The Myth That Helps Zionism: Why the "Sterilized Ethiopian Jews" Story Hurts Palestinians
By Sidoc Haytu
You have heard the story. It circulates in every anti-Zionist space, on every protest sign, in every TikTok explainer. Ethiopian Jewish Israelis are the victims of a mass sterilization program — the Israeli state, terrified of Black babies, has been secretly sterilizing Ethiopian Jewish women for decades. The claim is repeated with such confidence that questioning it feels like a betrayal.
It is a lie. And it is a lie that serves the enemy.
Not because anti-Zionists who repeat it are bad people. They are not. They are people who know that Israel is a genocidal, apartheid, settler-colonial state, and who want to make that case with maximum force. Their intentions are good. But good intentions do not save an argument from being false. And a false argument, repeated loudly, does something worse than fail — it disarms us. It hands the Zionists a weapon and says, here, use this.
If you are serious about Palestine, you need to sit with this. And you will not like it.
The Law of Return: The Fact That Breaks the Narrative
Israel has an on-the-books law called the Law of Return, passed in 1950. It grants every Jew anywhere in the world the right to immigrate to Israel and receive citizenship immediately upon arrival.
This law applies only to Jews.
It does not apply to Palestinians — the people who are actually from the land, who were expelled in 1948, who have lived in refugee camps for three generations waiting to exercise a right that international law guarantees them.
Read that again. A Jewish person whose family has never set foot in Palestine can board a plane today and be a citizen by evening. A Palestinian whose grandmother's house keys are still in her family's possession cannot.
This is the structural fact that everything else must be measured against. And Ethiopian Jews are the clearest illustration of it.
They Were Not Fleeing. They Were Recruited.
The framing you have been given is that Ethiopian Jews came to Israel as desperate refugees, seeking asylum from persecution in Ethiopia, and were then brutalized by the state that took them in.
The truth is that Israel went looking for them.
In 1984, Israel conducted Operation Moses, airlifting approximately 8,000 Ethiopian Jews to Israel. In 1991, Operation Solomon evacuated another 14,000 in 36 hours using roughly 40 planes. These were not rescue missions in the humanitarian sense. They were recruitment drives, subsidized, coordinated, and paid for by the Israeli state.
Why? Because Israel is an expansionist settler colony that needs bodies. There are only so many Jews in the world. So Israel scours the planet for anyone who can be classified as Jewish — in Ethiopia, in India, in the former Soviet Union, in Argentina — and offers them a package deal: free flight, immediate citizenship, housing subsidies, integration assistance, and a home on land that belonged to a Palestinian family.
There is a material logic to this. Settler colonialism requires settlers. And a state that needs settlers will go anywhere to find them.
The fact that Israel has been actively seeking out, subsidizing, and welcoming Ethiopian Jews for forty years is not the behavior of a state that considers them a racial threat. It is the behavior of a state that considers them a demographic asset.
What Actually Happened: The Depo-Provera Story
Here is where I will lose some of you. But I would rather lose you with the truth than keep you with a lie.
The sterilization narrative is built on real events that have been distorted beyond recognition.
In the early 2000s, approximately 30 to 35 Ethiopian Jewish women reported that, while in Israeli-run transit camps in Ethiopia preparing to immigrate, they were told they needed to take a contraceptive injection — Depo-Provera — as a condition of being allowed to leave.
Some of the women later told Israeli journalists that if they refused the shots, they were told they would not be allowed to emigrate. That is a serious allegation. It deserves to be taken seriously.
But here is what the story is not:
It is not sterilization. Depo-Provera is a temporary injectable contraceptive. It lasts about three months. It does not remove the ability to conceive. It is not a hysterectomy. It is not Essure. It is not the forced sterilization of Puerto Rican women by the US government, or of Indigenous women in Canada, or of Black women in the American South. Those were permanent. This was not.
It is not mass. The number of women who came forward was approximately 35. Out of a population of Ethiopian Jews in Israel that numbers in the hundreds of thousands.
It is not ongoing. In 2013, after the allegations surfaced in the Israeli press, the Israeli Health Ministry issued a formal directive instructing gynecologists to stop administering the injection to women preparing to immigrate from Ethiopia. Whatever was happening, it stopped. No further reports of this practice have surfaced since.
The Israeli government's investigation is not credible. The state investigated itself and announced it had found no evidence that any woman had been coerced. Take that for what it is worth — which is very little. A state investigating its own conduct is not a neutral arbiter.
But even if you accept every allegation as fully true — even if you believe the coercion was real and the government's investigation was a cover-up — you are left with 35 women who were given a temporary contraceptive lasting three months during a process of voluntary immigration to a settler colony. That is a scandal. It is not a genocide.
