The Idea of Israel

by Ilan Pappe

  This challenge by Shenhav was more than just a question of historical accuracy or fabrication. He doubted the mainstream Zionist narrative in Israel about Mizrachi Jews: that they were Zionists who were eager to come to Israel and that the state saved their lives by bringing them ‘home’. Shenhav questioned the assumption that Zionism played any important role in the life of Jews in the Arab world in general, and in Iraq in particular. While acknowledging that they did have a religious affinity to Eretz Israel, he suggested that they never perceived it as a place of residence or displayed any wish to colonise it. Shenhav also stressed the patriotism Jews felt for Iraq and other Arab countries – another reason they did not feel compelled to leave. And he goes further still, claiming that they were brought in as a cheap labour force to replace the expelled Palestinians and to help redress the demographic imbalance in the new state. In the early years of statehood, Israeli leaders realised that despite the 1948 ethnic cleansing, a Palestinian minority remained within the Jewish state and that not enough Jews had come from the West to settle in Israel. Not mincing his words, Shenhav cast doubt about the pretence of the Zionist movement to be a liberation movement: it may have liberated the European Jews, he asserted, but it enslaved the Mizrachi Jews.

  Shenhav was too young to recall the events himself. But Ella Shohat remembered all too well what it meant to be an Iraqi Jew in the young State of Israel. Today she teaches at New York University and is a leading figure in cultural studies, a topic she tried unsuccessfully to promote in Israeli academia. As a young girl in 1960s Israel, Shohat tried to lose her Arabic accent and refused to take as her school lunch the kinds of food that would identify her as an Arab. She further noticed that most of her neighbours Hebraicised their family names, and therefore she, too, tried to adapt (later she returned to her Arabic names as part of her personal struggle for recognition and equality).5

  Out of this experience came a long career of activism and scholarship that acquainted her with the world of textual and cinematic analysis, and a close association with the works of Edward Said and his deconstruction of Orientalism. She was the first to coin the term ‘Arab Jews’ and in many ways pioneered the 1990s post- and anti-Zionist Mizrachi challenge to the idea of Israel.

  Only Slightly Better Than Arabs

  Hiding their origin was common to many Jews who came from Arab countries. Ariella Azoulay – another cultural studies scholar, and a curator of several important post-Zionist exhibitions in Israel during the 1990s – tells the story of her father, born in Oran in Algeria. Upon his arrival in Israel, he took the first step on the way to Israelisation by declaring proudly, when the immigration official asked him for his place of birth, that he was from Oran, France. Nobody, she wrote, wanted to admit to being of Algerian origin.6

  What Ella Shohat and Ariella Azoulay’s father went through was individually and collectively experienced by many Arab Jews upon arrival to Israel. They were patronised and resented by the host community, and this disdainful attitude was felt from top to bottom. Prime Minister Ben-Gurion led the way by describing the Arab Jews as being without ‘the most elementary knowledge’ and having not even ‘a trace of Jewish or human education’. Ben-Gurion was worried that the arrival of Arab Jews would turn Israel into an Arab state. ‘We do not want the Israelis to become Arabs’, he said. ‘We are bound by duty to fight against the spirit of the Levant that corrupts individuals and society’.7

  Other Israeli politicians shared similar views. Abba Eban was worried about the ‘prominence of immigrants of oriental origin’.8 Nahum Goldmann, at that time the chairman of the Jewish Agency, asserted that ‘a Jew from Eastern Europe is worth twice as much as a Jew from Kurdistan’ and suggested repatriating only a small number of them.9 And Golda Meir wondered aloud, ‘Will we ever be able to elevate these immigrants [to Western civilization]?’10

  The politicians’ views were echoed by Israel’s leading journalists. Already in 1948 one of them wrote:

  We are dealing with people whose primitivism is at a peak, whose level of knowledge is one of virtually absolute ignorance and, worse, who have little talent for understanding anything intellectual. Generally, they are only slightly better than the general level of the Arabs, Negroes, and Berbers in the same regions. In any case, they are at an even lower level than what we know with regard to the former Arabs of Israel. These Jews also lack roots in Judaism, as they are totally subordinated to savage and primitive instincts. As with Africans you will find among them gambling, drunkenness, and prostitution … chronic laziness and hatred for work; there is nothing safe about this asocial element. [Even] the kibbutzim will not hear of their absorption.11

  By the early 1970s, Mizrachi activists had had enough. They went on a campaign to convince the establishment that they were not Arabs.

