I will discuss the dramatic immigration process in chapter 4. The first major wave took place in 1984–1985, when Beta Israel villagers left their homes in Gondar and descended the Ethiopian highlands at great personal risk (several thousand are estimated to have died en route), settling temporarily over the Sudanese border in refugee camps such as Gedaref (Parfitt 1985). The Israeli government airlifted eight thousand Beta Israel clandestinely in January 1985 in what came to be known as Operation Moses (Mivtsa Moshe). Some of the villagers who were left behind moved to Addis Ababa to await later transport to Israel, and a second airlift called Operation Solomon (Mivtsa Shlomo) brought fourteen thousand Beta Israel to Israel in May 1991 during the last days of the Ethiopian Derg regime.
The Beta Israel were thrilled to arrive in Israel but found it difficult to adjust to life there. They did not yet speak the language (and some never learned it), their skills as smiths and potters were unsuited to the Israeli economy, and their extended family networks were broken up by a housing policy that favored the nuclear family (mishpaḥa garinit). The extended families that lived together in households of up to thirty people are scattered today across Israel, with major populations as far apart as Netanya, Rehovot, Kiryat Malakhi, Haifa, and Be’er Sheva. The uprooting of the extended family unit in Israel has caused substantial damage to Ethiopian-Israeli family life (Davids 1999: 139, Elias and Kemp 2010, Weil 2004, Westheimer and Kaplan 1992: 59), fostering ongoing problems of crime, domestic violence, and suicide.
In Israel, Beta Israel are referred to simply as Etyopim, the Hebrew word for Ethiopians, or yotsei Etyopia (those who left Ethiopia). This is a descriptive reference to ethnic origins (edah), consistent with the labeling of other Jewish groups (“Iraqis,” “Yemenites”). It is perhaps not insignificant, though, that the Hebrew term contains no acknowledgment of Jewishness: there has been extensive debate in the rabbinic courts and in the government over whether or not Beta Israel are “really” Jewish (Salomon 1995: 127, 1999: 5). The academic subdiscipline called Beta Israel studies addresses this debate in detail, and the work of scholars is often used to support or deny the credibility of a new group of immigrants. There is no doubt a racialized angle to the rabbinic suspicion, but it is framed in terms of roots and validity of religious practice.
In the past fifteen years the debate over Jewishness has become more complex, since the majority of Ethiopians who have immigrated to Israel since 1992 have been members of a small group known as Falash Mura, or people who converted from Judaism to Christianity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Seeman 2009 explains the paths to and from Judaism in detail).10 They began to immigrate to Israel in the 1990s under family reunification laws, and since then many thousands have converted back to Judaism (Seeman 2009: 91). Today they make up approximately a third of the total Ethiopian-Israeli population, or 45,000 out of an estimated population of 135,000. In the same vein as a Beta Israel-Falash Mura schism (which existed in Ethiopia and remains today in Israel), some Ethiopians in Israel prefer to identify through religious practice, calling themselves Oritawi (Torah-true) or Maryam Wodet (lovers of Mary, or Christians). To avoid wading into debates over religious authenticity, I refer throughout this book to all Ethiopians in Israel as Ethiopian-Israelis. Also, I find that the metaphorical hyphen that separates the two sides of contemporary Beta Israel status—the Ethiopian from the Israeli—succinctly articulates much of the intersectionality and disjunction of the experience of being black in Israel.
GREATER TEL AVIV
This book deals with national imaginaries of citizenship, but most of the action takes place in and around Tel Aviv, a city that is at once distinct (politically, religiously) from the rest of the country and representative of it demographically. Initially I spent a year in south Tel Aviv (July 2008 to July 2009), conducting ethnographic research through participant observation there and in many venues around Israel. I spent little time in Rehovot, the suburb that for two decades had the largest Ethiopian-Israeli population, or Tiberias in the Galilee, which has an enormous absorption center (merkaz klita). I spent no time in Kiryat Malakhi, the “development town” (that is, a town created after the establishment of the state in peripheral regions such as the Galilee and the Negev—see Yiftachel and Meir 1998) with a disproportionately large Ethiopian population relative to its size and remoteness. Instead I carried out most of my research in the major urban centers of Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Jerusalem, as well as smaller cities like Ashkelon that are home to significant Ethiopian-Israeli populations. This multisited work, conducted in Hebrew but with use of Amharic words and phrases, highlights the emergence of new immigrant population cores in urban areas. I cover many of the institutions enumerated by Alex Perullo in his conception of a “music economy” (2011) comprising live music venues (nightclubs and Azmari houses, where I attended live music performances several times per week), music vendors (record stores, where I chatted with patrons and employees and increased my knowledge of contemporary music from Addis Ababa), state-run support bodies (absorption and community centers, where I interviewed musicians and social workers and took lessons in the massenqo, the Azmari’s one-stringed fiddle), and musicians themselves (approximately a dozen of whom I cite by name from interviews in this book, and many more of whom I anonymize).
Tel Aviv’s city center is home to only a small Ethiopian population,11 most Ethiopian-Israelis being dispersed across more remote towns, but as the cultural core of the State of Israel it hosts an avant-garde arts scene and a multicultural atmosphere. Like other urban cultural centers worldwide, it attracts tens of thousands of migrant workers who do the more thankless jobs rejected by Israelis, from cleaning office buildings to picking fruit to caring for the elderly (or, in the case of Eritreans, washing dishes in Tel Aviv’s restaurants). Many of these guest workers depart after a few years, but some stay on as long-term residents, a small but visible number marrying Israelis and raising children who eventually serve in the Israeli military (military service being the ultimate symbol of integration in Zionist tropes). This urban environment full of international culture and migrant workers influenced my research immensely. Conducting fieldwork about marginalized minorities in and around Tel Aviv reveals multiple points of disparity, since the city’s assets (a vibrant arts scene and an abundance of sushi restaurants) and its downsides (the abject poverty of its many immigrants and the exploitation of labor migrants) go hand in hand. Indeed, Ethiopian-Israelis are not the only population that has troubles in Tel Aviv, but they constitute a group that encapsulates the inherent paradoxes and hypocrisies of the cosmopolitan city.
Finally, although I refer throughout this book to Tel Aviv, the city is officially called Tel Aviv-Jaffa, and the relationship of Israeli Jews to their Arab neighbors, on both sides of the Green Line (1949 armistice lines), affects everyday life profoundly. I will touch only briefly in this book on issues pertaining to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but it looms in the background of any discussion of race, ethnicity, class, religion, culture, language, and national identity in modern Israel. It is relevant to this book insofar as the conflict is the source of many Israeli cultural and political anxieties, but I also submit this book as a case study of a minority trying to come to terms with Israeli citizenship through cultural output.
OVERVIEW
In the first three chapters, I unpack the narratives of Ethiopianist, Afrodiasporic, and Zionist imagery. Chapter 1 examines Afrodiasporic myths of citizenship through the work of Ester Rada, perhaps the most prominent Ethiopian-Israeli entertainer today. Through her convention of singing in English, while constructing a composite Afrodiasporic style comprising soul, reggae, jazz, gospel, and Ethio-jazz, she suggests that Ethiopian-Israelis look to the African diaspora as a mechanism for upward mobility and acceptance in Israeli society.
In chapter 2, I outline the Ethiopianist myths that glorify a certain version of Ethiopian history and frame Ethiopian-Israelis as central to