In 1991, Israel pulled off one of the most extraordinary humanitarian operations in modern history. In just 36 hours, Operation Solomon airlifted 14,000 Ethiopian Jews to the Jewish state. It was the culmination of decades of effort to bring the Beta Israel community home. The world applauded. Israel celebrated.
Then came what happened next.
The boss flagged this one, and it is the kind of story that demands telling plainly: Israel’s Ethiopian Jewish community, numbering roughly 150,000 people and comprising about 1.7% of the population, has faced systemic discrimination touching nearly every aspect of life. From coerced contraception to discarded blood donations, from segregated kindergartens to police killings, the gap between the heroic rescue and the lived reality is wide and well-documented.
Not Jewish Enough
The discrimination began before Ethiopian Jews even landed. The Israeli religious establishment cast doubt on their Jewishness despite centuries of documented practice. The Chief Rabbinate required Ethiopian immigrants to undergo symbolic conversion, including ritual immersion, because their isolated tradition diverged from mainstream Rabbinic JudaismThe mainstream form of Judaism, based on the Talmud and the legal rulings of rabbinical authorities, as distinct from earlier or isolated Jewish traditions.. No other Jewish immigrant group faced this requirement at scale.
The late Sephardic Chief Rabbi Ovadia Yosef had ruled in 1973 that Beta Israel were fully Jewish, descendants of the biblical tribe of Dan. But the rabbinical establishment chose to override that ruling for decades. It was not until a 2020 decision that the Chief Rabbinate officially affirmed what should have been obvious: these people are Jewish.
By then, the damage was done. As Prof. Tamar Hermann of the Israel Democracy Institute wrote, the Orthodox establishment’s questioning of Ethiopian Jewishness fed every other form of discrimination that followed.
Blood They Would Not Take
In 1996, Israelis learned that Magen David Adom had been secretly discarding blood donated by Ethiopian Jews over fears of HIV contamination. Not testing it. Not screening it. Throwing it away, while accepting it at donation centers to avoid confrontation.
About 10,000 Ethiopian Jews marched on the Prime Minister’s office in Jerusalem in protest. Police responded with water cannons and tear gas. The ban on Ethiopian blood donations was not fully lifted until 2017, more than two decades later.
Births They Would Not Allow
In 2013, after five years of denials, Israeli officials admitted to targeting Ethiopian Jewish women with long-acting contraceptive injections without proper consent. Women in Israeli-run transit camps in Ethiopia were given Depo Provera shots, many under the understanding that refusal would block their immigration.
One woman’s testimony, reported by the Center for Genetics and Society: “We said we won’t have the shot. They told us, ‘if you don’t you won’t go to Israel… you won’t get aid or medical care.’ We were afraid… We didn’t have a choice.”
The numbers are stark. Between 2005 and 2008, 57% of the 4,833 Israeli women injected with Depo Provera were of Ethiopian origin, despite Ethiopians being less than 2% of the population. In the decade following, the Ethiopian birthrate in Israel dropped by 50%.
Schools That Shut Them Out
Education, theoretically the great equalizer, has been another arena of exclusion. In 2011, 281 Ethiopian children were unlawfully denied school registration in the Central District. In 2019, ultra-Orthodox schools in Jerusalem refused to enroll Ethiopian children entirely.
Perhaps the most revealing incident came when an Ethiopian mother brought her daughter to kindergarten in Kiryat Gat and found the child placed in a classroom composed exclusively of Ethiopian youngsters, with a separate entrance. The school cited geography. The parents saw skin color.
The data backs the parents. A 2024 comptroller’s report found that only 54% of Ethiopian high school students finishing 12th grade in 2022 were eligible for university-standard matriculation certificates, compared to 75% for the general Jewish population. That is a 21-percentage-point gap, forty years after the major immigration waves.
Police Violence
The deadliest manifestation of this discrimination comes through law enforcement. Ethiopian Israelis are targeted by police at higher rates than other Jewish Israelis, according to data from the Association of Ethiopian Jews. Young men are stopped daily, questioned, and can end up with criminal files opened against them or worse.
