Violence in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories has killed more than 50 people — mostly Palestinians — in recent weeks. At least one of the dead, though, was an innocent Eritrean bystander shot and then beaten by an Israeli mob after an Israeli-Arab attacked a bus station.
Haptom Zerhom, 29, was mistaken for the attacker’s accomplice due to his dark skin. A harrowing video has been released from the incident where Zerhom is laying on the floor badly wounded. Certain bystanders seem to be trying to protect Zerhom from further aggressions but others bypassed them, kicking Zerhom in the head while he lay on the ground. A group then is heard chanting “Death to Arabs.”
An innocent Eritrean bystander was shot and then beaten by a mob after a gun attack at an Israeli bus station.https://t.co/Pb0dq4JPr5
— AJ+ (@ajplus) October 20, 2015
According to the New York Times, “Zerhom, whose nickname was Mila, had been working for the past year at a plant nursery in Ein Habesor, a village in southern Israel. His manager, Saguy Malachi, said Mr. Zerhom had gone to Beersheba to renew his work visa. Mr. Malachi described him as a ‘dedicated and pleasant worker’.” None of the mob members, including an Israeli soldier who kicked Zerhom while he was lying on the ground, were arrested.
Such attacks in public spaces often cause panic. The attacker shot and killed a soldier, then took his M16 rifle and wounded 11 more people before being gunned down. But the shooting and subsequent mobbing of Zerhom, who was innocent, unarmed, and reacting to the shooting in the same way as everybody else, highlights growing concern about racial discrimination in Israel toward not just Palestinians but blacks as well.
An Israeli court approved deportation of African refugees…in July
There are around 135,000 people of Ethiopian descent in Israel today, plus another 45,000 refugees primarily from Eritrea and Sudan. “The [Ethiopian] community, which includes many born in Israel, has long complained of discrimination, racism and lack of money. More than half of the Ethiopians in Israel live in poverty and only half graduate from high school,” according to Al-Jazeera.
Life for the refugees is especially difficult as they are given 30 days “to accept Israel’s offer of $3,500 in cash and a one-way ticket home or to an unnamed third country in Africa, or face incarceration at Saharonim prison,” according to the Washington Post. An Israeli court approved deportation of African refugees and asylum seekers to countries like Rwanda and Uganda last July.
“The death of an asylum seeker at the hands of security guards and an angry mob is a tragic but foreseeable outgrowth of a climate in which some Israeli politicians encourage citizens to take the law into their own hands,” Sari Bashi, Israel-Palestine country director at Human Rights Watch, told Al-Jazeera. “The Israeli authorities should investigate and prosecute those responsible for the attack. Israel faces acute threats to public safety, but vigilantism will only lead to more innocent people being harmed or killed.”
But in many ways, racism permeates Israeli society much in the same way it does in the US. Take for example the beating of an Israeli soldier of Ethiopian descent earlier this year by two policemen.
The video of the beating quickly went viral. Damas Pakada, the Ethiopian-Israeli soldier, then met with President Benjamin Netanyahu, who called to eradicate racism in Israel. The policemen who beat Pakada won’t face trial, though one was fired.
“The attorney general claims that Damas struck the cop first, and contradicts this later in his decision. Does the attorney general think the public is stupid or blind? Did he see a different video? It seems he tried to reach a solution that would appease the police,” Pakada’s lawyer, Eyal Abulafiya told Walla News.
Shortly after the video caught the public’s attention, riot police clashed with Ethiopian Jews in Tel-Aviv. Protesters believe the crackdown was harder on them than other Israelis, largely because of their skin color.
“I love this country and I want my children to have a future here, but today I feel more black than Jewish because the state has made us second-class citizens,” a protester named Benny Malassa told AFP.
As Fentahun Assefa-Dawit, head of the advocacy organisation Tebeka, also told AFP, “These demonstrations should bring the responsible authorities to their senses so they realise… there is a problem: that there are discrimination and racism issues in Israel.”
Update:
One of the original working titles of the story indicated that Haptom Zerhom was Ethiopian when he is, in fact, Eritrean.