  Are We Arabs?

  From very early on, Mizrachi activists and politicians rebelled against these negative images. Much of the wrath was directed at the Labour Party establishment, which ruled Israel from 1948 to 1977, and so it was not surprising that the natural home for such frustration was the right-wing opposition parties, led by the Likud. Menachem Begin, Likud’s Polish leader, captured the anger and channelled it into his electoral campaign in 1977, a campaign that brought him and his party to power. The Likud is still there today, helped by a new group of frustrated immigrants. Now it is those who were brought from the former Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc.

  Likud’s main answer to these negative images was that the Mizrachi Jews were modern and Jewish, not Arab – that they were in fact as European as the other Jews. Scholarly proof of this assertion was provided by mostly left Zionist scholars whose expertise lay in Jewish communities in the Arab world; their approach was to show that these communities had their own identity, culture and life – ‘untainted’ by the surrounding Arab culture.

  Alas, the European Jews still perceived the Arab Jews more as Arabs than Jews. This explains the desire felt by many Arab Jews to become integrated as quickly as possible as Jews and Westerners in ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’. The fact that many of them had an Arab appearance complicated the integration; quite often, their appearance led to arrest or maltreatment by the security forces. Thus they were forced to work hard at de-Arabising themselves in the eyes of the Ashkenazi community around them. Wearing a huge Star of David medallion on the chest and a conspicuous yarmulke reduced the instances of mistaken identity by the powers that be.

  That desire was very different from the one that motivated the post-Zionist Mizrachi scholars and activists of the 1990s. What they claimed was that their Zionist and Jewish credentials were being overlooked, denied or ridiculed by the Ashkenazi Jewish establishment. On the other hand, the new generation also wanted to be recognised as Arabs, both ethnically and culturally, if not necessarily nationally. This, as we will see towards the end of this chapter, opened an unbridgeable gulf between the 1990s challengers and their natural constituencies.

  However, there was also a common thread. The scholars’ revelations about the scope and depth of past discrimination were welcomed by the community of Mizrachi Jews, who also accepted the allegations that the Mizrachim were still being discriminated against in modern-day Israel. Yet they detested the comparison with the Palestinians and rejected any non-Zionist visions of the future, such as cultural integration of the Jewish community within the Arab world.

  In this challenge too, there were trailblazers. Certain members of the most influential Mizrachi movement of the 1970s, the Black Panthers, not only took issue with the Labour establishment, they did not support Likud in its stead; moreover they also had doubts about Zionism as a whole. This is why some leading members of this movement developed close ties with the Israeli Communist Party, whose leadership saw the plight of the Mizrachi Jews and the Palestinians as a class issue. A well-known leader of the movement, Charlie Biton, served as a member of the Knesset on the Communist Party’s parliamentary list. There were also strong links between this movement and
the Marxist sociologists at the University of Haifa in the 1970s.

  As a result, Marxist analysis remained a possible basis for Mizrachi action, provided that the former dimmed its critique of Zionism. But the post-Zionist scholars of the 1990s who were Mizrachi Jews themselves or were Ashkenazi Jews concerned about the plight of this community were far more interested in the politics of identity than in issues of class. The most important impact on their work came from postcolonial studies, especially the work of Edward Said.