In June 2019, 18-year-old Solomon Tekah was killed by an off-duty police officer in Haifa. The officer fired a warning shot at the ground; a fragment ricocheted and hit Tekah fatally. Tens of thousands of Ethiopian Israelis took to the streets, blocking major intersections across the country. In April 2024, the officer was acquitted of negligent manslaughter. His family later received NIS 1.8 million (about $580,000) in a civil settlement.
Tekah was not an isolated case. In 2014, 22-year-old Yosef Salamsa was tasered by police and left outside a station in Zichron Yaakov. Months later, he was found dead, having taken his own life. In 2018, Yehuda Biadga, 24 and mentally ill, was shot by police who said he charged an officer with a knife.
The Economic Gap
According to a 2024 Israeli State Comptroller’s report, the monthly average wage of Ethiopian Israelis is 33% lower than the average for other Jewish Israelis. More than half of Ethiopian families live below the poverty line, and the proportion of Ethiopian students with university degrees is the smallest of any Jewish population group.
State Comptroller Matanyahu Englman put it plainly: “It can’t be that in 2024, over 40 years after the waves of immigration from Ethiopia, there are still significant gaps between Ethiopian Israelis and the rest of the population.” He then added: “Whoever is good enough to sacrifice their life for the state must have his rights protected by the state.”
Dying for a Country That Will Not Fully Accept Them
That last point cuts deep. Ethiopian Israelis serve in the IDF at rates comparable to or above the general population. But within the military, they face the same disparities. In 2017, Ethiopian soldiers made up about 4% of IDF personnel but accounted for 10.78% of male military prisoners and 15.07% of female military prisoners.
Since October 7, 2023, 40 Ethiopian-Israeli soldiers have been killed in Gaza and on the northern front. At 1.7% of the population, they account for over 4% of IDF combat deaths. They fight and die at disproportionate rates for a country that still debates whether they belong.
Still Waiting
Meanwhile, roughly 14,000 Jews remain in Ethiopia, most with first-degree relatives already in Israel. In 2022, the Israeli cabinet passed Government Decision 716, obligating the state to bring 3,000 Ethiopian Jews and then reconvene to decide on the rest. The 3,000 came. The government never reconvened.
In late 2025, Israel announced it would bring in all remaining B’nai Menashe from India but ruled there were “no eligible individuals” among Ethiopian Jews. The contrast speaks for itself.
A Reckoning Deferred
Israel rescued the Beta Israel. That is true. It is also true that what followed the rescue has been decades of institutional failure, from the rabbinate to the police, from hospitals to schools, from the military to the immigration bureau.
As journalist Nahum Barnea wrote in Yedioth Ahronoth, quoted by the Middle East Policy Council: “The Israeli society is infected with racism. Racism is far more common and far more poisonous than we dare tell ourselves.”
The Ethiopian Israeli community is not asking for charity. They are asking for what they were promised when those planes lifted off from Addis Ababa: to be treated as equals in their own country. Until that happens, the airlift remains an unfinished story, and its ending is not yet one Israel can be proud of.
In 1991, Israel executed one of the most logistically ambitious humanitarian operations in modern history. Operation Solomon airlifted 14,000 Ethiopian Jews to Israel in 36 hours, using dozens of aircraft in a near-continuous shuttle between Addis Ababa and Tel Aviv. It followed Operation Moses (1984) and Operation Joshua (1985), which had brought thousands more. The world saw a Jewish state rescuing persecuted co-religionists from famine and civil war. The narrative was heroic, and it was not wrong.
But what the Beta Israel found on arrival, and what their children and grandchildren still navigate today, tells a very different story. The boss wanted us to look at this one, and the evidence trail is long and damning: a pattern of institutional discrimination that has persisted for over four decades, touching medicine, religion, education, policing, economics, and military service.
