The Idea of Israel

by Ilan Pappe

  On this score, a highly unusual development in Israeli knowledge production occurred as a result of the deep engagement with Said’s work. Orientalism differentiates between the colonialist Orientalism of the nineteenth century, which had its own reasoning and features, and the one that continued to be exercised after colonialism ended in the second half of the twentieth century, often defined as the postcolonial period. In every corner of the world where the attitudes of the colonial past were still held and implemented by Western states, institutions, or people towards whatever or whoever was non-Western, this was discussed as a postcolonial phenomenon – because in practice there was supposedly no more colonialism. Palestine, however, was not yet decolonised, even at the end of the twentieth century. So the question was which aspect of Said’s work applies better: his approach to historical colonial case studies, or his approach to societies that were formerly colonialist.

  This question was seriously debated in the spring of 2002 in the leading post-Zionist journal, Theory and Criticism, which devoted a special issue to postcolonialism as it was understood and applied by Israeli scholars.18 This was a difficult title for scholarship within a state that many believed was still colonialist. The reality that was described appeared to be much closer to colonialist-era reality, while the discussion relied on tools which assumed that real colonialism was already over. This was never mere intellectual babbling. Until today, the Palestinian national movement and its supporters have failed to provide a clear analysis of what Zionism is all about: was it a colonialist movement and thus the Palestinian struggle is anti-colonialist, or is Israel a state with a colonialist past but the struggle with it today is between two national movements? This conundrum was eventually solved a few years ago when scholars such as Patrick Wolfe, Edward Cavanagh and Lorenzo Veracini offered a new paradigm for situations such as the one prevailing in Palestine. They proposed that settler colonialism is ‘as much a thing of the past as a thing of the present’.19 They would not accept ‘neocolonialism’ or even ‘postcolonialism’ as terms that describe the reality that prevails in Palestine, where colonialism still rages on, albeit through twenty-first-century means.

  This is an intellectual quandary with political implications that have only recently been grasped. Earlier, the Mizrachi scholars had more urgent issues to resolve. The main problem for those who adopted the Saidian prism was that it led to a direct clash with their immediate constituency in the State of Israel. On two major aspects of the analysis, the scholars and the politicians of identity differed: how to deal with Zionism, and what sorts of alternatives to offer the Mizrachi Jews?

  The politicians endorsed what they saw as a popular wish among the Mizrachim to be admitted as ‘good Zionists’ and saw this as the key to integration and success. Such a route, however, was deemed disastrous by the challengers. Said had offered an answer as to why that approach became so popular. Inspired by Frantz Fanon’s ideas of how native populations react to their negative image in the eyes of the colonisers, Said invoked the process of internalisation. Victims of racist colonialism begin to absorb and accept the negative images the colonialists have of them. They try to solve the problem by becoming the colonisers, and their failure puts them in an even more vulnerable position than they had occupied before.

  Ella Shohat explained that this political behaviour was the result of years of Ashkenazi oppression. In her view, the Mizrachi Jews internalised the condescending Ashkenazi attitude towards them to such an extent that they turned into self-hating Mizrachim. In other words, the East came to view itself through the West’s distorting mirror. Shohat quoted Malcolm X, who said that the white man’s worst crime was to make the black man hate himself. She maintained that Mizrachi hatred towards the Arabs was no more than self-hatred caused by long exposure to Ashkenazi oppression.20

  The second bone of contention was that many of the post-Zionist Mizrachi scholars regarded the Mizrachim as Arabs, who therefore suffered the same way as the Palestinians did. This approach seemed alien, and still does, to the community’s leaders and pundits. And indeed, while many of these scholars were inspired by Edward Said’s work on Orientalism, to mainstream Israeli scholars Said was an enemy – a Palestinian.

  We Are Proud Arabs!

  By associating themselves with the kind of critique offered by Said, post-Zionist scholars broadcast that they were content to be counted among the Arabs. Scholars such as Shohat and Shenhav, along with many others, were seeking their roots as Arabs, not necessarily as Jews. In many cases, that meant relearning Arabic – which their parents had asked them to forget – as part of an attempt to widen their identity as Arab Jews and diminish their identity as Mizrachim in Israel.

