Ethiopian In Israeli Riot Over Dumping of Donated Blood
Thousands of Ethiopian Jews clashed with riot policemen outside the Prime Minister’s office today in a protest over the news that blood they donated was secretly dumped because of fear that it was contaminated with the virus that causes AIDS.
Israeli officials have said that the blood was accepted from Ethiopians and surreptitiously thrown out so as not to stigmatize the donors publicly. The realization that their blood was rejected seemed to unleash a pent-up sense of humiliation and discrimination among Israel’s 60,000 Ethiopian Jews, an ancient branch of the Jewish people who were brought to Israel in two airlifts in 1984-85 and 1991.
Our blood is as red as yours and we are just as Jewish as you are,” proclaimed one of the many banners in a throng of about 10,000 black Jews that ranged from elderly men and women in traditional Ethiopian dress to youths in jeans and baseball caps. “Apartheid in Israel,” proclaimed another.
Vastly outnumbered by the demonstrators who arrived from all over Israel in dozens of buses and who began pushing their way toward the entrance of the Government building, the police first turned water cannon, then tear gas, on the protesters. The police actions inflamed the crowd, and a new attempt by the police to push the crowd back suddenly filled the air with rocks, flailing batons, screams, tear gas and rubber bullets.
When the rioting subsided, several police officers were reported seriously injured, almost all cars in the vicinity of the Prime Minister’s office had smashed windows, the ground was littered with rocks, and the police and demonstrators alike seemed stunned by the unexpected violence.
Prime Minister Shimon Peres, who was meeting with a delegation of Ethiopian Jews when the worst clashes broke out, condemned the rioting but promised to establish a committee to look into the grievances of the group.
The report about the blood, first published in the daily Maariv, was followed by an explanation from blood-collection officials that they did not use blood from Ethiopian immigrants because of a relatively high rate of H.I.V. infections among them — 520 among 60,000 immigrants, compared with 800 carriers in the rest of the population of 5 million.
Israel tests all donated blood for H.I.V, the virus that causes AIDS, but because the virus often does not show up for six months after infection it excludes certain high-risk groups as donors. In the United States, earlier in the AIDS epidemic blood was not accepted from Haitians, who were thought to be at higher risk of infection. More recently, blood has been excluded only on the basis of high-risk behaviors, like intravenous drug use.
Instead of refusing to take blood from Ethiopian Jews, Israeli officials said they decided to dispose of it quietly so the donors, especially soldiers, would not be stigmatized in public. Most blood in Israel is donated in the army, with entire military units giving together.
For the Ethiopians, the revelation came as a blow. “I’ve never seen them so hurt and angry,” said an Israeli teacher who has long worked with Ethiopians.
The report came on the heels of a suicide of an Ethiopian soldier, the latest of as many as 20 suicides during the last two years among Ethiopian Jewish recruits that apparently resulted from their difficulty in adjusting to the rough and unfamiliar world of the army.
On a recent Israeli television report about the suicides, the brother of a soldier who killed himself talked of the incident as the crisis of a sensitive, religious and naive youth “who didn’t know like everybody else how to cheat and get one’s way in the army.”
The suicides, in turn, have contributed to a sense, especially among young Ethiopian Jews, that they are being patronized and often racially discriminated against in a land they believe to be their own.
While some of the protesters spoke of specific incidents of racial discrimination, most talked of a broader sense of not feeling accepted. Young soldiers told of being assigned to guard duty on nights when there were parties.
"I did two years in the army to become a citizen of Israel like everybody else," said Ziva Tedela, 23. "When they tell me that since 1984 they’ve been spilling the blood, it feels like the army means nothing, that I’ll never be part of Israel, because my color is black and my blood is contaminated. It really hurts."
That sense of alienation began when the Ethiopian Jews first arrived, say Israelis who have worked with the Ethiopian immigrants. From the start, Orthodox Israeli rabbis questioned the authenticity of the immigrants’ Jewishness. The Ethiopians were often housed in trailer parks. Many Ethiopian youths were placed in special boarding schools, special classes or vocational schools.
Israeli officials have said those measures were taken to help the Ethiopians integrate into Israeli society, but a result was that many Ethiopians came to feel that they were being segregated.
"Obviously this matter with the blood gets to the root of race, and whether Ethiopian Jews feel truly accepted here in Israel," said Micha Odenheimer, an American-born Israeli who directs the Israel Association for Ethiopian Jews and has sharply criticized the Government’s education policies toward the Ethiopians.
"This did not happen in a vacuum," he added. "The anger stems from young people who feel sharply that they have not been given an opportunity to fully integrate."
The uproar over the blood appeared to catch the Government by surprise. Police officials said they had not expected so many protesters, nor so much passion from people perceived as unaggressive.
The Minister of Health, Dr. Ephraim Sneh, acknowledged that he did not know of the blood-dumping policy, but tried at first to defend the policy of the Magen David Adom, the Israeli blood-collection agency. Dr. Amnon Ben-David, director of the agency’s blood services, said, “We thought that singling out an ethnic group and telling them to go home would be more offensive and embarrassing.”
These explanations reflected a broader sense expressed by Israelis that their efforts to integrate the Ethiopian Jews may at times have been misguided and insensitive, but not racist. Officials noted that huge sums and efforts have been devoted to housing, educating and training a group of immigrants who arrived often illiterate and utterly unprepared for Israel’s technologically advanced and highly mobile society.
Even then, many of the problems with absorption that Ethiopians have experienced are shared with other large immigrant groups, like the Jews who arrived from North Africa in the 1950’s, or more recently the arrivals from the former Soviet Union. Many Israelis hold a special admiration for the Ethiopian Jews for maintaining their traditions through the centuries.
"There were mistakes, but the Government’s intentions toward the Ethiopian Jews are good," said Harry Wall, Israel director of the Anti-Defamation League. "It isn’t a racial issue, but it has been handled insensitively. They have missed many of the nuances on how to relate to a community that is so different from any other immigrant population that Israel has. That leaves the impression that there could be race-related factors."
But many young Ethiopian Jews, frustrated by their slow integration into Israeli society and inspired by the civil rights campaigns of American blacks, have come to see their plight as a result of their skin color.
"They always told us, and we always believed, that we are one people," said Shula Hula, 23, a student at Hebrew University. "Now they have proven that they were lying."
Photos: Israeli police officers carried away a wounded Ethiopian Jewyesterday after violence erupted at a protest against the policy of throwing away blood donations from Ethiopian Jews because of fears of the AIDS virus. (Reuters)
