Palestinians are circulating a scene from an old Israeli comedy on social media in which a group of Hamas fighters manage to infiltrate through a tunnel into enemy territory and kidnap an Israeli officer in order to exchange him for Palestinian prisoners. Although everything goes smoothly, the operation fails. Why? Because it's too dark for them to see that the officer is black. When the leader of the group realizes that the captive is of Ethiopian descent, he knows that all their efforts were in vain.

The group gets into a long discussion about how to convince the Israelis to exchange him for a smaller number of Palestinian prisoners, but in the end they are convinced that the Israelis will offer nothing in return, and even the prisoner himself won't believe that the Israeli army and government care about him. The only issue they face is: What do they do with this useless prisoner without hurting his feelings? In the end, they decide to release him.

The officer can't believe that even Hamas doesn't want him, and tries to convince his captors that, despite being a black Israeli, he is valuable because he is not just a soldier, but an officer, an important officer. But they are not convinced. One of the group tells him that he should thank God that he is not a Druze. The officer asks them to drive him to the separation line, but they refuse and tell him to run, because Israeli soldiers are good at running.

Such comedy is no stranger to this decades-long conflict. People on both sides love to produce and watch them, perhaps because people tend to be more honest with themselves when they are laughing. Although such clips are meant to be self-critical, they are often used as propaganda to mock the enemy and boost self-confidence.

Last week, an Israeli police officer shot Solomon Teka, an 18-year-old Ethiopian-Jewish youth, killing him and sparking widespread protests that shut down public transportation in major cities like Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, reminding people of the Arab Spring. Foreign media showed some Ethiopians declaring their support for Palestine and converting to Islam, in a rebellion against the state of Israel, which they describe as fundamentally corrupt. They are treated in almost all respects as third-class citizens by the state.

In an attempt to capitalize on the Ethiopian-Israeli protests, a Palestinian comedian from Gaza, Ali Nasman, wrote a satirical song mocking Israel's racism towards its darker-skinned citizens. In the video in which he sings the song, Nasman blackens his face and is joined by a group of young, dark-skinned Palestinian men to mock the way Ethiopian Jews are treated in Israel. Nasman is shown with a young child on a bus, and a white policeman forces them to get off, calling them "black scum." Nossaman then reminds us how Israel ignored an Ethiopian Israeli soldier captured by Hamas.

To inflame the situation, Hamas' military wing revealed that Israel has never demanded that the case of the missing soldier, Avraham Mengistu, be discussed when the subject of prisoners comes up. Since his disappearance, he has been completely excluded from the negotiations. Mengistu's family accuses the Israeli government of double standards based on racial discrimination.

Now, Keren Bar-Menachem, head of the committee appointed by the Israeli Justice Ministry to investigate Tika's death, has told the young man's family that "the ballistic report shows that the off-duty policeman who shot Tika aimed toward the ground, but the bullet ricocheted and hit the 18-year-old's chest."

This time, the victim is an Israeli Jew, not a Palestinian, so things should be different. It will no longer be possible to cover up official racism. The next time Netanyahu wants to brag to his backers at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) about achieving a homogeneous society from diverse colonial communities, he will have to think twice if he wants to be honest. Institutionalized racism against Ethiopian Jews represents the failure of the entire Zionist colonial project, because racial discrimination is inherent in the ideology on which the colonial settler state is based; just ask the Palestinians, they know this to be absolutely true.

As Israeli-American activist Miko Peled said: "Supporting Zionism and Israel means supporting racism and violence. Supporting the Palestinian struggle means supporting efforts to replace racism and violence with justice, freedom and equal rights."

Source: Middle East Monitor