JERUSALEM — President Reuven Rivlin of Israel said on Monday that mounting protests by Ethiopian-Israelis had “revealed an open and raw wound at the heart of Israeli society,” but he condemned the violence that erupted the night before at a demonstration in Tel Aviv.
“We must look directly at this open wound — we have erred, we did not look, and we did not listen enough,” said Mr. Rivlin, who has emerged as a leading advocate for Israel’s Arab and other minorities during his first year in his largely ceremonial post.
“We must not allow a handful of violent troublemakers to drown out the legitimate voices of protest,” he added. “We are not strangers to one another. We are brothers, and we must not deteriorate into a place we will all regret.”
The call for calm came as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu convened meetings with leaders of the Ethiopian community after Sunday night’s protest, in which 56 police officers were injured and 43 demonstrators were arrested. Several thousand people, including many non-Ethiopians who supported the anti-discrimination message, rallied peacefully in Tel Aviv for hours, but clashes broke out in Rabin Square as night fell.
The police said demonstrators tried to break into City Hall and pelted officers with bricks and stones. They responded with water cannons and stun grenades, whose use is rare in the historic square and unusual at a gathering of Israeli Jews, though similar mechanisms are frequently deployed in the West Bank to quash protests by Palestinians.
Officers were deployed in large numbers on Monday around Jerusalem’s government complex, in anticipation of another outbreak of violence.
Sunday’s protest followed a smaller one last week in Jerusalem, in response to the April 26 beating of a uniformed Ethiopian-Israeli soldier by two police officers, which was caught on video and spread on social networks. Mr. Netanyahu met on Monday with the soldier, Demas Fikadey, 21, and posted on Twitter a photograph of the two shaking hands and smiling.
“I said to the soldier,” Mr. Netanyahu’s post on Twitter recounted, “ ‘I was shocked by the pictures. We cannot accept this and we will change things.’ ”
Earlier, Mr. Fikadey told Army Radio that he opposed “violence against citizens and against police,” adding, “It’s important that they hear our side, but violence will not solve the problem.”
Since the attack on Mr. Fikadey in the Tel Aviv suburb of Holon, many young Ethiopian-Israelis have shared their own tales of police harassment and brutality that they say are commonplace. Ethiopian leaders say the community also faces discrimination in housing, education and employment, painting a bleak picture of the group’s position in society 24 years after a mass airlift of descendants of an ancient Jewish tribe.
There are now about 135,000 Ethiopian Jews in Israel, less than 2 percent of the nation’s population. But Ethiopians make up to a third of youths in detention facilities, according to government reports, and have higher rates of poverty, suicide, divorce and domestic violence.
Rabbinic authorities have offended Ethiopians by questioning their Jewishness and requiring conversion before approving weddings. Health officials prompted outrage in 1996 by dumping Ethiopians’ blood donations over fears of H.I.V. Schools have restricted Ethiopian enrollment.
In 2012, protests started after residents of four apartment buildings in the southern town of Kiryat Malachi vowed not to rent or sell to Ethiopians.
This year’s movement has been propelled in part by the parallels with African-American protests against police brutality in Baltimore; Ferguson, Mo.; and elsewhere.
Fentahun Assefa-Dawit, director of an Ethiopian-Israeli advocacy group, Tebeka, said the focus of the movement must now turn to the government, and he called on the prime minister to immediately establish a committee “to investigate everything and to plan a way to resolve these issues.”
“Sometimes we see protests and demonstrations to be an aim in itself,” Mr. Assefa-Dawit told international reporters in a conference call. “But it is not the aim, it is the means. The aim is to bring the government, whoever is in charge, to draw their attention to the burning issues and the problems that exist.”
He continued: “We are against any violent demonstration. Violence is not going to solve the problem. It deteriorates the problem.”
But Shlomo Molla, a former member of Parliament and leader of the Ethiopian students’ association, called for civil disobedience, including refusing to serve in the army or pay taxes, until the situation improves.
“I know it’s very dangerous,” he said. “I know violence it’s not the solution, but this government, these people understand only violence. It’s very sad to say, but if you are not acting violent in Israel, you are not coming to any result.”
“Years and years people are coming,” added Mr. Molla, now a businessman who travels frequently to Ethiopia. “Ethiopians are demonstrating, but no one is giving the right answer, no one is hearing, no one wants to understand.”
Micky Rosenfeld, a spokesman for the Israeli police, said at least one officer remained hospitalized on Monday with moderate injuries from Sunday night’s clashes, in which Mr. Rosenfeld said seven protesters were also wounded, though local news reports suggested there were more. Nineteen of the 43 arrested protesters were scheduled to appear in court on Monday.
Scores of police officers, some on horseback and others on motorbikes, surrounded the prime minister’s office, Parliament, the Supreme Court and other government buildings on Monday morning after another demonstration was announced. Streets were closed off and a water cannon was at the ready, though no demonstration materialized.
Yitzhak Adamka, a 40-year-old father of three, said that he had been a soldier working as a member of kitchen staff when Ethiopian blood donations were rejected in the 1990s, and that he had felt ashamed, worried about whether “people would eat my food or not.” Now, he says, he watches as a younger generation — born in Israel and serving in the military at higher rates than other Jews — earn college degrees but still struggle to find work that suits their skills.
“We’re first in the line of fire,” Mr. Adamka noted, listing recent military operations in which he and his friends have served. “But when it comes to jobs, we’re the last.”
Of the new protest movement, he added, “it just erupted like a volcano.”
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