Ethiopian riot in Rabin Square

They riot in Baltimore, in Ferguson, in Washington, in Los Angeles, and I think 'How terrible!' But they are goyim, they are different. Ethiopian Jews rioting in Tel Aviv is something different. It touches me more immediately. What were the two policemen thinking when they beat the Ethiopian soldier that sparked these riots? What was the Ethiopian soldier doing? It is easy to understand that Ethiopians feel disadvantaged, discriminated. They come, after all, from a world so different from that of the Ashkenazi Israelis. Their poverty, their isolation is so far removed from the baggage of European Jews, or even Jews from the Middle East and North Africa, a baggage stuffed with memories of persecution and murder and a sense of resilience. Davke, they tried to kill us but we will show them that we are not so easy to annihilate. The deep historical roots of Ethiopian Jews do not prepare them for the life they found in Israel. But nor were the impoverished shtetl Jews prepared for the society of assimilated Central and Western European Jews. The Hungarians, the Germans, the Sabras, looked down on the Polishers. They were noisy, their manners were uncouth, they were persistent, dragged you into their shops to sell you something. This was not how cultured Europeans behaved. And they had old fashioned medieval beliefs. They withdrew into closed circles that reproduced the shtetl environment they knew. They were an embarrassment to those who over a few generations left that environment behind. But there was a degree of empathy, and a large degree of charity that linked all the diverse different Jews. When Israelis offered the Jews of Ethiopia a refuge, a home in Israel, it was this spirit that underpinned it. We are all different, but we are all Jews, a persecuted minority linked with an attachment to the Torah. I am sure that the Ethiopian Israeli soldier who arrived in Israel as a seven year old orphan had his dreams that involved being like everybody else around him. He joined the army and he was no longer an Ethiopian, he was an Israeli soldier. Whatever occasioned the assault on him must have dented his dream and aspirations. The story goes that when someone told Dizengoff, the mayor of old Tel Aviv that a murder had occurred in the newly found city, he said thank God, we are like all other people. We don't want to be like all the goyim in Baltimore. We must not be like all other people.