Few people reading this post will have forgotten the protests of 2015 and 2019 that followed alleged ‘police racism’ and discrimination against the Ethiopian community in Israel.
But such incidents are not confined to the country’s black minorities.
Many other private law-abiding citizens sigh and say the Jewish state harbours too many thugs in uniform.
This is because such horrible treatment is too often meted to them.
(Pictured above is Ishmael Khaldi with my husband, Brian Fink who was then chairman of ESRA Karmiel and who did much to introduce Khaldi to the local Anglo community).
My husband, for example, an Anglo immigrant in his mid-70s, was harassed, screamed at and frisked with a hand-held metal detector at Tel Aviv’s Hahagana train station when he did not put his water bottle through the security scanner at the station entrance.
It was a frightening experience for us both and ruined what had been a pleasant day.
It’s as well that I ignored my first impulse – to photograph the bullying guard – because our friend, the popular Bedouin diplomat, Ishmael Khaldi claims he was thrown to the ground and choked by security guards at Jerusalem’s main bus station in events that are alarmingly similar to the brutal death of African American George Floyd.
But this time the bullies picked a quarrel with the wrong man. So it is no surprise that the bus station authorities are reluctant to release the CCTV footage that proves what occurred.
Khaldi is an athletic former IDF man turned polished envoy with a record of fighting Israel’s corner against hostile crowds in many parts of the globe.
The incident is a bad one for Israel as a racist stain on its reputation; as an ugly imitation of the attack on Floyd and will not help it win friends at the International Criminal Court or indeed slough off the ridiculous accusations it has to field about ‘apartheid’.
It will also, most unfortunately, add weight to the false claims that US police have been trained by their Israeli counterparts in so-called ‘violence and control’.
This episode is also another bruise on the state’s sense of internal self worth and its reputation abroad as threats mount of a third intifada in the wake of the planned part-annexation of the West Bank on 01 July.
Thus far, the Israeli police have done little bar wriggle in acute embarrassment at having broken the eleventh commandment.
They have been found out!
Khaldi is a charming and endearingly complex personality:
He is an educated, worldly individual who escaped a shepherd’s life but spends much of his free time at his family’s Galilee home; a smooth diplomat who does not mind raising bureaucratic hackles over perceived injustices against his community; a man derided as an ‘Uncle Tom’ by those who say he has betrayed them but who, despite being a devout Muslim, has visited synagogues for prayers in support of his Jewish friends.
My own wish is that this time, some of the worst tinpot tyrants in Israeli society receive a punishment that fits their crime.
An exemplary prison term might just do the trick.
© Natalie Wood (16 June 2020)
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