Unpacking hegemony: Acts of decolonization by Ethiopian Jews in Israeli academia

Abstract

This paper argues that the encounter of Ethiopian Israeli students with the national hegemony, epistemic racism, and whiteness within Israeli academia has led them to deconstruct hegemonic narratives, epistemologies, and spatial structures, contributing to a broader process of decolonizing the Israeli academy. Drawing on interviews with 50 Jewish Ethiopian female students and graduates regarding their racialized experiences in Israeli academia, this paper examines the dual positioning of this group, shaped by their simultaneous encounters with their identities as both racialized Black Jews and as “inferior settlers”: First, when they encounter national exclusion within the academic space and experience themselves as racialized others; and second, when they interact with Palestinian students who define them as part of the settler “other.” By revealing their dual positioning, they challenge the core elements (national, religious, and colonial) of the Zionist Israeli/settler identity, reclaiming their Ethiopian epistemology through these fundamental axes. This paper introduces a new theoretical layer to Israeli scholarship by examining the racialized experiences of Black Jewish migrants through the white-black axis—an approach that largely overlooks their positioning within colonial-indigenous matrices. These axes underscore the anchors through which Israeli academia must undergo decolonization.