  The Orientalist Jewish State and Its Jewish Orientals

  The impact of Said as a Palestinian and as someone who confronted Western Orientalism head-on was quite significant during Israel’s post-Zionist moment. Said himself did not always move easily between his general critique of Orientalism and his commitment to the Palestine issue, and this open-ended twin interest explains also the nature of the post-Zionist engagement with his work and thoughts. It was possible to engage with him as a universalist when convenient but not as a Palestinian nationalist if that posed a problem.

  There is a tendency to separate Edward Said’s theoretical work on literature and culture from his writings on Palestine. It is true that he dealt with the two themes in separate books and essays, in which not only the content but also the style differed. However, it is possible to trace a dialectical relationship between them. This is particularly true with regard to his writings on Palestine, in which he directs the reader to theoretical contexts when discussing certain issues specifically connected to Palestine, but it is also present in his theoretical writings even where he does not explicitly mention Palestine.

  This interconnection between the general situation and the Palestine case study, however, created a permanent tension within Said’s work. The former entailed a sharp critique of nationalism, while the latter had to be more tolerant, if not reverent, towards it. This may explain why so few other authors on Palestine employed Said’s paradigms. It may also account for the paucity of Palestinian historians who followed his lead. The reasons for this are complex and understandable, but it was not until the Oslo Accords of 1993 and the unattractive manifestation of statehood under the Palestinian Authority in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip that pioneering works began to denationalise Palestinian history in the same way Said did.

  The universalised approach towards the study of Palestine, and his use of a deductive prism, did not at first win Said many followers within Israel. As we have shown, until the arrival of post-Zionism, academic work in Israel was primarily Zionist. But when Zionism was eventually challenged, Said became a natural source of inspiration. It seemed that quite a few critical Israeli academics, media pundits, and literati could not resist Said’s desire, and ability, to engage with humanity.

  Said’s impact can be detected in several major areas: the analysis of Israel as an ‘Orientalist’ state, the examination of the dialectical relationship between power and academic knowledge within the local context, the introduction of the postcolonial prism into the study of the society, and the critique of the current peace process and the search for an alternative way forward. But more than anything else, it was Said’s methodology of exposing images of the Orient and his assertions of what those images signified that had the most notable effect on how Mizrachi scholars and intellectuals viewed the past and present conditions of the Arab Jews within the State of Israel.12

  Among the early work in this vein was that of Eli Avraham, who investigated the media portrayal of the Mizrachim in the 1980s and 1990s. He found a number of recurring themes, including violence, crime, social unrest, unseemliness and neglect, and other unsavoury attributions such as having a primitive, herd mentality that disabled them from ever being ‘like us (the Ashkenazim)’.13 The most notable Saidian work in this respect, as mentioned, was the research of Ella Shohat. Inspired by Edward Said’s essay ‘Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims’, Shohat wrote about Zionism from the standpoint of its Jewish victims.14 In her view, the Arab Jews were part of the Orient, disparaged by the West and, in particular, the European Jewish settlers. By taking that approach, Shohat drew different lines of conflict on the land of Palestine: not between Israelis and Palestinians, but between ethnic Arabs (belonging to all three monotheistic religions) and European Jews. In her eyes, it was primarily a clash between East and West.

  Indeed, Said’s main impact was to allow these scholars to understand the delicacy of identity politics in a Jewish state that had brought in more than a million Jews from Arab countries in the 1950s. This re-examination began by looking at how Zionism affected the question of Jewish identity in modern times, arguing that the transformation of Zionism from a national movement in Europe, where a Jew was defined as a non-Gentile, into a colonialist project in Palestine produced a new definition of a Jew: a non-Arab person.

  The issue of identity appears prominently in the writings of the Mizrachi challengers. This new, Orientalist definition of a Jew in the context of Palestine owed much to Said’s claims in Orientalism – that the notion of the Orient helped to define Europe, and the West, as its ultimate opposite in perception, in ideas, in personality and in experience. Thus, from this Saidian angle, Zionism destroyed the Arab Jewish sense of community and culture and superimposed on it the Zionist and Israeli identity, which was an Orientalist construction, a collective identity that idealised European features by demonising Arab characteristics.

