The paradox of diversity in the Israeli academia: reproducing white Jewishness and national supremacy

ABSTRACT

This paper claims that policies designed to promote diversity and provide Ethiopian Jews with opportunities in Israeli institutions of higher learning create a paradox where, rather than diversifying student bodies and faculties in universities, they bolster the reproduction of national and religious supremacy of white Jews in the Israeli academia. Interviews with 50 Ethiopian students reveal that the racialized cultural indexes on which Israeli society structures its racialized attitudes towards Ethiopian immigrants have not been purged from university campuses. Instead, I argue, they continue to suffuse and shape those very programs designed to combat them by reinventing Jewish privilege and national exclusivity in Israeli universities.

KEYWORDS:

• Racism
• black women
• diversity
• higher education
• Israel

Acknowledgments

I thank the ministry of science, technology & space for funding this research between 2014-2017.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Zionist movement placed Aliyah (Emigration of Jews from Europe to Palestine) as one of its primary goals, a priority that stands at the heart of the Law of Return, amongst the first laws to be legislated in the State of Israel, that determines that the Aliyah of Jews to the state does not constitute immigration but rather a realization of a Jewish birthright to return to their homeland (Fikar 1999, 338).

2. The melting pot was an integration policy led by early Israeli governments aimed at achieving the ‘ingathering of the Exiles’, one of the primary goals of early Israeli statehood that stipulated the social, economic and cultural absorption of immigrants and their full integration with the veteran Jewish population from the mandatory era.

3. Settlers of color is a term aims to ‘highlight how non-indigenous people of color are set up (by settler colonial states) to take part in the politics of genocide regardless of their intentions or historical circumstances, because their displacement into indigenous lands simultaneously erases indigenous people who previously occupied these lands’ (Smith 2012, 80–81).