  The most passionate articulator of this sentiment was the sociologist Sami Shalom Chetrit. He was part of the Moroccan Jewish community, the largest group of North African Jews in Israel. He taught at several Israeli universities before having to pursue his academic career elsewhere. Like Shohat, he went to the United States. Born in Morocco, he grew up in Ashdod, a development town built near the evicted Palestinian town of al-Majdal. In his fascinating work, he fuses personal memories with scholarly research on the Arab Jews in Israel. Like his colleagues, he made substantial forays into activism. 21

  Together with Shlomo Svirsky, Chetrit opened Kedma, the school mentioned in the previous chapter. He was also instrumental in founding an organisation named the Mizrachi Democratic Rainbow Coalition, a group (and think tank) that articulates demands such as increased social and cultural rights for their fellow Mizrachim and redistribution of the state’s wealth and resources, such as housing, among the ethnic Jewish groups within Israel. Their greatest achievement was to allow moshavim – generally poor Mizrachi Jewish settlements, collective in their nature – to enjoy the same rights and access to privatised public land as granted many years earlier to the predominantly Ashkenazi kibbutzim. (That land, of course, had been confiscated from the Palestinians in 1948, a point the Rainbow was not always willing to acknowledge fully.) In fact, fearful of the anti-Arab tendencies in its potential constituency, the Rainbow refused to include the Palestinians in Israel as a group whose lack of any share in public land and housing should be addressed by the Rainbow itself. Universalism was not really one of its tenets.22

  The Second Intifada fractured the Rainbow. The wish to be part of a newfound consensus in Israel in the wake of the demise of the Oslo Accords – the effects of which are discussed in the final chapter of this book – pulled most of the Rainbow members back into the Zionist fold. A minority became even more critical than before towards Zionism and the idea of Israel as a Jewish state. Chetrit was among the latter group. He remained both a universalist and, more than anything else, an Arab Jew. He is also a poet, and sometimes his and his fellow Mizrachim’s, angst and frustration come through best in his poems:

  When I hear Fayruz singing, ‘I shall never forget thee, Palestine’,

  I swear to you with my right hand

  that at once I am a Palestinian.

  All of a sudden I know:

  I am an Arab refugee

  and, if not,

  let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.23

  In the 1990s, these scholars had to confront not only the right-wing orientation of most Mizrachi Jews in Israel but in addition a new tendency to adopt a far more religious, and at times fundamentalist, approach in their politics of identity. The new orientation was a mixture of ultra-Zionism with ultra-Orthodoxy, which stressed the superiority of the Mizrachi religious tradition in Judaism over all other trends and attitudes. This tendency was institutionalised when a charismatic North African rabbi, Ovadia Yosef, with the help of a leading ultra-Orthodox rabbi of Ashkenazi origin, Eliezer Shach, founded a new party, Shas, which became increasingly popular among the Arab Jews who were still stuck on the lower rungs of the social, economic and geographical ladder of the modern State of Israel.

  The slogan of Shas, Le’hahzir atara l’yoshna (to return the crown to
its place – in other words, to redeem our greatness) was by itself not something the critical Mizrachi intellectuals were opposed to. They shared the wish to salvage a forgotten, repressed and marginalised religious and cultural tradition. But the wish to reinvent this tradition as a Zionist one, and at the same time as a pointedly anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian one, separated the politics of identity of the scholars from that of the Mizrachi politicians.

