevere]

She ain't beautiful, at least physically, by any definition that I could endorse.

Oh, fuck you, Dave. Yityish Aynaw:

Exactly. She's lovely.

[Crackpot]

That just because you're not blatantly racist

[Sue U]

Or anti-Semitic.

[Crackpot]

There's a difference?

[Sue U]

Well, not in this case.

[oldr_n_wsr]

She's a very pretty young lady. Too bad I am 54.
As I tell my wife, "it doesn't matter where you get your appetite as long as you come home for dinner".

[Lord Jim]

Ethiopian woman are among the most beautiful in the world...

A number of them are fashion models....

[Gob]

I'd bone her.

[Sue U]

I'd bone her.

Of course you would.

But what was the point Ruby Hamad was trying to make in the OP, and why did you think to post it here?

[Gob]

Want the truth Sue?

I know so little about Israeli politics and such, that I stuck it up here precisely to find out what you and others would have to say about it.

[Sue U]

Well, it's certainly true that Israel has its share of ethnic/cultural division that results in discrimination and social tensions, and it seems to generally plot along lines of the most recent immigrant community. The rift used to run deepest between the Eastern European and Iberian/North African communities, then with the Yemenites and Mizrahis (from areas of the former Babylonian Empire), most recently with Beta Israel (Ethiopians). (Recent Russian immigrants get their share of flak, too, but they have a broader communal support network.)

Of course, the Beta Israel came from severely impoverished and backward rural communities, didn't speak Hebrew, had much different cultural traditions and practices and had to depend on Israeli social services for virtually everything -- and often those services were inadequate, particularly during the mass influx in the mid 1980s/early 1990s.

Under any circumstances it's difficult for a small country to absorb nearly 100,000 socio-ethnically distinct people all at once, but Beta Israel faced particular difficulties -- not only due to economics, but because there was a dispute as to whether Israel's Law of Return for Diaspora communities even applied to them. There is still considerable bitterness over the issue, especially since there is another sect of Ethiopians whose ancestors had been converted to Christianity and who now are re-adopting a Mosaic Israelite tradition (the Falasha Mura, but this is heading down another long tangent).

Anyway, in Israel, public schooling and compulsory military service have been an effective way of integrating the new generations into a more cohesive society -- Yityish Aynaw herself was an IDF officer (military police commander). My expectation is that within the the next 15 years, Beta Yisrael will be a community fully integrated into Israeli culture in the same way that previous immigrants are today.

[Gob]

Cheers Sue, very enlightening!

[rubato]

Israel's treatment of the Falashas is an ugly little racist history. First, they denied them the right of return given to all white Jews who merely show up and say "I'm Jewish" no matter the degree of religiousity or which sect they are from. Finally they tried to make up for it by evacuating the Falashas who remained alive.

The racism towards blacks is contiguous with their racism towards Palestinians (both Christian and Muslim). And it is tied to their religion.

But perhaps they will atone and repair their social attitudes more quickly than we have?

yrs,
rubato

[dgs49]

She looks hideous in the picture at the top of this thread, which is probably why that picture was selected.

[Sue U]

Israel's treatment of the Falashas is an ugly little racist history.

Using the term "Falasha" for Beta Israel is itself derogatory and racist. It's equivalent to calling them "wetbacks" or "illegals."

First, they denied them the right of return given to all white Jews who merely show up and say "I'm Jewish" no matter the degree of religiousity or which sect they are from.

That is decidedly not how the Law of Return operates. And in fact, it has never had anything to do with "race," religiosity (whatever that means) or sect. The Law of Return is based primarily on the Nazis' definition of who was considered a Jew under the "Nuremberg laws" -- whether or not practicing any form of Judaism at all -- and under a 1970 amendment the Law was expanded to include other family members of such Jews, including non-Jewish children, grandchildren, their spouses, etc. In the early 1970s there was a dispute within the Israeli religious establishment as to whether the Beta Israel came within the Law because, having been separated from the rest of the Jewish community for many many centuries, their traditions and religious practices are significantly different from those of Jews elsewhere in the world, whether in the Sephardi or Ashkenazi traditions. However, the Sephardi Chief Rabbi ruled that Beta Israel --as well as the Karaites -- were to be considered Jews "for all purposes."

There are continuing issues today whether anyone of any "race" simply claiming to be a Jew, or converting to Judaism simply to gain Israeli citizenship, should be permitted to immigrate. There have been some shocking social problems with immigrants from the former Soviet Union (including "neo-Nazi" gangs). There have been serious questions raised whether additional groups (not only in Ethiopia) are conveniently discovering a long-abandoned (or never existing) Jewish heritage as a way out of poverty and unrest in their native countries via a ticket to Israel. These problems raise legitimate issues that any country with such an immigration policy would ultimately have to decide -- particularly where a founding principle of the country was to create a Jewish state.

Finally they tried to make up for it by evacuating the Falashas who remained alive.

Nearly 10,000 Beta Israel had immigrated to Israel between 1973 and 1984. In six weeks alone during the 1984 famine in the Horn of Africa, the IDF (assisted by the CIA and Sudanese mercenaries) evacuated 8,000 more Beta Israel to Israel from refugee camps along the Sudan border. The airlift was stopped because Arab governments pressured Sudan to cut off the flights. In 1991, as the Ethiopian government was destabilized in the Eritrean rebellion, the IDF conducted a covert military operation that brought nearly 15,000 more Beta Israel out of Ethiopia to Israel. Private (Jewish) humanitarian organizations (notably the North American Conference on Ethiopian Jewry) have been funding and facilitating additional immigration and social/medical services in both Ethiopia and Israel for the last 30+ years. No one else in the world cared about this community or lifted a finger to save them -- let alone provide for their wholesale transport and resettlement as citizens in a new country.

The racism towards blacks is contiguous with their racism towards Palestinians (both Christian and Muslim). And it is tied to their religion.

But perhaps they will atone and repair their social attitudes more quickly than we have?

I think "Fuck you" is really the only appropriate response.