The Idea of Israel (29 page)

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.
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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 such 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.

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.