Who Cares About Ethiopians? October 16, 2007

An article from YNet today caught my eye. The body of Gabi Ababao Dwait a”h was returned to Israel from Lebanon on Monday, ending a three-year harrowing experience for the Dwait family, during which they had no idea where he was. No whereabouts. No videotaped messages flooding CNN. Nothing.

YNet reporter Danny Adino Ababa’s op-ed piece today, entitled “Who Cares About Ethiopians?” asks a question which I think should both ask, and answer, itself:

The Dwait family is a typical Ethiopian family whose world collapsed. The family was hit by one tragedy after another: A father who was run over by a car; a brother who committed suicide. For three years now, the family has been engaged in a search for the lost son. The son who nobody heard about, saw, or cared about. He just disappeared. Evaporated.

Just like any of us would do under such circumstances, they turned to the authorities, to the Israel Police. Yet the answer they received at the police stations in Haifa and Be’er Sheva was always the same: “He’s a big boy, he’ll return home.” Just like that. Just another Ethiopian guy wandering around – as if all members of the Ethiopian community are destined to wander forever.

Imagine that Gabi Dwait’s name was in fact Danny Gutshtein; imagine his family was Israeli-born and that his parents had connections in the right places – what would the last three years look like? Wide-scale searches, photos in the media, interviews with leading journalists?…Maybe some good will also come out of the fact that Gabriel Dwait’s tragedy finally exposed the humiliating attitude of the establishment, media, and Israel Police to members of the Ethiopian community.

Danny Admasu, director of the Israel Association of Ethiopian Jews (IAEJ), in his Jerusalem Post interview, shows that the Israeli Mishtara (Police Dept) is not the sole culprit, and that “integration of Ethiopians” into mainstream society (i.e., decreasing passive and covert racism) must be put on the front-burner in numerous arenas:

Admasu believes his role is to create awareness and dialogue so that Ethiopian Jews are more readily integrated and accepted.

“I want people to know that even if they don’t want us here, we are here to stay,” he says in a tone that he has made many an MK sit up and take notice.

“In the beginning, when Ethiopians first arrived here people said, ‘They are not educated; it will take at least 50 years for them to catch up,’ but that has happened much faster than anyone thought. Today, there are many educated Ethiopians, but they still end up working as security guards in the mall.

This is a serious problem and it must be solved. These people are the leaders of their family and their immediate community. If these people, who went to college, end up guarding a mall, everyone in the next generation sees that and says why do we bother? Why do I have to go to college if I will just end up working in a mall? We need to make this a big issue.”

Israeli security forces were unaware Dwait’s body was even in Lebanon until Hezbollah hinted that they had another Israeli there. “He’s a big boy, he’ll come home?” Would any Israeli-born family with “the right connections” even be told such a callous thing by an official? As his death wasn’t caused by Hezbollah fire (he drowned in the Mediterranean Sea), perhaps we can say this caused some of the lag in information gathering (after all, if you’re picking up bodies from a battlefield, drowning victims do begin to fade in priority), but to dismiss a grieving mother for three years and not even be aware of whether or not a soldier is in one’s own country or in enemy territory?

My condolences to the Dwait family, and I hope they are comforted in their time of need. I hope the Ethiopian community gets the representation it deserves. And above all, I hope that the worth of one’s lifeblood does not remain inversely proportional to the amount of melanin in their skin.