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Comments:  36
Ethiopian students affair shows prevalent racism in Israel
By Gideon Levy, Haaretz Correspondent
Tags: Racism, Gideon Levy 

All of a sudden, we can say "racism." A shock wave has struck complacent Israeli society. A few dozen Ethiopian children were not accepted to religious schools in Petah Tikva. That is truly terrible, everyone tsked-tsked at the heart-rending picture of Aschalo Sama, a boy without a school. Even President Shimon Peres expressed shock. Everyone is permitted to be shocked; it is politically correct.

Oh, how beautiful we are, how enlightened we seem to ourselves. Look how we fight racism, undaunted and uncompromising. And yet, in a twinkling, this shame will be forgotten, and we will be left with the many other manifestations of society's racism, to which we remain sleepily indifferent.

That's the way we are. From time to time, when the sewage overflows, and the stink spreads everywhere and we can no longer hold our noses, we all cry out against injustice until, once again, the cover is closed. The water underneath continues to froth and stink, but it will be covered and repressed.
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It is difficult to know, for example, how many self-righteous and tsking parents would have agreed to register their children in a class with a majority of children of Ethiopian origin. And how many would rent an apartment to an Arab student? But far be it for them to count that as racism. And how many parents are shocked by the nightly selection at the clubs where their adolescent children go for a good time? Routinely, young "others" are excluded - Ethiopians, Arabs, Druze, and sometimes Mizrahim, too. Foreigners are barred for having dark skin, and no protest is heard.

Every day security guards check people entering Ben-Gurion International Airport on whether their accent sounds Arab, and no one complains. That is not racism. It's how we have organized for ourselves an ethical code of double and triple moral standards. We fight against a few manifestations and close our eyes to other, far worse, examples.

The case of the Petah Tikva pupils is the tip of the racism iceberg. Children engender special feelings; shameful revelations about the school system will always yield a scandal. But the very week the country was in a huff over the Ethiopians, Nir Hasson reported in Haaretz that Jerusalem invests NIS 577 a year in a pupil from East Jerusalem and NIS 2,372 in a pupil from West Jerusalem. Four times less, only because of the child's ethnicity. That does not count here as racism. Neither does the fact that East Jerusalem lacks about 1,000 classrooms, only because its residents are Palestinian. No one howls against these revelations, no one is infuriated by them, including the president, who fights against racism.

Now that we can use the term "racism," the time has come to admit our society is absolutely racist, that all its components are racist. The legal system, for example, is no less tainted than Petah Tikva's Morasha school. In many cases there is one law for a Jew and another for an Arab. The Bank of Israel, a state institution no less than the Morasha school, with 900 employees, has always been "clean" of Arab employees except sometimes one or two. Some 70,000 Israeli citizens, all Arab of course, are living in unrecognized villages, without electricity or running water, without an access road and sometimes without a school. Why? Because they are Arabs. Every week at soccer matches we hear racist epithets and chants, the kind teams in Europe are severely penalized for. Here, the referees do not even bother reporting them.

The latest incident occurred last week at the Doha Stadium in Sakhnin in a match between Bnei Sakhnin and Beitar Jerusalem.

And we have said nothing yet about the attitude toward foreign workers, the occupation (the greatest racist curse) nor about the attitude toward Mizrahim since the founding of the state. The list is long and shameful.

When the children of Petah Tikva have all found schools to attend , even though their skin is black, society will not stop being racist. It will return very quickly to business as usual and self-satisfaction. See how there was racism here, we fought it and it disappeared without a trace.
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  1.   Nobody is asleep but you Gideon 05:55  |  A Nice Fellow 03/09/09
  2.   Sorry, but this is news only to Israelis (if at all) 06:02  |  Kelly Brians 03/09/09
  3.   so what should we do? 06:21  |  peter rouget 03/09/09
  4.   Presence of Racism does not equal prevalent 06:55  |  Brad 03/09/09
  5.   Jews are not perfect 06:55  |  Faizal 03/09/09
  6.   Just because, Gideon Levy 07:04  |  Edifice 03/09/09
  7.   Wiothout outer ennemies, israeli society is falling apart 07:05  |  Kris Lazar 03/09/09
  8.   gideon levy - loves israel 07:20  |  jeremy 03/09/09
  9.   I love to see a Gay convert to Judaism teach in Arab schools! 07:30  |  arthur 03/09/09
  10.   Don`t be too harsh on yourself 07:35  |  Simon 03/09/09
  11.   Oh the painful ignorance of Gideon Levy 08:29  |  Joe Sittizen 03/09/09
  12.   Equality of Opportunity and Security 08:48  |  Art 03/09/09
  13.   Mr Levy, do not hurt the just cause of these chidren 09:00  |  dan 03/09/09
  14.   Well, what`s special about the Ethiopians is... 09:03  |  Colin Wright 03/09/09
  15.   observation 10:19  |  potobac 03/09/09
  16.   The racism is here daily 10:25  |  Axel 03/09/09
  17.   Ethiopians - A source of pride, a source of shame 10:26  |  Leon Blaustein 03/09/09
  18.   To the self proclaimed "Nice Fellow" 10:29  |  Brendan Holleran 03/09/09
  19.   How surprising! You forgot Ein Kerem, 10:41  |  Binyamin Dissen 03/09/09
  20.   To The NAACP: Racism in Israel 10:50  |  Elika S. Kohen 03/09/09
  21.   Ethiopian student affair 11:03  |  A.ABRAHAMS 03/09/09
  22.   HEADLINE shows Gideon is ready to generalise about Israel 11:31  |  PETER SM 03/09/09
  23.   AXEL IS that the PREVALENT view ?Which survey are you quoting? 11:36  |  PETER SM 03/09/09
  24.   This racism is about ignorance 11:46  |  Charles 03/09/09
  25.   I would not agree 14:02  |  Jo 03/09/09
  26.   anti-Ethiopian racism vs anti-Arab "racism" 14:10  |  yona 03/09/09
  27.   racism in Israel (the so-called Ultra Orthodox) 14:15  |  Gerald -- Zang 03/09/09
  28.   shame on us 14:16  |  oz 03/09/09
  29.   WRIGHT Israel is pushing these children INTO the schools NOT out 14:27  |  PETER SM 03/09/09
  30.   Ethopian Students 15:26  |  lynn fux 03/09/09
  31.   Solomon`s Descendants 15:59  |  Walid 03/09/09
  32.   To # 9 Arthur 16:00  |  Shoded Yam 03/09/09
  33.   Gideon, 16:01  |  Quebec observer 03/09/09
  34.   Why exactly is that Racism Gideon: Because they are Ethiopians? 20:11  |  AA 03/09/09
  35.   Anti-Semitism at its worse 18:53  |  Lese Majeste 06/09/09
  36.   forgot a few details 18:59  |  mikael 09/09/09
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