The Desire to Be America: On the Wretchedness of the "Ethiopian Protest"

Political Cat: Second column in Bilha Reuven's new section. This time, the house cat tails a giant and terrifying black cat, with dreadlocks, groove, hoodie, and bling, who looks like the authentic king of the ghetto and calls himself Niger, but for some reason speaks with an American accent, which ruins everything. On another victim of tail-wagging politics

Authentic Israeli protest against Ethiopian slavery and Ethiopian apartheid and Ethiopian racial segregation  (Source)

When Roy Hasan was once pressed to admit the sources of his poetry, the unsurprising answer was revealed. Not Mizrahi poetry, liturgical poems, or maqamas, not Spanish poetry or influences from the glorious Arabic poetry - but American black culture and its replicated images in American media: revered rappers, NBA, ideology of "unapologetic" resistance to whites, and in the best (and pretentious) case - jazz. From here, everything is imitation and replication of American black ideology to the Israeli space - which explains well the success ("At 23, I had a hip-hop group, which is the only group I'm proud of to this day. It was called Kasha Basha, and there I really felt I was writing poetry"). The authenticity of the protest poetry celebrated here as authentic and rooted Mizrahi is a fitting parable for the Ethiopian protest celebrated here as an unparalleled authentic protest.

The cheap and transparent American imitation is the central characteristic of Israeli media, whose world of images stems from American series it watches every night - for several decades. How many years have we waited to have our own blacks, so we can be good whites, privileged, moral, with guilt feelings (about slavery!), and also play in the recurring script we watch every evening, which shapes our consciousness, but still remains foreign to us? With the Eritreans it didn't work well enough, the Black Panthers - well, that's from Golda's era, the Arabs - completely refused to play the role. So here are the Ethiopians.

An Ethiopian youth killed in unclear circumstances by a policeman? This is our opportunity to live the American left, the American dream, it's perfectly suited to the script of "Black Lives Matter". We too are America. It doesn't matter that just two weeks ago, in another police case, it became clear to everyone how elusive the truth is - this time it's our turn to be on the inflammatory side, and "their turn" to ask to wait for the investigation results. But what can we do, American cultural imperialism is all-pervasive - and the Ethiopians themselves are influenced by its images, its ideology, its manipulative values, and the desire to "be America". They too are Roy Hasan. They too want to occupy the black, prestigious slot, with its imagined cultural capital - the "against" slot. And they too watch YouTube and television (yes, Ethiopians have smartphones and TVs!). Harlem is here, isn't it?

And as usual, the regular chorus marches on, explaining about discrimination, about the economic sources of the protest (Marx!), about exclusion. Everyone knows their role (including the Ethiopians), and everything is as determined by a Hollywood screenwriter, who, what can we do, really loves to cast blacks in crime series (and aren't the policemen themselves influenced by this? Don't they watch Netflix? How many drug series and crime movies has an average policeman seen?). And the one who is really to blame for the Ethiopian community's distress, for the loss of its ethos, and for turning it into easy prey for parasitic and imitative ideology, and unfortunately also one that glorifies criminality as a cultural hero - is not to be mentioned. Because it is the secular elite itself that shattered the traditional Ethiopian culture, its authentic (yes, this time without quotation marks) social and ideological structures, the ethos and the most unique Jewish culture it preserved (including the language!) - with the help of its ideology, in a proven method that has been working on traditional societies for about three hundred years like a jackhammer. What is called - the process of secularization.