Too bad; We Ethiopians are in an age where we face suffering, hatred and violence wherever we go. Even if we are in Ethiopia, Africa, America, Asia, Europe and Australia, we will not escape the challenge anywhere.
It is surprising that when the Jewish US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken is heading to Ethiopia; Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu too planned to go to “Pergamon” Berlin; However, they delayed their visit because the Western media are shouting loud that “Israel is violating human rights”.
The German government is under pressure for hosting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was due to arrive in Berlin later Wednesday and facing strong criticism over planned legal reforms.
On the eve of Netanyahu’s departure for Germany and ahead of a planned trip to Britain, 1,000 writers, artists and academics wrote to the two European nations’ ambassadors urging their governments to scrap the visits.
👉 So let’s compare this with the situation in Ethiopia and encounter ‘double standards:
When the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken heades departs for Ethiopia to meet the barbaric Gala-Oromo Ahmed Ali, who massacred more than a million Orthodox Christians, all the media and governments that said, “We will fight for human rights” say and do nothing. Hypocritical, ugly and dirty world!
💭 Mixed Jewish-Arab city has been a flashpoint of nationalistic crime in the past.
Israel Police have arrested two Arabs on suspicion that they set fire to the “Beit HaGadzo,” a cultural center for Ethiopian Jews located behind the pre-military training school in the Ramat Eshkol neighborhood of Lod.
“We will not be silent,” local residents responded, and announced that they would be holding a demonstration. “At 8:30 p.m. we will all gather at the site for the evening prayer and raise a cry of protest.”
Investigators from the Lod Police Station used advanced technological means to investigate the crime leading to the swift apprehension of two Lod residents aged 18 and 25, who are suspected of the arson. At the conclusion of their interrogation, it will be decided whether to ask the court to extend their detention.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on December 10, 2020
“I had to speak my fluent Amharic to survive,” said Filimon Shishay, a 21-year-old Tigrayan who said he encountered the Fano and had to part with the $5 he had with him. “They hate us,” he said.
Tens of thousands have sought safety in Sudan, where they gave accounts to Times journalists of a devastating and complex conflict that threatens Ethiopia’s stability
The armed men who stopped Ashenafi Hailu along the dirt road dragged him by a noose so they could save bullets.
Mr. Ashenafi, 24, was racing on his motorcycle to the aid of a childhood friend trapped by the Ethiopian government’s military offensive in the northern region of Tigray when a group of men on foot confronted him. They identified themselves as militia members of a rival ethnic group, he said, and they took his cash and began beating him, laughing ominously.
“Finish him!” Mr. Ashenafi remembered one of the men saying.
As they tightened the noose around his neck and began pulling him along the road, Mr. Ashenafi was sure he was going to die, and he eventually passed out. But he said he awoke alone near a pile of bodies, children among them. His motorcycle was gone.
ImageAshenafi Hailu was attacked by a group of Fano militia members. After they learned that he was ethnic Tigray, they robbed him, tied a noose around his neck and dragged him until he passed out.
Ashenafi Hailu was attacked by a group of Fano militia members. After they learned that he was ethnic Tigray, they robbed him, tied a noose around his neck and dragged him until he passed out.
Mr. Ashenafi and dozens of other Tigrayan refugees fled the violence and settled outside the remote and dusty town of Hamdayet, a community of just a few thousand people near the border, where I spoke to them. Their firsthand accounts, shared a month after Ethiopia’s prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, declared war on the Tigray region, detail a devastating conflict that has become a grisly wellspring of looting, ethnic antagonism and killings.
Many of the refugees have lingered here rather than moving on to the more established refugee camps farther into Sudan, staying closer to home so they can get any news about their towns or missing loved ones. But little information is getting out, with mobile networks and the internet blocked for weeks by the Ethiopian government.
