For some time now, young people in Kiryat Gat have been talking about the poor girl, whose troubles led her to the tragic encounter that ended with her murder. Even now, two months after, almost no one knows her full name. Everyone refers to her as "the Ethiopian girl."
The tribulations of absorption in a new land are painful, and it takes time for the immigrants to become Israelis. Assi, a counselor at the city's absorption center, talks of how his son, who was born in Israel, found himself in a class with children who were born in the former Soviet Union. For some reason, he was always referred to as the new immigrant, even though he was the only native-born Israeli. "It's the color," says Assi. "You can't escape it. Even if you're a sabra and your father is a sabra - if you're Ethiopian, you will forever remain a new immigrant."
Immediately after their arrival in Israel, Mantagwosh (Mika) Debebe's family was sent to live in the Shoftim quarter, the home of the Ethiopian community in the city. Nearly 4,000 Ethiopian immigrants live there in crowded conditions, in four- and five-story buildings that previously housed immigrants from the Caucasus, before they upgraded and left for new neighborhoods. Most of the Ethiopian immigrants have still not adjusted to the new life. Even now, a decade or even two decades after their arrival, they walk around, blank expressions on their faces, huddling around the entrances of the residential buildings. They can't cope with the burning hot apartments, and do what they can to escape the oppressive heat.
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A different life was awaiting them in their new land. The open landscapes vanished, the social encounters disappeared, the family atmosphere was gone. Families were assigned to Amidar and Amigur public housing apartments, and shuttered themselves inside. Here and there, they would meet at mass events. Chaim Shalom, who is in charge of social-welfare services in the city, says weddings and funerals have become the main events at which members of the community turn out to see one another. Thousands of people met most recently to accompany Mika along her final path.
The rumor about the discovery of her body spread like wildfire. At the funeral, people were talking about the brutal way the girl died. Chaim took part in the ritual of preparing the body for burial, and shuddered at what he saw. "At first glance, you wouldn't have known it was a person," he recalls. "After the bastards murdered her, they burned her body, but not before they butchered her. It was ghastly."
The funeral took place on a Friday, two months ago, shortly after her body was positively identified, after having been thrown into an open garbage dump in Rahat. The mother, her face tattooed, broke down in sobs over her daughter's grave. Neighbors said she was lamenting - in Amharic - her own bitter fate. Since moving to Israel, the mother had been compelled to raise her children by herself, after her husband had died in Sudan on the way to Israel. The sounds of crying next to the grave could not mask the beautiful young woman's own twisted fate. Everyone knew her secret. Girlfriends from her class in the ORT school envied the wild life she led outside of school and outside the city. At every opportunity, she told them about how her Bedouin friends spoiled her and showered her with love.
The girlfriends saw nothing wrong with these relationships. Here, far from the good life of the other Israel, groups of immigrants live side by side, having brought with them diverse cultural codes. Immigrants from Ethiopia alongside immigrants from the FSU alongside veteran immigrants from North Africa alongside Arab youths from Bedouin villages. They are alien to normative Israeli existence and lifestyle. Which may explain why the posh cinema that was built in the new shopping mall in central Kiryat Gat closed only nine months after it opened. Not a single film, Israeli or foreign, was able to draw much of an audience.
Cloistered conditions
Of all the immigrant groups living in the south, the Ethiopians are the worst off. The more the Ethiopian immigrants try to make their way into Israeli society, the more it eludes them. Mika also tried to pave her way in, but did not succeed. Acquaintances say that is why she drifted into distant and dangerous fields. "This is what happens when you discover you are not wanted, and that you are not desired anywhere," says attorney Moshe Samo. "We, who came from Ethiopia, live in a trap. You try as hard as you can to distance yourself from your parents' culture so that you can become Israeli, but you always end up going back to the place you started from. There's something about Israelis that makes them unwilling to accept Ethiopians. It is very painful."
