page_title: Black people
section_title: Israel
hierarchical_section_title: Black people / Asia / Western Asia / Israel
caption_attribution_description: Israeli Border Guard Police_2254c
context_page_description: Black people refers to a racialized classification of people, usually a political and a skin color-based category for specific populations with a mid to dark brown complexion. Not all Black people have dark skin; in certain countries, often in socially based systems of racial classification in the Western world, the term "Black" is used to describe persons who are perceived as dark-skinned compared to other populations. It is mostly used for people of Sub-Saharan African descent and the indigenous peoples of Oceania. Indigenous African societies do not use the term Black as a racial identity outside of influences brought by Western cultures.
  The term "Black" may also be capitalized; the AP Stylebook changed its guide to capitalize the "b" in Black in 2020.
  Different societies apply different criteria regarding who is classified "Black", and these social constructs have changed over time. In a number of countries, societal variables affect classification as much as skin color, and the social criteria for "Blackness" vary. In the United Kingdom, "Black" was historically equivalent with "person of color", a general term for non-European peoples.
context_section_description: About 150,000 East African and black people live in Israel, amounting to just over 2% of the nation's population. The vast majority of these, some 120,000, are Beta Israel, most of whom are recent immigrants who came during the 1980s and 1990s from Ethiopia. In addition, Israel is home to over 5,000 members of the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem movement that are ancestry of African Americans who emigrated to Israel in the 20th century, and who reside mainly in a distinct neighborhood in the Negev town of Dimona. Unknown numbers of black converts to Judaism reside in Israel, most of them converts from the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States.
  Additionally, there are around 60,000 non-Jewish African immigrants in Israel, some of whom have sought asylum. Most of the migrants are from communities in Sudan and Eritrea, particularly the Niger-Congo-speaking Nuba groups of the southern Nuba Mountains; some are illegal immigrants.
caption: An ethnic Jewish (Beta Israel Ethiopian Jew) Israeli Border Policeman
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