Nearly 50,000 have fled to Sudan so far, in what the United Nations has called the worst exodus of refugees Ethiopia has seen in more than two decades. And their accounts contradict the repeated claims from Mr. Abiy, who won the Nobel Peace Prize last year for ending the border conflict with neighboring Eritrea, that no civilians are being hurt.
The Tigrayans describe being caught between indiscriminate military shelling and a campaign of killing, rape and looting by government-allied ethnic militias. Several told me that they saw dozens of bodies along the route as they fled their shops, homes and farms and took to the long road to the border with Sudan, in stifling heat.
As the fighting in Tigray continues, it is degenerating into a guerrilla war that could unravel both Ethiopia’s national fabric and the stability of the entire Horn of Africa region. That includes Eritrea, which is allied with Ethiopia against the Tigray and has been shelled by the rebel forces; and Sudan, which has heavily deployed its army along its restive border with Ethiopia even as it has allowed refugees to cross.
The Tigray make up about 6 percent of Ethiopia’s 110 million people, and they were the arbiters of power and money in the country from 1991, when they helped dismantle a military dictatorship, until 2018, when anti-government protests catapulted Mr. Abiy to power.
Mr. Abiy had sought to emphasize national unity and diversity in a multiethnic Ethiopia, even as he began methodically excluding Tigrayan figures from public life and condemning their abuses while they were in power. Now, the conflict stands at stark odds with the legacy he was seeking, and with the stability of the entire country.
If Mr. Abiy’s aim was to unite an increasingly divided country, then “this conflict has made that harder to achieve, and so increased the likelihood of serious ongoing political instability,” said William Davison, a senior Ethiopia analyst with the International Crisis Group who was recently expelled from the country.
Adding to the deadly mix are the involvement of rival ethnic militia groups. One of them is the Fano, a militia from the Amhara ethnic group. Along with Amhara regional government security forces, Fano took part in the intervention in Tigray, Mr. Davison said.
While Fano is a term loosely used to refer to young Amhara militias or protesters, Mr. Davison added that it is also “the name given to youthful Amhara vigilante groups that become more active during times when there is perceived to be insecurity that is not being managed by the authorities.”
Tigrayan refugees in Sudan said that Fano fighters attacked and maimed them, ransacked their properties and extorted them as they sought to flee. Many of the Tigrayans, including Mr. Ashenafi, said that they were afraid of going back and that the experience had left them sleepless and scarred.
After Mr. Ashenafi awoke and saw the bodies around him, he trudged through a nearby forest to reach the home of his friend, Haftamu Berhanu, who took him in. Photos taken by Mr. Haftamu and seen by The New York Times showed Mr. Ashenafi lying on his back, white skin peeled away around his neck from the noose.
For days afterward, Mr. Ashenafi could not talk or swallow anything and communicated with his friend through pointing or writing things down.
“It was heartbreaking,” Mr. Haftamu said of the days caring for his friend.
“I didn’t expect in our life that our government would kill us,” Mr. Ashenafi said. “I am frightened so much. I am not sleeping at night.”
Many of the refugees who made it to Sudan have been resettled to the Um Rakuba camp about 43 miles away from the border. But many are also staying around a refugee transit point in Hamdayet, hoping to return home or reunite with their families once it is safe.
In this dusty outpost, the refugees convene every morning at the Tekeze River, a natural border between Ethiopia and Sudan, to shower, collect water and clean whatever clothes they brought with them. On a recent afternoon, as children dived into the flowing river and Ethiopian music played from a nearby phone, the refugees recounted scenes of horror that they witnessed.
Many told me that they came from Humera, an agricultural town of about 30,000 people near both the Sudanese and Eritrean borders. Thousands suddenly fled the town with whatever they could carry when shelling began around midnight from what the refugees said was the direction of Eritrea.
Some gathered first at nearby churches, but after hearing that other churches had been shelled, they started the hourslong journey on foot to Sudan. They said that militia fighters began streaming in.
“The Amhara militia cut people’s heads,” said a Humera resident named Meles, who wanted to be identified by only his first name out of fear of retribution.
