Ethiopian Jews seek political voice in Israel poll

Allyn Fisher-Ilan:

"It's time for our community to take its destiny into its own hands!", Avraham Neguise, a candidate in Israel's election, shouts to an auditorium full of fellow immigrants from Ethiopia.

"In our own hands, yes!", the crowd at a community centre in Rehovot, a town near Tel Aviv, chants back in their native Amharic tongue, before offering up hearty applause.

As the first Ethiopian Jew to head a political party, Neguise's campaign for Tuesday's ballot is a sign of how the small immigrant community is developing its own political voice after years on Israel's sidelines.

"Our community is finally getting itself together, and realise we need a representative in parliament. We have been lacking a political voice," said David Meckonen, a 30-year-old attorney in Rehovoth, who backs Neguise.

Ethiopian Jews often complain of discrimination in Israel's job market and in schools, despite extensive government aid programmes. Many live in separate communities.

They are also Israel's poorest immigrant group. More than 60 percent live below the poverty line, compared with 20 percent overall for Israelis. An isolated few have achieved some prominence in sports, entertainment, law and politics.

Neguise is one of four high-profile Ethiopian Jewish candidates in the Israeli election, an unprecedented figure for the immigrants, who number upwards of 100,000.

Much of the community, which traces its roots to the biblical King Solomon and Queen of Sheba, arrived in major airlifts in the 1980s and 1990s.

Ethiopian immigrants tend to vote in large numbers and many have backed right-wing parties in the past.

Neguise, 48, a veteran social worker once active with the rightist Likud party, cites the immigrants' persistent problems integrating into Israel as the reason he had decided to seek office on his own as head of the "One Future" party.

"The situation of our community is a catastrophe, a time bomb waiting to go off in Israel's face, like it did in France and elsewhere, if we don't do something about it," he said.

Increasing numbers of immigrant youths, born in Israel, face an identity crisis, torn between their parents' traditions and modern Israel, and many turn to drugs and crime, Neguise said.

More than half of the Ethiopian immigrants, including a growing number of college graduates, are unemployed, he said.

"These problems keep me awake at night, and I want to make change. In order to do that, we need political power."

Many Ethiopian immigrants take pride in Neguise as the first party leader from their midst, although opinion polls give him just a slight chance of winning a seat in parliament.

Shlomo Mula has a better chance of being elected to the legislature than Neguise. Mula is number 33 on the candidate list of interim Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's Kadima party. Opinion polls give front-running Kadima some 36 seats.

Mula, an immigration official in the quasi-governmental Jewish Agency, would be the first Ethiopian in Israel's parliament since the late 1990s.

He said a party like Kadima would be more effective than a tiny ethnic faction in helping Ethiopian migrants integrate.

"We came here to become a part of the society and help build it, not to continue to live in our own Ethiopian ghetto," Mula said.

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