I did not know Solomon Tekah, the 19-year-old fatally shot by police on Sunday night. I do not intend to spend much time investigating who this young man was. I want to focus instead on the bleak result of his death.
Following the large protest against over-policing and police violence against the Ethiopian community in 2015, there was a sense that the Israel Police had learned its lesson and changed its behavior.
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But it seems the Israel Police is incapable of translating a statement of its intentions into action, its officers continuing to see themselves as above the law. The defective handling of Ethiopian Israelis' complaints of police violence by the Justice Ministry's Police Internal Investigations Department serves to support officers who fire their weapons at members of the community. It is a shame that a handful of racist cops are devastating families, destroying an entire community and harming the image of a state that we love and hold so dear.
I will not lay out all of the disasters the Israel Police has inflicted upon us, because the public has not been exposed to all of the shocking incidents. If a murder is not documented, the police, with all the resources at its disposal, acts to defame the victims and conceal its failures.
Young children in our community are scared of police cruisers. Just like the children in the Gaza periphery region run for cover whenever they hear a siren, so too do our children whenever they hear the siren of a passing ambulance or security force vehicle. The police are causing our children emotional and physical damage. They are being forced to grow up with the sense they are being persecuted for no other reason than they are the children of immigrants from Ethiopia.
But the damage being done does not end with us. It impacts the country and society in general. The government must delineate a policy of containment and stop taking us into consideration only when it comes time for budget deliberations, as the latter always stays the same and we are relegated to just another budget item. What we need is to be treated like human beings. I suggest all kinds of community activists try to calm the tensions and find effective means of action that will put the offender on trial. We must not sow the seeds of hatred and add fuel to the fire.