Meles, who owned a small cafe, said that the Fano’s reputation preceded them and that just as he feared, he encountered many dead bodies along the way to Sudan. As he spoke to me, a crowd gathered near him on the banks of the river, many nodding and verbally affirming his account as he told it.
At least 139 children are among those who arrived in Sudan unaccompanied, many of whom are now at risk of abuse and discrimination, according to the organization Save the Children.
With the Tigray region sandwiched between the Amhara region and Eritrea, which is aligned with the Ethiopian national government, Meles said he was glad that refugees like him had another outlet for escape.
“Thank God there’s Sudan for us to turn to,” he said.
“I had to speak my fluent Amharic to survive,” said Filimon Shishay, a 21-year-old Tigrayan who said he encountered the Fano and had to part with the $5 he had with him. “They hate us,” he said.
There has long been enmity between the Tigray and Amhara. When Tigrayan rebels seized power in 1991, Amharas claimed that the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, which governed the region, occupied land that historically belonged to them.
“The widespread assumption is T.P.L.F. wanted to annex these areas in order to have a border with Sudan and to tap into the fertile land for economic development,” Hone Mandefro, an Ethiopian analyst and a doctoral candidate in sociology and anthropology at Concordia University in Canada, said in an email.
Mr. Davison of the International Crisis Group said that with Amhara security and militia forces active in Tigray in recent weeks, and with some Amhara administrators put in place there, “it appears to be a de facto Amhara occupation of territory they claim the T.P.L.F. annexed.”
The move is likely to lead to violent Tigrayan reprisals, he said, as may have already occurred in the town of Mai Kadra, where human rights groups have said forces loyal to the liberation front massacred as many as 600 people, most of them Amhara.
Many refugees in Hamdayet blamed politicians, and particularly Mr. Abiy, for pitting civilians against one another. “The Amhara and the Tigray are one,” Negese Berhe Hailu, a 25-year-old engineer, said.
Hadas Hagos, 67, fled her home in Humera — which is part of the larger West Tigray area the Amharas claim — and worried she wouldn’t be able to go back or see the family members she left behind. Other refugees who arrived later informed her that her home had been looted.
“We fought for freedom and democracy,” said Ms. Hadas, breaking into tears as she recounted how she and her family fought against the Marxist regime in the 1980s, and how she lost her brother to the war. “We don’t deserve this kind of life.”
On 14th May 1948, 70 years ago today, David Ben Gurion declared the independence of the State of Israel. In celebration of this momentous anniversary, God raised up Netta Barzilai, and lo, she won the Eurovision Song Contest 2018, though quite what Israel was doing competing in a European competition is unknown (a bit like Australia, and Armenia…). In further celebration of this momentous anniversary, President Donald Trump has decreed that the US Embassy shall be inaugurated today in Jerusalem, the eternal capital of Israel, as a seal of the unbreakable bond of friendship between their countries and their peoples.
“Thank you! I love my country!” cried Netta at her point of victory. “Next year in Jerusalem,” she added poignantly, with a hope that has echoed in every Jewish heart for centuries, and a prayer which has endured through millennia of weeping by the Rivers of Babylon.
Zionism is the Jewish dream of restoration, return and renewal. Israel’s rebirth 70 years ago was a joyous event. To some it represented a safe haven to be Jewish in a Jewish land without fear of persecution. To others, the sovereign hand of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob fulfilling promises from the Torah and the Prophets was clear to see. Much of the world rejoiced with them. However, not everyone was pleased. Many Arabs, including those whose own nations were formed in the same period, call Israel’s national rebirth ‘The Naqba‘ or ‘catastrophe’. The formation of a Jewish state in the region, they claimed, robbed Palestinians of their land; the Jews were portrayed as interlopers. The region’s problems were – and are – routinely blamed on Israel, and criticism goes far beyond Israel’s actions, often questioning the very legitimacy of Israel’s existence.