The distance between "35 women allege coerced temporary contraception" and "Israel is mass-sterilizing Black Jews" is not a small gap. It is an entirely different claim. And when the gap is exposed, everything built on top of it collapses.
Why This Myth Does Real Damage
I need you to understand something, and I need you to understand it clearly.
Israel is not a white supremacist state. It has elements of white supremacy within it. It has real racism against Ethiopian Jews, Mizrahi Jews, and other non-Ashkenazi populations. But white supremacy is not the primary structure of Israeli oppression.
The primary structure is Jewish supremacy.
In Israel, the fundamental dividing line is not between white and Black. It is between Jew and non-Jew.
A dark-skinned Ethiopian Jew serving in the IDF can raid a Palestinian home. He can arrest a Palestinian child. He can bulldoze a Palestinian olive grove. He can shoot a Palestinian teenager at a checkpoint.
A light-skinned Palestinian — and many Palestinians have European features, blue eyes, fair skin — cannot. He is still an "Arab." He is still less than human in the eyes of the state. He is still a demographic threat to be managed.
The Ethiopian Jew is inside the master group. The Palestinian is beneath it.
When you import a white-supremacy framework into this context and insist that Ethiopian Jews are victims of the same system that brutalizes Palestinians, you are doing something specific. You are telling Zionism's lies for it.
You are helping to obscure the actual mechanism of oppression, which is ethnic-national supremacy, not biological racism. You are helping to present Israel as a flawed liberal democracy with a racism problem, rather than a settler-colonial project built on the exclusion and elimination of one specific people.
You are giving the liberal Zionists exactly what they want.
The Structural Argument: Settlers Are Not Victims of Settler-Colonialism
There is a concept in Marxist theory that applies here, though it must be used carefully.
Lenin, writing about imperialism, described the labor aristocracy — a stratum of workers in imperial countries who are bribed with a share of the superprofits extracted from the colonies. They are still workers. They are still exploited. But they are also materially invested in the imperial system, because the crumbs they receive depend on its continuation.
The same logic applies to settlers, regardless of their racialization.
An Ethiopian Jewish person who immigrates to Israel is placed, immediately, in a settler position. They receive citizenship based on ethnicity. They are eligible for housing on land taken from Palestinians. They are subject to the Law of Return, a privilege denied to the people the land actually belongs to. They are eligible to serve in the IDF, which is the armed enforcement arm of the whole system. They participate in the national project, whether they consciously choose to or not.
This does not mean every Ethiopian Israeli is a willing perpetrator of atrocities. It does not mean they face no discrimination. It does not mean their lives are easy.
It means that their material position is that of a beneficiary. They are not the colonized. They are the colonists. They are not the dispossessed. They are the recipients of dispossession.
And when anti-Zionists insist on presenting them as victims, they confuse the Palestinian struggle with something it is not: a racial justice movement in which all non-white groups are natural allies against a white oppressor.
Palestine is not that. Palestine is a national liberation struggle against a settler-colonial project. And in settler-colonial projects, settlers can be Black, Brown, poor, discriminated against, and still be settlers. Their oppression within the master group does not make them members of the colonized nation. It makes them second-class members of the colonizing nation.
That distinction matters. It is the difference between understanding Zionism and misunderstanding it.
The Honest Counter-Argument
A fair reading of the other side deserves space, because pretending it does not exist would make this a weaker article, not a stronger one.
Ethiopian Jews in Israel do face real racism. This is documented. They are overrepresented in poverty statistics. They have lower educational outcomes than Ashkenazi Jews. They face discrimination in housing and employment. Israeli police have killed unarmed Ethiopian Israelis, and in 2019, an off-duty police officer shot and killed Solomon Tekah, an 18-year-old Ethiopian Israeli, sparking nationwide protests.
There was also a real scandal in the 1990s when it was revealed that the Israeli national blood bank had been discarding blood donated by Ethiopian Jews out of unfounded fears about HIV. That happened. It was real. It was humiliating and racist, and it did lasting damage to the community's trust in the state.
So when I say Ethiopian Jews are not victims of the system, I am not saying they experience no harm. They do.
But there is a difference between discrimination within the master group and exclusion from it. The Ethiopian Jew who is called a slur by an Ashkenazi commander is still in the army. The Palestinian who is stopped at a checkpoint is not in the army — he is on the other side of it. These are not equivalent forms of oppression. They are not even on the same spectrum.
And there is a second honest point to acknowledge: the Israeli government's investigation into the Depo-Provera allegations is not trustworthy, and the directive issued in 2013 does not prove that no coercion occurred before that date. Anti-Zionists are right to treat Israeli state claims with suspicion. The demand for accountability for those 35 women is legitimate.