  In many ways, however, these Mizrachi scholars went beyond Said. They not only deconstructed Orientalist Israeli attitudes toward the Jews who came from Arab countries; they also tried to offer a different narrative on how the Arab Jews lived before they arrived in Israel. They negated the depiction of life in the Arab and Islamic countries as supposedly primitive and pointed out that the cities where these Jews lived and were active were far more culturally developed than the small shtetls of Eastern Europe.

  The assertion that the prior identity of the Arab Jews was not merely different but also contributed to peace played an important role in the new Mizrachi challenge. Moshe Behar, an important activist of the 1990s who now teaches at the University of Manchester, saw the superimposition of a Western identity, which was in Middle Eastern terms a colonialist one, as a crucial factor in making any reconciliation in Israel and Palestine a failure. Thus, he introduces a narrative that is accepted all over the world but denied by mainstream Israelis: life as a Jew in Arab and Islamic societies was a life of integration and coexistence.15

  As Behar insisted, only once in ancient history were Jews forced to choose between Arabism and Judaism, and suffered from ‘communal schizophrenia’ as a consequence. This was during the days of the Caliph Harun al-Rashid (763–809), who forced Jews to wear yellow patches. Zionism, it seems, reintroduced this schism in modern times. On the other hand, for the Mizrachi scholars, this history of organic cohabitation made the Arab Jews the ideal facilitators of peace and reconciliation between Israeli Jews and the Palestinians, including the refugee communities. Sadly, this view remained a matter of wishful thinking, and the role of facilitator has not yet been fulfilled.16

  The Saidian prism explained why the attitude of the nascent Jewish state was so hostile and indeed racist. From a Zionist perspective, the new state promoted the arrival of a million Arabs after expelling exactly that number in order to ensure Jewish supremacy and exclusivity in Palestine. As the works of Chetrit,17 Shenhav, and others clearly show, the Zionist leadership would have preferred to leave the Arab Jews where they were had it not been for the Holocaust and the lack of any significant immigration from the West after 1948. The dilemma was solved, however, by de-Arabising those Jews upon arrival. Once de-Arabised, the new immigrants contributed to the demographic balance and minimised the number of ‘real Arabs’ inside Israel.

  It is because of this paradigm shift that questions such as those posed by Shenhav were asked about the motives behind the immigration of Jews from Arab and Muslim countries to Israel. The Zionist narrative asserted that the main reason for suc
h immigration was the Arab Jews’ devotion to Zionism. It was a groundless replication of the story of the rise of Zionism in Europe. The critical scholars, however, showed two reasons for the immigration: aggressive Zionist lobbying and the emergence of local, anti-Jewish Arab nationalism.

  Similar revision of the official narrative was offered with regard to the motives behind the government’s discriminatory and abusive treatment of the immigrants. Mainstream historiography argued that there were objective problems, such as scarcity of resources or security concerns; the new Mizrachi researchers exposed a racist attitude towards these Jews as Arabs and a wish to modernise and Westernise them, with little consideration for their traditions and roots.

  Under Said’s influence, Mizrachi scholars exposed the sociological, anthropological and historiographical discourses used in research on ‘Arabs’, whether they were Palestinians in Israel, the inhabitants of neighbouring Arab states, or Mizrachi Jews. Therefore, when the early critics at Haifa made Arabs, Palestinians, and oriental Jews a single subject for scholarly research in Israel, they revolutionized the field. This tendency was strengthened in the post-Zionist discourse of the 1990s, and it made even more sense if one adopted the critical paradigm of Orientalism offered by Said. In fact, for years, such a grouping or reification was taboo, as Ella Shohat learned when she was faced with the condemnation that forced her to leave the country.