Israel is central to Jewish religious and national identity; it is where Jews are closest to God. It is the one piece of land historically promised to the Jewish people as recorded in Genesis, and the only land where the Jewish nation has ever experienced sovereignty and self-rule, producing a dynasty of kings and visionary prophets from whose quills flowed some of the most treasured writings in the history of the world.
Despite attempts by successive occupying powers to expel them, communities of Jews have lived in the Holy Land continuously since the time of Abraham. Since the Babylonian exile, the Jewish diaspora has spread as far as South America, China and Australia. But Jewish ethnic identity, recognised by the countries in which they lived as minority communities, was based on Jewish affinity with the land of Israel and the Jews living there.
On 29th November 1947, the United Nations voted to create an Arab and a Jewish State alongside each other in what is now Israel and the West Bank. It was accepted that Israel would have a sizeable Arab minority. The Jewish State was allotted 56% of Mandate Palestine, since the UN correctly predicted heavy Jewish immigration from Europe after the creation of the Jewish State. Perhaps they also guessed that large numbers of Jewish refugees from Arab nations would also need a home.
The Jewish Agency, led by David Ben Gurion, accepted the plan. Arab leaders rejected it, and Arab attacks on Jewish communities began at once. Britain announced that her troops would be withdrawn from Palestine on 15th May 1948. Aware that Arab countries had vowed to destroy any Jewish state, David Ben Gurion declared the independence of the State of Israel on 14th May 1948, with borders as stipulated in the UN Partition Plan.
Significantly, the Declaration of Independence stated: “We appeal… to the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve peace and participate in the upbuilding of the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions…” Within days of the British withdrawal, 35,000 Iraqi, Lebanese, Syrian and Egyptian troops (led by British officers) invaded Israel. Despite overwhelming odds, and the loss of 1% of the population of Israel, Israeli forces decisively defeated the Arab armies. Israel took territory beyond the UN allocated borders because their territory could not be defended against further Arab attacks.
Unsurprisingly, given repeated Arab threats to annihilate Israel, Israeli leaders feared an Arab ‘fifth column’. However, most Arabs who had remained in Israel became Israeli citizens. Jews were also expelled from their homes by Arab forces, for example from Gush Etzion and K’far Darom in Gaza, all built on land purchased legally. And of course Jews were expelled from the Old City of Jerusalem. In addition, 800,000 Jews were forced to abandon homes and businesses in Arab countries. They arrived in Israel with nothing.
These are the forgotten refugees of 1948. Both sides committed atrocities. Women and children were murdered by Jewish fighters of the Stern gang and Irgun in the peaceful Arab village of Deir Yassin. Arab fighters took revenge by murdering Jewish women and children in K’far Etzion and members of a convoy taking medical supplies to Jerusalem’s Hadassah hospital.
With 3,000 years of continuous presence in the Holy Land, how can Jews be characterised as interlopers in the region? After World War II, Palestine was the only place that many European Jews, robbed of their homes and families, could go. A further 800,000 Jews from Arab countries fled or were expelled in pogroms and were absorbed into the Jewish state in the years following Israel’s Independence. Later, Jews from all over the world – Africa, India, China, the old USSR, as well as the USA and Europe, made aliyah to Israel.
Modern Israel combines the best ideals of the west – democracy, liberty, openness to debate and criticism as well as new ideas in technology and the arts. Such ideals are much needed in the region. Given the ferocity of comment in the Israeli press and the intensity of debate and moral self-criticism which so characterises discussion in Israel – so rare in public life today – the ongoing global attacks on Israel are profoundly depressing and disturbing.
God promised Abraham that his descendants would have a land, and would be a blessing to all the nations of the earth. The Anglican Friends of Israel believe that modern Israel is a fulfilment of that promise: we rejoice unashamedly at this, Israel’s 70th birthday, thanking the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob for the restoration of the Jewish people to their land.
And we pray for a just peace for all the people of the region, Jew and Arab – a peace which we believe that ultimately, only God himself can bring.