But suspicion of Israel does not license fabrication. It does not license taking a documented, limited, contested allegation and inflating it into a race war that does not exist.
The Ethiopian Dimension
I am writing this from a specific place, and I need to say this clearly.
Ethiopian Jews are a small, historically vulnerable minority within Ethiopia. Ethiopian Israelis are a small, historically marginalized minority within Israel. Neither group has any power over the other.
The myth that they are being mass-sterilized by Israel is false. But the myth is not harmless in Ethiopia either. It contributes to a broader propaganda environment in which Ethiopian Jews — who are already subjected to real discrimination in their country of origin — become a symbol, a token, a talking point in a war between factions that have no interest in them as people.
If you are in Ethiopia, and you are fighting for the liberation of the Ethiopian working class, understand this: the Ethiopian Jew who immigrated to Israel did not take anything from you. He was not your enemy. He was offered an opportunity by a state that wanted settlers, and he took it. You can criticize the structural meaning of that decision without pretending he is being sterilized.
Focus on your own struggle. It is enormous. It is real. And it does not require the manufacture of victims in a country you do not live in.
The Reason This Matters
Here is the crux of it.
When you repeat the sterilization myth, you are telling a story in which the primary evil of Zionism is racism. Racism against Black people. Racism that a liberal, if properly shamed, could be persuaded to correct.
That is not what Zionism is.
Zionism is a settler-colonial project whose primary evil is the elimination of the Palestinian people from their land. It is not a racism problem. It is a colonial problem. It is not a matter of Israeli society becoming more inclusive. It is a matter of the settler project being dismantled.
And when you reframe the struggle as a matter of racism, you open the door for the liberal-Zionist response: "Look, Israel is imperfect. It has problems. But it is a democracy, and we are working to fix it. We just need more diversity. We just need more sensitivity training. We just need to listen to Black Jews."
That is the trap. That is how this myth gets weaponized against the very people it claims to defend.
Palestine does not need Israeli society to become less racist. Palestine needs the settler-colonial project to end.
The sterilization myth tells Palestinians that their struggle is part of a broader global racial justice movement, which it is not. It tells them that their natural allies are other marginalized groups inside Israel, which is not true. It tells them that the enemy is racism, when the enemy is colonialism.
Palestinians did not ask for this. They did not ask to be turned into a metaphor for someone else's racial politics. They are a people being expelled from their homeland by a settler-colonial state. That is their struggle. It is specific. It is national. And it does not need to be dressed up in borrowed clothes.
Stop Looking for Victims Who Are Not There
Here is the hardest version of this argument, and it is the one you need to hear.
You do not need the permission of Jewish suffering to oppose Zionism.
You do not need to find an oppressed group of Jews and stand up for them as the way to justify your stance on Palestine. That stance justifies itself. You are against settler-colonialism because settler-colonialism is wrong. You are against the Zionist project because it is a colonial project. You are against the expulsion of a people from their land because that is a crime.
The desire to find Jewish victims of Zionism — to prove that the system harms even its own supposed beneficiaries — is a symptom of a deeper problem: the inability to oppose a movement led largely by Jews, on behalf of a people who are not Jews, without needing to be excused by other Jews first.
That is the reflex of a politics that does not quite trust itself.
Stop it. Stop looking for victims among the settlers. Stop building your argument on a foundation that will crack under the lightest questioning. Stop giving the enemy an easy counter: the anti-Zionists lie.
Because they do sometimes. And every time they do, a Palestinian family loses a little more of the argument that might have saved them.
What We Actually Have
We have a settler-colonial state. We have a Law of Return that grants citizenship by ethnicity. We have airlifts that recruited Ethiopian and Indian and Russian Jews to populate stolen land. We have an occupation of fifty-eight years. We have a genocide in Gaza. We have a state that killed nearly 200,000 people in a two-year period. We have a system of Jewish supremacy that orders human beings by ethno-religious hierarchy and calls the top rung the only one worth having.
That is enough. That is more than enough. You do not need to add anything to it.
The sterilization myth adds something false to something true. And anything false, added to the truth, weakens the truth.
You want to help Palestinians?
Stop repeating a lie. Start telling the truth. All of it. The truth about the Law of Return. The truth about the airlifts. The truth about the positions that settlers occupy. The truth about what Zionism is and what it does.
The truth is doing more damage to Israel than the myth ever could. And the truth is what Palestinians actually need.
If this analysis resonates — and if you have a counter-argument — I want to hear it.
Sidoc Haytu is an Ethiopian writer and researcher focused on political economy, class dynamics, and anti-imperialist movements in the Horn of Africa. Follow Sidoc Haytu on Instagram at @sirapressnews.