We were sitting earlier this week in Shoftim Park, near the Shoftim quarter, where immigrants from Ethiopia live in cloistered conditions. Samo has been a lawyer for seven years. He recently moved to Kiryat Gat from Elazar, the settlement in Gush Etzion, because he felt a need to do something for the good of his community: an attorney who had made a success of himself, he decided to serve as a model for imitation to young people in the town.
Samo, 33, immigrated to Israel at the age of seven. He is certain that times have changed. For the worse. When he was about to enter high school, he vacillated between a religious boarding school with other Ethiopian pupils, or Kfar Haroeh, an elitist knitted-skullcap boarding school. He decided in favor of Kfar Haroeh, because he believed it would make him Israeli. Samo still looks back with longing to the Sabbath eves when his friends in the dormitory would vie with one another to see who would get to invite him to their homes for the festive meal. "Everyone wanted to take an Ethiopian home, because it was exotic," he recalls. "Now that's over." Israeli society, he says, has rejected the Ethiopians.
In his opinion, this rejection is the mother of all sin. It is what pushes many young people of the community to the far margins of life. It pushed Mika into the abyss. "There is an expression commonly used in the town - 'Rahat girls,' referring to young women from the community who hang out with Bedouin from Rahat," he explained. "Let's tell the truth. It's like a forbidden love that develops between two minorities, neither of which belong to the dominant group. The problem is that these are girls of 14 or 15, who are tempted by young Bedouin men who offer them all manners of enticement. It can be perfume, it can be a meal in a restaurant, and it can also be treatment that is different from how they get treated at home. All of a sudden, the girl feels she is like every other girl in Israel. It does something to her."
He says the intimacy offered by the young Bedouin must be understood against the background of the collision of values here. Ethiopian immigrants brought with them a quiet, introverted, modest culture, and find themselves up against a lifestyle that is never quiet, that never stops talking and that suffers from a tendency to make a commotion and yell and shout. "It goes further than that," adds Moshe. "We have no culture of showing intimacy. Everything is kept inside. Whereas with you, everything is on the outside. It is here that a terrible disconnect is formed between young people and parents."
Mika was drawn into a similar whirlpool. At home, she felt imprisoned. Outside, she spread wings and sensed an infinite freedom. Chaim Shlomo, who has worked with the Ethiopian community since it settled in Kiryat Gat, says this sense of freedom works like a big bang that causes the girls to run away from home in a search for broad horizons. In recent years, Rahat has become a popular destination. "Every so often, a mother comes to me and reports that her daughter has gone with the Bedouin," he says. "If it is non-Jewish Russian girls, I don't care. But when it is a Jewish girl, I get into the picture and try to bring her home. If it were a question of true love, maybe I would understand it. But to my regret, they are taking advantage of the girls."
Emotionally charged
Shalom, who became more religious after his son died from a disease, knows of four local Ethiopian young women who now live in Bedouin villages. "A few months before she was murdered," he recalls, "I saw Mika at a hitchhiking station with a Russian girlfriend. I stopped to talk with her, but it didn't help."
Samo says the encounter with the Bedouin is emotionally charged from the start. "The Bedouin fellow comes with a fancy car, takes the Ethiopian girl to clubs, wraps her up in an effusive type of affection. Here in our community, if you show things on the outside, you are showing weakness. In Israel, if you are silent and reserved, you are considered weak, and nobody respects you. Which is why the parents do not understand the children. Because in their mentality, they have remained in Ethiopia, while their children have already internalized the Israeli codes."
The brutal murder took place two months ago, but at the request of the police was not publicized. The body was found and was brought to burial without any audible public response. Only last week, when the identity of two young men suspected of the murder was revealed, did authorities allow the affair to be made public. The long delay was a source of strong emotions among members of the community in the city and elsewhere. How is it that a teenager who was murdered gets publicity in newspapers and on television, while the murder of a girl from our community does not? It is as if the murder of the girl from our community never happened. Some people drew the conclusion that the life of an Ethiopian girl is cheap in comparison with that of an "Israeli" girl.
