An Academic Attempt to Frame Israel as a Devious Colonial Enterprise
By Georgia Leigha Leatherdale Gilholy, CAMERA’s UK Campus Associate
“Educator” Nimrod Evron and groups including King’s College London Action Palestine hosted a virtual discussion on Ethiopian Jews in Israel on July 5 to frame their experience as part of a “global struggle against racial injustice” recently publicized by the Black Lives Matter movement. The key speaker was Efrat Yerday, a lecturer at Tel Aviv University and a leading figure in activism for Ethiopians in Israel.
It was evident from the outset of the meeting that Evron was out to dismiss the reality of Israeli society so as to frame it as a devious colonial enterprise. He guided the discussion with statements such as “Israel is a white, European culture” and “Israel is a white-supremacist society.” This shouldn’t come as a surprise since Evron is the facilitator of the “Occupation 101 Course” that boasts that it does not aim to be “balanced” or “equal” to “both sides” in its history of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Yerday supported Evron’s extreme narrative by suggesting that “Ethiopians are sick of being depicted as people who should be grateful to their white ‘saviours’ for … barely qualifying as Jews.” Her rhetoric is a textbook radical attempt to generalize entire identity groups as possessing a monolithic experience and political agenda simply because they are not “white,” and reinforces the myth that non-Ethiopian Jews derive privilege from being “white.” There have been plenty of wranglings between the Ethiopian religious tradition and rabbinic Judaism, but this has generally been associated with theological qualms rather than racism. Ethiopian Jews are visible across Israeli politics, religious life and entertainment, yet Evron and Yerday deliberately presented events through a narrow lens of racial oppression so to misconstrue Israel as being uniquely evil.
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