Although the #BlackLivesMatter movement began following the 2012 death of Trayvon Martin and spread with the 2014 death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, the struggle against police brutality is a global one. And while the Black-led, multiracial protests have been gaining momentum in the U.S., so, too, has worldwide activism surrounding the violence committed against Black bodies.
As protests erupted recently over the killing of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Philando Castile in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, Black Israelis have been protesting by the hundreds in Tel Aviv against institutional racism and police violence by the Israeli government.
Arrests were reported in Tel Aviv earlier this month of predominantly young Jewish Israelis of Ethiopian descent. On July 3, protesters attempted to block the nation’s busiest highway, as was reported by David Sheen in the San Francisco Bay View. The Black protesters held signs bearing the likeness of Yosef Salamsa, 22, an Ethiopian Israeli found dead in July 2014 in a quarry after facing police abuse months earlier. As Sheen reported, Salamsa had been approached and tasered by police without warning. He and his family faced death threats after filing a report with the authorities, and after he was found dead, the government refused to allow the family to identify his body before burial.
“We only wanted for Yosef’s story to be known and for justice to be done. For his story to not be buried with him, as many stories were buried,” Tehune Maharat, Salamsa’s cousin, told theSan Francisco Bay View. “Many youth were murdered because they were Black. They experienced police brutality, they were beaten, humiliated and abused, just because they were Black. Not for any other reason,” she added.
As Atlanta Black Star reported, protests erupted in Israel in May 2015 after a video was shown of a white police officer assaulting Damas Pakada, a Black Israeli soldier in a Tel Aviv suburb. Police arrested Pakada and detained him overnight, releasing him only after the video footage went viral. Thousands took to the streets and were met by riot police.
Although police brutality has proven an important part of the protests, Black activists in Israel are railing against a host of discriminatory practices by the government in housing, education and the military, and a state program in which Ethiopian women were forced to take injections of the contraceptive Depo-Provera. As a result, the Ethiopian-Israeli population dipped 20 percent. Activists regard this as a form of genocide, in a nation that does not want more Black people. And while a year has passed since the protests against anti-Black racism began in Israel, the press and the greater white society do not seem to care. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has failed to make changes he promised to the Ethiopian community, just as Israel seeks observer status in the African Union.
Meanwhile, this month people marched in London, Berlin and Amsterdam holding #BlackLivesMatter signs and chanting, “No justice, no peace,” asCNN reported. Around 1,000 people stopped traffic in Brixton in South London, as protesters chanted “Black lives matter” and “hands up, don’t shoot,” according to The Guardian.Brixton is known for the 1981 Brixton Rising, in which a bloody confrontation took place between police and Black protesters, amid socioeconomic problems, high unemployment and police stop-and-frisk policies facing the Afro-Caribbean population. As BBCreported, over 300 people were injured in the 1981 uprising, with millions of pounds in property damage, leading to calls for community policing in Black neighborhoods.
Eze Afrika