The Religious Question: Centuries of Practice, Decades of Doubt
The Beta Israel practiced Judaism in isolation for centuries in the Ethiopian highlands, maintaining traditions predating the Talmud. Their practices diverged from Rabbinic JudaismThe mainstream form of Judaism, based on the Talmud and the legal rulings of rabbinical authorities, as distinct from earlier or isolated Jewish traditions. in significant ways: they did not observe Hanukkah (a post-Biblical holiday), their religious leadership (the KessimThe traditional religious leaders of the Beta Israel (Ethiopian Jewish) community, trained in pre-Talmudic practices rather than rabbinical law.) operated outside the rabbinical framework, and their liturgical language was Ge’ez rather than Hebrew.
These differences became a weapon. Despite Sephardic Chief Rabbi Ovadia Yosef’s 1973 ruling declaring the Beta Israel to be Jewish descendants of the tribe of Dan, the Chief Rabbinate imposed a requirement of symbolic conversion (giur l’chumra) from the late 1970s through the 1980s. This included immersion in a mikvahA ritual bath in Jewish law used for purification, required before certain religious milestones or after states of ritual impurity. and a declaration accepting Rabbinic law.
No comparable requirement was imposed on Soviet Jewish immigrants, many of whom had little or no religious practice and whose Jewish lineage was often far less documented than that of the Beta Israel. The requirement was deeply insulting to Ethiopian Jewry and was eventually dropped for Beta Israel, though it persists for the Falash Mura (descendants of Jews who converted to Christianity generations ago).
The Chief Rabbinate did not formally reaffirm the community’s Jewishness until a ruling in late 2019 (reported January 2020), nearly 50 years after Yosef’s original decision. In the interim, some ultra-Orthodox communities continued to reject Ethiopian Jewishness outright. In 2018, a leading Israeli winery banned its Ethiopian-Israeli employees from contact with wine during production, citing kosher certification requirements that classified them as non-Jews.
As Prof. Tamar Hermann of the Israel Democracy Institute noted, the religious doubts “are being projected on the entire community, by those for whom Jewish identity must be proven ‘authentic.'”
The Blood Scandal: Disposal as Policy
In 1996, Israeli media revealed that Magen David Adom had been routinely discarding blood donated by Ethiopian Jews rather than processing it into the national blood supply. The stated rationale was concern over HIV prevalence in sub-Saharan Africa, but the implementation was telling: rather than institute targeted screening (as was done for other risk populations), the blood service accepted donations from Ethiopian Israelis and then quietly destroyed them.
The revelation triggered one of the largest protests in Israeli history by a minority community: approximately 10,000 Ethiopian Jews demonstrated outside the Prime Minister’s office in Jerusalem. Police deployed water cannons and tear gas. Multiple officers and protesters were injured.
The restrictions on Ethiopian blood donation were not fully lifted until 2017, over twenty years after the scandal broke. The ban had initially been justified on epidemiological grounds, but its blanket application, its secrecy, and its duration marked it as institutional discrimination.
The Contraception Scandal: Coerced Sterilization
In December 2012, Israeli investigative journalist Gal Gabbay aired an investigative report on Israeli Educational Television documenting a practice that had been rumored for years: Ethiopian Jewish women were being injected with Depo Provera, a long-acting contraceptive, without proper informed consentAn ethical and legal requirement in research that participants must be fully informed about the nature, risks, benefits, and procedures of a study, and must voluntarily agree to participate without coercion or misrepresentation. A key principle in research ethics..
After five years of denials, Israeli government officials admitted in 2013 that the practice had occurred. Women in Israeli-run transit camps in Ethiopia reported being told that immigration to Israel would be denied without the injections. One woman testified:
“We said we won’t have the shot. They told us, ‘if you don’t you won’t go to Israel… you won’t get aid or medical care.’ We were afraid… We didn’t have a choice. Without them and their aid we couldn’t leave there. So we accepted the injection.”
