Focus on Issues: Ethiopian Anger over Blood Bank Reveals Community’s Deep Agony

While Israelis, including many in the Ethiopian community, were shocked by the enormity of Sunday’s violent confrontations between Ethiopian Jews and Jerusalem police, perhaps they should not have been.

For more than a decade, after Israel airlifted tens of thousands of Jews from famine-ridden Ethiopia from 1984 to 1985 and again in 1991, community leaders have been complaining about inferior housing, jobs and education.

“If Israelis don’t know about our problems, they haven’t been listening,” Adiso Masala, one of the community’s most vocal activists, said during Sunday’s rally outside the Prime Minister’s Office.

Those problems – which include what Ethiopian community leaders consider a longstanding pattern of discrimination by Israeli government authorities – have long been simmering.

But revelations last week regarding how Ethiopian blood donations were routinely being handled brought emotions to the boiling point.

Leaders of Israel’s Ethiopian community organized the demonstration after the Israeli daily Ma’ariv revealed that Magen David Adom, which operates the country’s nationwide blood bank, routinely discards blood donated by Ethiopian olim out of fear that the blood is contaminated with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

Israeli Health Minister Ephraim Sneh said last week that his ministry would continue its policy about blood donations from high-risk groups in order to protect public health.

According to the ministry, Ethiopians are 50 times more likely to the HIV carriers than other Israelis. Of the 60,000 olim from Ethiopia – a country where AIDS is widespread – 520 have been identified as HIV positive, according to the ministry.

“The blood bank has the right to discard blood if necessary, and all countries screen high-risk groups,” said Dr. Shlomo Maayan, an AIDS researcher at Hadassah Hospital.

“The difference is that while other Israelis, including homosexuals and those who have had hepatitis or malaria, are given questionnaire and asked to pre- screen themselves, Ethiopians have not been given that opportunity,” he said.

“This is extremely condescending and patronizing,” he said. “Israelis must stop patronizing Ethiopians.”

Although the Ethiopian community’s elders dealt with community problems back in the towns and villages of Ethiopia, in Israel it is the young people – educated in Israel and fluent in Hebrew – who organize rallies and address Knesset members.

During Sunday’s demonstration, which lasted most of the day, some of the 10,000 demonstrators clashed with scores of Israeli police armed with riot gear.

At least 50 Ethiopian Jews and police were injured in the demonstrations. Two police officers were severely injured when stones and other objects were thrown at them.

Although rally organizers and police blamed each other for the escalation of tensions, many eyewitnesses were critical of the police department’s decision to bring in water cannons and tear gas.

Several demonstrators, many of them elderly, as well as dozens of police officers, became ill when the wind changed direction and blew clouds of tear gas directly over them.

In a statement, a Jerusalem police spokesman defended police actions, saying that far more demonstrators had turned out than the 1,000 authorized in the original permit.

The spokesman indicated that even stronger measures than water cannons and tear gas were employed.

“In order to maintain the integrity of the perimeter around the Prime Minister’s Office, a limited number of rubber bullets were fired along with three shock grenades,” the statement said.

“These actions were taken as a last resort to prevent the mob from actually entering the Prime Minister’s Office.”

Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres voiced an apology for the events leading up to Sunday’s demonstration.

“I don’t think that what has happened was a matter of a policy, but of a mistake,” he said, referring to the way Ethiopian blood donations were handled.

“I regret” the recent developments he said, adding that Israel’s Ethiopians “were hurt, they were insulted.”

During Sunday’s weekly Cabinet meeting, Peres invited Ethiopian community leaders into his office to discuss their grievances.

Peres, Sneh and Absorption Minister Yair Tsaban promised to form a committee to examine the Ethiopians’ demands.

While Ethiopian leaders initially called demonstration to protest the national blood bank’s practice of discarding blood donated by Ethiopians, the violence that ensued was spurred by something far deeper.

According to Micha Odenheimer, director of the Israeli Association of Ethiopian Jews, this week’s demonstration “was years in the making.

“It was an expression of the Ethiopians’ outrage that, over the years, they have not really been absorbed into Israeli society.”

The community “feels pushed into the margin of Israeli society,” Odenheimer said.

“Despite some efforts by the government,” he said, “many Ethiopian children still learn in largely segregated classrooms. Unemployment is high, and Ethiopians are the poorest ethnic group in Israel today.”

Odenheimer warned that unless something is done quickly to reverse these negative trends, “Ethiopian Jews will become a permanent black underclass.”

“We need to stop the cycle of poverty, and that involves providing the children with good education.”

In any discussion with Ethiopian activists, their first concern tends to be education.

For many years, at least two-thirds of Ethiopians in primary school attended segregated “absorption classes.”

An even larger percentage of teen-agers were – and still are – sent to religious boarding schools, where many of their fellow students hail from “problem homes.”

Although no one denies that the boarding schools were a good stopgap measure, because many youngsters arrived in Israel without their parents, Odenheimer said both the boarding schools and segregated classes actually hurt the very children they were supposed to help.

“Segregating kids prevents them from integrating, and the level of education tends to be lower,” he said. “Sending teen-agers away from home hurts the fabric of the family, and the parents eventually lose their authority over their children.”

After numerous demonstrations by Masala and other Ethiopian activists, the government decided to change the police on education about three years ago.

The Ministry of Absorption, which gradually assumed responsibility for absorbing new immigrants from the Jewish Agency for Israel in the early 1990s, called on the government to mainstream schoolchildren.

Preferring to see the cup half full rather than half empty, Amnon Be’eri, spokesman for the Ministry of Absorption, said, “I wouldn’t say there haven’t been problems or mistakes but we are doing the best we can.”

As proof, Be’eri points to the government’s housing plan for Ethiopian immigrants.

Unlike other immigrant groups, which receive discounts on home mortgages, Ethiopian families are entitled to grants that cover 85 percent of the cost of an apartment, up to $110,000.

Thanks to this scheme, the vast majority of Ethiopians have been able to move out of caravan parks and into permanent housing.

Ethiopian activists do not deny that the government is trying, but they regard the efforts as too little, too late.

“The government is making an effort, but it hasn’t been systematic enough or serious enough,” said Masala.

“About a year ago, the Ministry of Education created a task force to find solutions to these problems, to help the children advance and give them the help they need,” he said.

“Instead of funding the task force’s suggestions, the government gave only $5 million of the $18 million needed to see the project through.”

The feeling among Ethiopian immigrants that they are victims of discrimination in Israel runs deep.

“I’m here today because the government blood bank doesn’t want my blood, and this has hurt me personally,” said Estie Hananya, a 15-year-old from Rishon Lezion, who was among the protestors Sunday.

“Today they don’t want my blood because I am black. Tomorrow they may not want my brain. People have called me a `kushit,’ a nigger.”

Trying to avoid the tear gas soldiers were discharging into the air, Hananya added, “We came here because we are Jews and we had a dream. A lot of people died in the Sudan on their away to Israel. We though we would be welcome.

“The decision not to use our blood, to give us inferior education – I call this racism.”