"Take, for example, Maayan Sapir, the girl from Rehovot," said Moshe Samo. "The whole country knows her name, and the whole country was talking about her day and night. Here, a girl was burned, and no outcry was heard. I find it very disturbing. Somebody set fire to a 15-year-old girl in the middle of a city, and the media remain silent."
Mika's friends and acquaintances, who insisted on remaining unnamed, relate to the tragic incident as the tip of the iceberg, of a community that has been placed in a bubble, and which lives its life in awful wretchedness. Of all the sins committed here, the sin of rejection has been the toughest one to accept. "The moment a girl like this feels better in the arms of a Bedouin than in the arms of a Jew, that says it all," says M., who was familiar with the lifestyle Mika led.
The climax of this long chapter of rejection is the "blood donation affair," the exposure of which in January 1999 set emotions high in Israel. No other event caused members of the community to feel so inferior and so unwanted. It was learned that blood donated by members of the community was thrown into the trash, without any use made of it. "Even the blood of dogs is treated better," said leaders of the community at the time. Samo remembers the affair as if it happened yesterday. "Do you know what it means when they don't want your blood, with all the symbolism blood has?" he fumed. "After the blood affair, people threw out their Israeli names and reverted to using their Ethiopian names."
This rejection gave rise to the feelings of hatred that many Ethiopian young people have for the country. These feelings led them to adopt black music and black singers from other countries, especially Jamaica. "Once Israeli society rejected them, why would they listen to Israeli music or love Israel?" wonders Assi from the absorption center.
An integrated whole
Mohammed Yunis - editor of the weekly Akhbar al-Naqab (News of the Negev), published in Rahat, says that Mika's case is not indicative of the complex relationship between the Bedouin community and the Ethiopian community. As far as he can tell, the murder was committed against a romantic background and had nothing to do with race or nationality. This Tuesday, he sent his newspaper to press without finding any need to devote any room to the murder. No, it is not strange for Bedouin youths to be spending time with young Jewish women. For years now, a wonderful friendship has developed between the Bedouin community and the immigrant communities in Israel. "The Bedouin live in the society around them," he explained. "You will barely find any place in southern Israel, in which Bedouin do not work. We live in an integrated whole. My newspaper appeals to all of the population groups, not only the Bedouin sector. The Arabs are becoming part of the weave of Jewish life, and the Jews are becoming part of the weave of Arab life. All of us speak Hebrew, and all of us read newspapers in Hebrew, listen to the radio and watch television in Hebrew."
To some extent, it is easier for young Bedouin men to make connections with young Jewish women. With them, the obstacles of language, religion and tribe are broken down. Israeli permissiveness has permeated the Bedouin sector and undermined rigid and ancient norms. Yunis says it is easier for a young Bedouin to become friendly with a young Jewish woman than with a young Bedouin woman from another tribe. This explains why there has been a revolution in recent years in the marital framework of the Bedouin. "They are marrying young Russian women," says Yunis. "And you won't find a single Bedouin settlement that does not have Russian women married to Bedouin. It has reached the point that some men are leaving their wives to take up with Russian women. Go to the sharia court and see the drama that is being played out every day, in which Bedouin women are complaining that their husbands have left them because of Russian women.
"There is a similar trend among Ethiopian women. The Bedouin recognized the Falashmura even before the rabbis recognized them as Jews. The young Bedouin man does not demand conversion and does not want immersion in ritual baths, he wants her, and nothing more."
Yunis admits it's easier for minority groups to establish connections between themselves. The rejected parties find a common language and create a new reality that cuts across national, racial and political differences. "Coexistence is not only in the romantic realm," he adds. "Regretfully, there is also very extensive collaboration in criminal realms." Mika, the Ethiopian girl who failed to find her niche in the Israeli social landscape, is a tragic victim of this collaboration.
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