The statistical evidence was unambiguous. According to a report by Isha L’Isha, a feminist organization in Haifa, among the 4,833 Israeli women who received Depo Provera injections between 2005 and 2008, 57% were of Ethiopian origin. Ethiopians constituted less than 2% of the total population. Over the subsequent decade, the Ethiopian birthrate in Israel dropped by 50%.
When questioned about the disparity, then-Israeli Health Minister Yaacov Ben Yezri reportedly attributed it to a “cultural preference” among Ethiopian women for injectable contraception. World Health Organization data on contraceptive use in Ethiopia directly contradicted this claim: three-quarters of Ethiopian women using birth control chose the pill.
Health Ministry Director General Prof. Ron Gamzu eventually ordered HMOs to stop prescribing Depo Provera to Ethiopian women if “for any reason there is concern that they might not understand the ramifications of the treatment.” The Association of Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) called the findings evidence of “harmful health policies with racist implications in violation of medical ethics.”
Education: Segregation in Practice
The Israeli education system has been a persistent site of discrimination against Ethiopian children. Key incidents include:
- In 2011, 281 Ethiopian children were unlawfully denied school registration in the Central District, documented by the Israeli NGO Tebeka.
- In 2019, a kindergarten in Kiryat Gat segregated Ethiopian children into a separate classroom with its own entrance. The Education Ministry subsequently announced directives to prevent racial discrimination and pledged to close “non-heterogeneous” kindergartens.
- In 2019, Ethiopian-Israeli parents took legal action against four ultra-Orthodox schools in Jerusalem that refused to enroll their children.
The outcome data reflects these barriers. The 2024 State Comptroller’s report found:
- 54% of Ethiopian 12th-graders in 2022 qualified for university-standard matriculation, versus 75% of the general Jewish population (a 21-percentage-point gap).
- In the highest-level mathematics track, Ethiopian participation was half the general rate (8.5% vs. 17%).
- In Kiryat Malachi, no Ethiopian students studied at the highest mathematics level despite 10% of non-Ethiopian Jewish students doing so.
- The proportion of Ethiopian students with academic degrees was the lowest of any Jewish population group.
The comptroller also found that only 67% of the budgets allocated for the “New Way” integration plan had actually been utilized, and the plan’s goals were therefore not met.
Policing: Disproportionate Force, Disproportionate Consequences
Ethiopian Israelis are policed at rates far exceeding their share of the population. According to data from the Association of Ethiopian Jews, they are stopped, questioned, and arrested at disproportionate rates. David Ratner, a senior researcher at the Israeli Ministry of Education specializing in the community, told Jewish Currents: “They are stopped on a daily basis, especially the young adolescent males.”
Young Ethiopian offenders are three times more likely to be incarcerated than their non-Ethiopian peers, and nearly 90% of those who enter the system receive prison sentences.
A series of high-profile incidents has brought this issue to national attention:
- 2014: Yosef Salamsa, 22, was tasered by two police officers and left outside a station in Zichron Yaakov. He later died by suicide. The investigation against the officers was closed.
- 2015: Damas Pakada, an Ethiopian Israeli IDF soldier in uniform, was beaten by police in an unprovoked attack caught on video. Officers later filed false charges against him. The incident triggered mass protests in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
- 2018: Yehuda Biadga, 24, mentally ill, was shot dead by police who claimed he charged an officer with a knife.
- 2019: Solomon Tekah, 18, was killed by a ricocheting bullet fired by an off-duty police officer in Haifa. The shooting sparked the largest Ethiopian Israeli protests in years. In April 2024, the officer was acquitted of negligent manslaughter. The judge ruled self-defense was justified. The family received NIS 1.8 million (approximately $580,000) in a civil settlement.
The Anti-Racism Coordinating Unit, established after the 2015 protests, reported in 2020 that discrimination complaints had doubled in 2019, with 37% coming from the Ethiopian community. Ethiopian Jews comprise 1.7% of the population but have a 3.27% arrest rate.