And we thank God that Netta Barzilai, an Orthodox Jew from Israel, can win Eurovision, for she is London in Jerusalem; she is Europe in the Middle East; she is our values and culture; she is the eccentric and eclectic incarnation of our liberty, fraternity and democracy. Happy 70th Birthday, dear Israel. L’Shana Haba’ah B’Yerushalayim.
Paying Tribute to Ethiopian Immigrants, PM Vows to Bring Home Man Held by Hamas
At memorial for Ethiopian Jews who died on perilous journey to Israel, President Rivlin says he asked his counterpart in Ethiopia to help Gaza captive Avera Mengistu
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday paid tribute to the thousands of Ethiopian Jews who died making the long, dangerous journey to Israel, and vowed that he would not rest until an Israeli man of Ethiopian descent held captive by the Hamas terror group is set free.
Speaking at an annual memorial ceremony held at the Mount Herzl Cemetery in Jerusalem, Netanyahu opened his address by mentioning Avera Mengistu, who has been held by Hamas for over three and a half years.
Herzl in Jerusalem, May 13, 2018. (Kobi Gideon/GPO)
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday paid tribute to the thousands of Ethiopian Jews who died making the long, dangerous journey to Israel, and vowed that he would not rest until an Israeli man of Ethiopian descent held captive by the Hamas terror group is set free.
Speaking at an annual memorial ceremony held at the Mount Herzl Cemetery in Jerusalem, Netanyahu opened his address by mentioning Avera Mengistu, who has been held by Hamas for over three and a half years.
“Distinguished guests, and mostly of all, our dear and beloved bothers and sisters, Ethiopian immigrants. The family of Avera Mengistu, we will not rest until we bring Avera home,” Netanyahu said.
President Reuven Rivlin was also at the event, which remembered the Ethiopian Jews who perished as they walked overland from Ethiopia to Sudan, from where they were airlifted to Israel.
Israel clandestinely airlifted thousands of Ethiopian Jews in the 1980s and 90s, spending hundreds of millions of dollars to bring the community to the Jewish state and help them integrate. About 24,000 people attempted the journey via Sudan — some on donkeys and horses, some on foot — but 4,500 died on the way. Many were later flown in 1991 directly from refugee camps outside the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa to Israel.
Rivlin, who earlier this month became the first Israeli head of state to make an official visit to Ethiopia, said that during the trip he asked President Mulatu Teshome for assistance in bringing Mengistu home.
“I want to recall our commitment to Avera Mengistu,” Rivlin said. “During my visit I asked the Ethiopian president to do everything he can to help in the efforts to bring Avera, who is held captive by Hamas, back to his family. May the day of his return come soon.”
Avraham Avera Mengistu, undated. (Courtesy of the Mengistu family via AP)
Hamas believed to be holding two Israeli civilians who entered Gaza of their own volition, Mengistu and Hisham al-Sayed. In addition, the terror group is also believed to be holding the remains of Hadar Goldin and Oron Shaul, two IDF soldier who were killed during the 2014 war between Israel and Hamas, which has since refused to provide any details about them.
Speaking of the ardeous journey that the Ethiopian Jews made to reach Israel, Netanyahu said “You were marching in fear. The thousands of those who died on the way were buried in deep sorrow.”
“Perhaps the whole story can be told in one small note that was left on one of the graves: ‘My body is here, but my heart in is Jerusalem.’”
“The Jewish people can learn so much from you. Of love for Jerusalem, on determination and willpower, on mutual responsibility.”
About 140,000 Ethiopian Jews live in Israel today, a small minority in a country of over 8 million. But their assimilation hasn’t been smooth, with many arriving without a modern education and then falling into unemployment and poverty.
Netanyahu said a special government unit that focuses on combating racism has had some success. “This is also a long journey, by we will not compromise on the goal. Equal and respectful treatment for every citizen. Equal and respectful treatment for you, Ethiopian Jews.”
Addis Ethiopia Weblog 