Minister to okay immigration for Ethiopian relatives of IDF veterans

Israel will begin allowing relatives of Israeli soldiers from the Ethiopian community who fought in Gaza over the summer to immigrate, days after mass protests alleging racism against Ethiopians roiled the streets of Jerusalem.

Interior Minister Gilad Erdan will back a plan to allow some members of the Falash Mura community in Israel to emigrate Israel Radio reported late Saturday, nearly two years after a decision to stop mass immigration flights from Ethiopia left thousands of community members stuck in Africa.

Erdan will ask the government to allow Falash Mura whose relatives fought in the summer’s Operation Protective Edge military operation in Gaza to be given the okay to immigrate to Israel and receive a government benefit package, according to the report.

The decision comes days after a large protest by members of the Ethiopian community turned violent Thursday night, as hundreds demonstrated against police brutality outside the Prime Minister’s Residence.

The demonstration came in the wake of video footage that emerged on Monday showing policemen beating an Ethiopian-born IDF soldier, who said later that he was the target of a racist attack.

“Apparently the streets of Israel must burn like they do in Baltimore, in order for someone to finally wake up. The apartheid regime is back, this time in 21st-century Israel,” Gadi Yevarkan, head of the Campaign for Equality for Ethiopian Jews, told Ynet.

It’s not clear how many people Erdan’s move will help.

In April, Israeli media reported on two cases of soldiers of Ethiopian extraction who fought in elite units, but whose families were not given permission to immigrate.

The Falash Mura, descendants of Ethiopian Jews who were forced to convert to Christianity in the 19th century, were not included in the initial mass immigration flights of Ethiopian Jews during the 1990s

In June 2013, the quasi-governmental Jewish Agency announced it would stop mass immigration for Falash Mura, instead bringing them over on a case by case basis.

The situation has left several thousand members of the community waiting in Africa to emigrate.

The Interior Ministry has received some 4,000 applications from the Falash Mura community requesting permission for some 20,000-40,000 community members in Ethiopia to immigrate to Israel, according to media reports.

Argaw Tesfaye, a former special forces paratrooper who participated in two previous wars between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, said that the state has been promising his family to let his sister immigrate from Ethiopia for over a decade.

“The Interior Ministry said that [my sister] would arrive after us. A week turned into two weeks, which turned into a month, which turned into 11 years,” Tesfaye told Channel 10 news in April.

In response to the Channel 10 report, the ministry released a statement last month saying the cases of the siblings of Tesfaye and fellow soldier Chalachew Mekonen would be reviewed immediately.

“We appreciate the service and contributions of the two soldiers to the nation’s defense, which cannot be ignored, and we will do everything possible to help them,” the statement read.

“To that end, Interior Minister Gilad Erdan has ordered that their requests be handled urgently, and they will be raised on Monday before the [ministry’s] Exceptions Committee. As they consider the requests, the members of the committee will take into account the contributions of the soldiers and will examine the applications favorably. Minister Erdan has clarified that those who serve in the IDF and risk their lives for the country and its people are entitled, he believes, to be united with their families.”

Justin Jalil and JTA contributed to this report