  And yet what is really impressive about the post-Zionist Mizrachi scholars of the 1990s is that they were quite a large group, and that they persisted in their defiant outlook into the next century, at a time when their immediate constituency rejected their agenda even more categorically than before. They remained relevant, despite the ideological gap between them and other societal forces championing Mizrachi rights, because the discrimination remained intact. The combination of Shas and a relatively open door for Mizrachi politicians within Likud (and later, even in the Labour Party) did reform the status of this community in the political and cultural realm in the late 1990s. Mizrachim held key positions in government and in the army. But there was still good reason for a scholar or any other kind of knowledge producer to continue the search for the roots and realities of discrimination against Mizrachi Jews, since the socio-economic gap did not narrow and in many ways worsened. One of the main reasons for this was the mass immigration of Russian Jews in the 1990s. This led to a prominent voice in the anti-Zionist group of Mizrachi challengers, Smadar Lavie, who attacked the Israeli government for its attempt to ‘whiten the Jewish people’ by bringing in large numbers of Russian Jews, many of whom were in fact Christians.24

  By the end of the twentieth century, still nearly 90 per cent of upper-income Israelis were Ashkenazi Jews, while 60 per cent of the lower-income families were Mizrachim. Yoav Peled, a political scientist at Tel Aviv University, noted in the 1990s that there was in Israel ‘a cultural division of labour’ – that is to say, there was a correlation between ethnicity and income.25 Thus, the vast majority of the low-income and impoverished families were of Mizrachi origin, while the lower-middle class consisted of both Ashkenazi and Mizrachi families, with a small Ashkenazi majority, and the upper-middle and upper classes were almost exclusively Ashkenazi.

  Even though the Mizrachim account for almost half of Israel’s population, even as late as 2000 there was still only one college-educated Mizrachi for every four college-educated Ashkenazim.26 Indeed, education is one of the areas that Mizrachi activists, whether Zionist or not, cannot ignore. Sami Shalom Chetrit argues that the gap in the educational realm is the outcome of state policies that have not changed significantly since the 1950s. In areas more densely populated by Ashkenazi Jews, high schools have focused on preparation for higher education and careers in academia or more prestigious professions. By contrast, in areas that are primarily Mizrachi, the state has built special high schools (called Makif and Amal) that offer mostly vocational training. Differences in levels of education have led to differences in occupation and income.27

  Another scholar, Yaakov Nahon, noted that despite intermarriages and the process of Mizrachi socialisation into Ashkenazi society, the gaps between the two groups not only did not close but even grew at the end of the twentieth century. Although he observed certain ‘objective differences’, such as the larger Mizrachi families, the gap was still, in his eyes, the result of early and present state policies of discrimination and prejudicial social attitudes.

  The post-Zionist Mizrachi challengers were pointing to the reality of discrimination, a reality that also informed the actions of Mizrachi politicians. In this respect, whoever represented the Mizrachim in Israeli politics shared parts of the analysis of the post- and anti-Zionist Mizrachi scholars. What the politicians refused to accept was the scholars’ explanation for why discrimination had occurred and would continue to occur as long as the state remained Zionist.

  Around 2000, the post- and anti-Zionist Mizrachi scholarly challenge reached its peak. It was an important challenge, but not, as we have shown so far in this book, the only challenge to the way the idea of Israel was marketed inside and outside the state. To a certain degree, the other challenges petered out after 2000. Yet the critical Mizrachi viewpoint persisted into the twenty-first century, since both mainstream Zionist politicians and scholars of Mizrachi origin shared major elements in its critique. The claims of discrimination were not denied. If scholars continued to observe its existence in the twenty-first century, and if poets, film-makers, and artists continued to protest it, this was all perfectly legitimate. As a result, the analysis continued while the debate about the prognosis was pushed aside.

  In the present century, Mizrachi scholars have tried a softer approach, requesting recognition of their cultural rights. They have demanded that the state’s educational and cultural policies be based on a more multicultural perspective; today, in the midst of the second decade of this century, this demand is still regarded as quite reasonable, provided it is wrapped in a Zionist discourse and frame of mind. Unlike the scholars, some artists, poets and writers, each in his or her own way, have continued the agenda of Arab Judaism that was first set forth by the scholars of the 1990s. To this day, the Mizrachi contingent of culture producers continue to pose some sort of challenge and alternative to the idea of Israel as presented by the establishment and as understood by the vast majority of Jews within the state.

