Obama, A New Job, Hope and Fear

By Baruch Munna

The world is paying attention these days to the nomination of Barack Obama as the first ever African American candidate of a major party for the presidency of the strongest country in the world. Well, like most people, I have been paying attention to that for sometime now. Ever since Barack Obama announced that he was going to run for president in February 2007, I was checking up the news outlets on the fate of the junior senator from Illinois on a regular basis.

That was when I was just past my first semester at graduate school and a month into a new job. It happens that I was having lunch with two of my newfound colleagues, when our talk about food turned to exotic foods and then to the mix of cultures, and then I was suddenly reminded of the African American senator's bid for presidency and I decided to update my new colleagues on the news I read a few days ago.

"Have you heard?" I said shifting the conversation, and told them about the Black senator who was bidding to be the next occupant of the White House. They scoffed at my story, "A black man in the United States as President?" I just said, "Well, we shall see…." but they went on to remind me how racist America really is by citing their experiences in the US. I could not argue for or against based on experience, since by then I had never been to the US and all that I know of the country was what I read, saw on TV or heard from those who had been there. Well we never really did discuss Barack Obama; until he was all over the news outlets and the fever of his ascendancy in the Democratic primaries were all over the news. By January 2008 and after the Iowa caucus, one of my colleagues who had remained to work in the company had officially become an Obama supporter. We then began to freely discuss, if he really can beat the former first lady. Well, he won Iowa, and won South Carolina riding the African American voters' wave, but can he really win the Nomination, we would chew through our food druing lunch breaks.

Meanwhile, my classes had really advanced over the year and were approaching the end of my graduate studies. So it was that I met a friend on the corridors of the university who had just finished classes like I did and was preparing to start a new job. Unlike me, she never worked professionally and she was quite stressed about it. She had just finished a study of 5 years where she studied her first and second degree without a break in between.

With a post graduate degree in hand and a mother tongue hebrew and a good command of English, she had eased into the jobmarket with an advantage over her peers. However, the idea of becoming a full time employee really scared her. She had already got a job as a clerk in a government office. She was wondering that what she had studied in her two degrees had nothing to do with what she is going to do. Her whole perspective of the professional world was filled with pessimism. She was not expecting anything positive from her first ever job. Her sense of the future was clearly not promising and I tried to talk her out of her pessimism. I told her that I did not have any idea of what I wanted to do when I graduated too and that she will need to see the professional world for herself to really find out what she wants to do in life and to know how she can do that.

She took note of my advice and asked me why I think she feels so negative at this time while she should really appreciate the path she came and what she accomplished. I had to tell her what I think and told her that she was putting up a defense system as she is stepping out for the first time to face the world of professional work. She has her concerns and fears, and lowering her expectations bar by thinking negatively was what she was doing. After all she is a black woman, living in a mostly white country where not quite a few people doubt if she is Jewish at all. Well I had to hand it to her. As they say friends are those that tell you what you don't want to hear. To my surprise, she agreed to my explanation. "You know" she said, "I never thought that I had negative expectations for my future here in Israel, until a few months ago…" so she started telling me that she met Ethiopian Americans that came to visit Jerusalem and she had a chance to acquaint with them. They had a question for her. "Why do people stare at us in the streets?" To her surprise she had a quick response for them, she quipped "It must be because you were speaking in English and most Israeli's are surprised to hear Ethiopians speak English." Her answer surprised her more than it surprised them. She told me that she started really paying attention to all the negative thoughts she hoards in the back of her mind about her life as an Israeli of Ethiopian origin in Israel. Amazingly, she was born in Israel and does not even speak Amharic, the Ethiopian language. Yet many see her and treat her as a new immigrant in her daily life.

So our conversation drifted to Obama as conversations do often these days, well at least to me they do. We wondered people's perception of black people in Israel might change if he gets elected. She confessed that she was in dilemma. "As a black woman," she said, "I am for his election and as a Jew, I hear he will not be good for Israel and don't want him to win."

I have spent hours reading talk back comments from Ynet to Jerusalem Post and all that you read is the hostility most Israeli's have towards Obama. In my humble opinion, I think most Israeli's find it hard to accept that a man whose father was a Muslim will not have sympathy to the Arab world. Well the truth is most (or so I think) Israelis come from Jewish parents from both sides and are not exposed to a mix marriage out of their religion, let alone race. I, for one having come from a mix marriage have no problem taking Obama at his word. If he thinks he identifies as American and is a Christian fine with me. After all, the only thing he has taken from his father is his name. Maybe it is because of the fact that Israel is more or less a homogenous nation state or so we tend to think that the make up of Obama scares us. The US is definitely on the way of being more of a multicultural state, the rise of a multiracial and multicultural candidate maybe the strongest indication of that.

Hope is perhaps what I can share with my lady friend as to the fate of Israel's black population, would there be a time ever that a black man can rise to an occasion of this magnitude in Israel. Well not in the near future anyway, but as Dr. King dreamt a generation ago so can we that one day we shall cease to fear and start to hope even if it means on a small thing as our first job out of university. After all we came to live and be a part of Israel, not to stand aside and watch.

The writer is an Ethiopian Israeli, who can be reached on baruchmuna@gmail.com