By DAVID LAZARUS, cjnews.com

Israel’s Council for Ethiopian Jewry is suing the Israeli government as part of a stepped-up effort to help the remaining Jews of Ethiopia get to Israel.

Mount Royal MP Irwin Cotler, right, said the lawsuit is part of a new three-pronged initiative announced last week to raise public awareness about the plight of what Cotler said are some 2,000 Jews in Ethiopia who are on Israeli government lists of people who have applied to come to Israel.

Speaking to reporters last week, Cotler, a founding member of the council, all but used the word “racism” to explain the government’s apparent refusal to use its own established list of 1,400 Jews who are already recognized as qualified to have their eligibility ascertained in court.

But the situation is clearly “discrimination,” he said, “a combination of bureaucratic failure, indifference, and incompetence. The effect is to treat [Ethiopian Jews] differently than anybody else, a denial of equality before the law.”

He said, “One of the most shocking things is that this is a list the government itself accepted in 1999.

“They said there were another 750 [on the list] they could not find, but we went there and found them within a week.

“They’ve withdrawn shlichim [to Ethiopia], they’ve shut the process down, when by their own list there are 1,400 who have not been investigated.”

The result, he said, is that Ethiopian Jews are languishing in Gandar with “young children dying of malnutrition.”

Cotler said there are probably as many as 8,000 “falash mora” Jews who could qualify for entry into Israel, and “90 per cent of that 8,000 would come.”

Besides the lawsuit, Cotler said a group of Knesset-members last week introduced a bill to pressure the government to bring the remaining Ethiopian Jews to Israel, and that the Ethiopian Jewish community will “ratchet up” its public advocacy in an effort to make the issue resonate more with the public.

“To use their own words, ‘enough is enough.’ We want our brothers and sisters home as quickly as possible.”

Cotler cited a recent statement by his friend Alan Dershowitz of Harvard Law School that he felt “ashamed” by the Israeli government’s current policies on Ethiopian Jewry, and Cotler noted that the Israeli government never required proof of “matrilineal descent” in the cases of thousands of Soviet Jews who found safe haven in Israel.

But what started as a commitment on the part of former prime minister Ariel Sharon’s government in 2003 to bring remaining Ethiopian Jews to Israel soon changed.

A year later, Cotler recounted, the government “capped’ the potential number of Ethiopian émigrés at 17,000. Then it said there was no “final number.” Then it established a monthly quota of arrivals that dropped from 300 to 150 by June 2006.

By December of last year, “the government said, ‘Aliyah is ending and we withdrawing the shlichim… to stop it all,’” Cotler said.

He quoted former Israeli Supreme Court president Meir Shamgar, who is honorary chair of the council, as saying that the Israeli government has no right to take away the rights of Jews.

“He said the right to immigrate belongs to Ethiopian Jews, and it is not the right of the Israeli government to extinguish them.”

Cotler quoted from a conversation he had with Israeli Interior Minister Meir Sheetrit in which he said Sheetrit described his government as constituting the “rule of law” on the issue.

Cotler retorted that he has dealt with numerous Israeli interior ministers over the years and that Sheetrit would not be the last.

“I told him: ‘These Ethiopian Jews will come either with your support or without your support.’”

Cotler also hoped the effort to raise the issue’s public profile in Israel would work.

“There are people who don’t seem to know this is happening,” he said. “It is hard to get ‘air time,’ if you will, hard to get it into the public arena.”