  NINE

  The Post-Zionist Cultural Moment

  In a little town in the south of Iraq, Basra, there were thirty million palm trees, but there was not even one sunflower by Van Gogh … George Shemesh was among those who left the rivers of Babylon and arrived in Jerusalem. There he found out that Zarisky [a well-known Israeli Ashkenazi painter] was the king of painters. And this truth was also revealed to Benny Efrat from Lebanon, Ben Haim and Doctori from Iraq and many young ‘Franks’ [derogatory term used by Ashkenazi Jews to refer to Mizrachim] who arrived in the land. But from these ‘Franks’, Zariskies did not emerge; nor did they engage with ‘Jewish’ or ‘Zionist’ art … However, when they arrived in America they learned from Matisse the Frenchman and Sol Lewitt the American that everyone [in the West] was talking about Islamic art and for a short moment this reignited their memories.

  – George Shemesh, text accompanying the exhibition

  Six Israeli Artists from Arab Countries, Tel Aviv, 19781

  In the spring of 2002, the Mother Tongue Festival was launched with exhibitions, a film festival and an academic conference. In more ways than one, it summed up the 1990s attempt to produce, or at least point to, the existence of a distinct Mizrachi discourse. The gist of the films, the visual arts exhibits and the talks delivered at the conference had to do with connectivity – the strong, almost undeniable ties that had been exposed between Arabism and Mizrachi Judaism. Yet this theme captured the paradox of the event: could Mizrachi culture return to its roots without re-adopting at least the mother tongue of that civilization, Arabic?

  Most of the films and discussion at the events were in Hebrew, reinforcing the fact that the Arabic language was not part of the new culture. The participants in the event were, in their own eyes, Arab Jews, but culturally they wished to be defined as Mizrachim, the Orientals. Loyalty to Hebrew was probably pragmatic, not ideological. Or perhaps the use of Hebrew involved deeper layers, for as one acute Mizrachi observer noted, this attitude to the Arabic language in the new post-Zionist Mizrachi culture, including music, was also an attempt to run away from the role played by Mizrachi Jews in the oppression of the Palestinians:

  We did all kinds of things there; we were governors in the occupied areas of 1948, agents in the Mossad, agents in the Secret Service, officers in the military rule inside Israel until 1967 and then in the occupied territories [the West Bank and the Gaza Strip].2

  The documentary films produced by the Mizrachim tried to revive the contribution of Jews to Arab culture in general, especially Egyptian and Iraqi culture. An example of this is the fiim Desperado Squa
re by Benny Toraty, a feature film about one of Tel Aviv’s poorest neighbourhoods, Shechunat Hatikva, which ironically means ‘neighbourhood of hope’. Hatikva, located on the southern outskirts of the city, was populated by North African Jews in the 1950s; lately the government has dumped tens of thousands of Eritrean refugees there, a move that is the source of constant friction between two disadvantaged communities locked in a slum separated from the rest of Tel Aviv by a highway.

  The film tells the story of the neighbourhood through the chronicles of one family. The father used to own a cinema and, after it closed, beseeched his children never to operate it again. There are two sons, who, after their father’s death, decide to defy his request, as one of them claims he was granted permission to do so by his dead father in a dream. To celebrate the reopening of the cinema, the brothers look for a copy of the Raj Kapoor film Sangam. The search for the rare copy reveals the neighbourhood’s subculture, in which dreams are fulfilled only on the screen.

  Many Mizrachi film-makers and visual artists regarded themselves in the 1990s as Arab Jews. But the Arabic language appeared only as it does in the testimony of a prominent Arab Jewish author, Shimon Ballas – in a dream, or rather a nightmare.

  In addition to including Arab Jews, the Mother Tongue Festival featured North African Jewish writers who asserted that it was not only the relearning or re-respecting of Arabic that could pose a linguistic challenge to the idea of Israel. Some of them regarded French similarly. Before emigrating to Israel and becoming Zionised, North African Jews conversed mainly in French. The Mizrachi author Dror Mishani even suggested that a return to French as the strategy for cultural definition might be less alienating to the general Israeli Jewish public. After all, it was not the language of the enemy. Or, as Mishani put it, it would create a linguistic space ‘where the Mizrachi Jew is not disturbing the cultural scene’.3