Military Service: Fighting, Dying, and Still Not Equal
Ethiopian Israelis serve in the IDF at high rates and often in combat units. But within the military, the disparities persist. In 2017, approximately 4% of IDF soldiers were Ethiopian, yet they accounted for 10.78% of male military prisoners and 15.07% of female military prisoners. Ethiopian male soldiers were nearly 2.7 times more likely to be imprisoned than their share of the force would predict; Ethiopian female soldiers, nearly 3.8 times.
Since October 7, 2023, the disparity has taken on a deadlier dimension. Forty Ethiopian-Israeli soldiers have been killed in Gaza and on the northern front. At 1.7% of the population, they represent over 4% of IDF combat deaths. As one grieving father told Kan News: “Israel trusted my son with a rifle. It will not trust me with a plane ticket.”
Economic Marginalization: The Numbers
The 2024 State Comptroller’s report quantified what the community has experienced for decades:
- Average monthly wages for Ethiopian Israelis are 33% below the average for other Jewish Israelis (measured for those born 1978-1983).
- More than half of Ethiopian immigrant families live below the poverty line, including nearly two-thirds of Ethiopian children.
- The Ethiopian population is concentrated in homogeneous, low-income neighborhoods, a legacy of absorption center placement policies that created de facto residential segregation.
Comptroller Englman cited the case of St.-Sgt. Aschalwu Sama, who was killed in action during the Israel-Hamas war. In 2009, Sama had been the face of the fight against school discrimination after being rejected from a school in his hometown because he was Ethiopian. Englman stated: “It is sad to say the obvious, but whoever is good enough to sacrifice their life for the state must have his rights protected by the state.”
The Ongoing Immigration Crisis
Approximately 14,000 people claiming Jewish descent remain in Ethiopia, most with first-degree relatives already living in Israel. In 2022, the Israeli cabinet passed Government Decision 716, committing to bring 3,000 Ethiopian Jews within two years and then reconvene to decide on the remainder. The initial 3,000 were brought. The government never reconvened. The Interior Ministry announced that further cases required “additional examination.”
The government’s own Harel Committee confirmed in 2023 that Israel’s Ethiopian immigration criteria were “inconsistent and incoherent,” that family separations were “often unjustified,” and that Interior Ministry demographic concerns were “based on flawed assumptions.” None of the committee’s recommendations have been implemented.
The double standard was laid bare in late 2025 when Israel announced it would bring in all remaining B’nai Menashe from India while simultaneously declaring there were “no eligible individuals” among Ethiopian Jews. The B’nai Menashe undergo full conversion upon arrival; the Beta Israel, whose Jewish lineage is longer and better documented, are subjected to more restrictive criteria.
The Structural Picture
What makes Ethiopian Israeli discrimination distinct from other forms of marginalization in Israel is the comprehensiveness of its reach. It is not limited to one institution or one era. The rabbinate questioned their identity. The medical establishment discarded their blood and controlled their reproduction. The education system segregated their children. The police profiled and killed their young men. The military imprisoned them at disproportionate rates while sending them to die in frontline combat. The immigration bureau blocked their relatives. The economy paid them a third less.
Each of these systems operated according to its own logic, but the pattern is unmistakable. As Nahum Barnea wrote in Yedioth Ahronoth: “The Israeli society is infected with racism. Racism is far more common and far more poisonous than we dare tell ourselves. It doesn’t start with Ethiopian immigrants and doesn’t end with them.”
Immigrant Absorption Minister Pnina Tamano-Shata, the first Ethiopian-Israeli cabinet member, called for “integration, integration, integration” and warned that officers guilty of racism must be removed from the force. But her own assessment was measured: “Things in Israel have improved since 2015 but unfortunately it’s not enough.”
The story of Ethiopia’s Jews in Israel is the story of a rescue that was never completed. The planes landed. The people disembarked. And then the system that brought them failed to make room for them. Until it does, the airlift remains a promise half-kept, and the distance between the tarmac and full citizenship remains the defining measure of Israel’s unresolved relationship with its Black citizens.
