While the Zionist movement as envisioned by the founders of modern
Zionism (Theodor Herzl, 1897) was created within Eurocentrist
thought, the reigning rhetoric was, in fact, one of separation from
Europeanism, and the creation of a "new Israel." It was this sort
of pioneer in the revived homeland that stood at the center of the
cultural and ideological activity during the Yishuv (pre-state)
period. The foundations of the Zionist vision described in Herzl's
Old New Land, 1902, however, were elitist and exclusive. The cities
of Tiberias and Jerusalem, for example, were to become holy, and
the book's heroes spoke about how they could purify themselves from
everyday profanities and from the merchants and the dirt of city
life. New melodies by Heine were to be introduced into the
environment in which marble, gold and pure whiteness would reign
once again. The Arabs were described in a patronizing tone. The
language was to be determined according to the cultural preference
of the speakers, and the national language of the past was not to
be forced on the incipient society.1
The early Zionists, for purposes of self-interpreting the
particular cultural position of the emergent society, made do with
a general "other": on the one hand Arab, and on the other hand
Diaspora-Jewish. From the outset, the society was saturated with
images caught in the tension between Eurocentrism and Orientalism,
but dominated by the Eurocentrist view of the "Oriental." Zionism
was founded on Eurocentrism and injected Enlightenment knowledge
and values into the various realms of life (politics, sociology,
the military, ideology, science, and into what Edward Said calls
the collective "imaginative").2 It was these that determined the
terms and criteria of belonging to the "Israeli society" and its
emerging institutions. The degree of proximity or distance from the
newly formed society was based on an imagined Israeli identity
founded on Eurocentrism. The Oriental part of Israel was of
interest to the forefathers of the Yishuv, but, as a hegemonic
society, it first had to be cleansed of its Oriental traits through
a war against the Levantine spirit. In the words of Ben-Gurion, "We
don't want Israelis to become Arabs."3
In his book on Orientalism, Said claims that the definition of
identity, and more specifically the Eurocentric definition, needed
an opposing "other," based on which it would define its selfhood.
It could be assumed then, that Eurocentrism from a Zionist
standpoint embodied the Arab as "other." Why, then, did Zionism
need an additional "other," its own private "other," besides the
Arab who embodied for it the Oriental "other"? Why did it need a
Mizrahi (Eastern Jew) whom it would negate even as it absorbed it
into its society?
"Mizrahi" is not an "authentic" category that exists in any
geopolitical space or historical time. In Morocco, Tunisia, Yemen
and Iraq there are no "Mizrahis" in the political-cultural sense
that exists in Israel. Their emergence as a politically and
ideologically significant category is relevant only to the Israeli
reality.
Inventing the Mizrahi
In order to understand why Zionism had to invent the Mizrahi as its
sole contrast, one must understand that Zionism, although it was
nourished from Eurocentrism, was not its equivalent. Zionism
developed from a dialectic process of rebellion both against
European decadence and against the Jewish lifestyle as it evolved
in the European Diaspora.
As a revolutionary ideology, Zionism adopted unmistakable
attachments to biblical Judaism, but Zionism was unhappy with the
cultural-ethical Judaism that had developed in the course of the
history of the Jews in the Diaspora. Its formulation as an ideology
of cultural and national revival was focused on motifs of
revolution and national revival. These were expressed by each
Zionist stream in its own way - socialist, nationalist and later
religious, with the new and modern mingling with the old and
distant. However, the new was dissociated from the Shtetl (the
Jewish village in Eastern Europe) and the Melah (the Jewish quarter
in the Moroccan city). Socialist Zionism, for its part, related to
religion as an opiate of the masses, to much of tradition as
degenerate - an obstacle to the modern liberation project - and to
the Diaspora as a force threatening an authentic emergence of the
new Israeliness.
Here lies the root of the challenge of Zionism as a secular
political ideology to tradition and religion. This challenge served
to reverse all that related to Diaspora and tradition into the
"other" that Zionism needed vis-à-vis pre-modern Judaism.
Ostensibly, the Orient and Orientalism constituted the basis from
which the Zionist "other" was derived. Zionism did not find in
Orientalism a particular solution to the question of Jewish
identity, and it thus had to invent a particular "other." This
invention was embodied in the image of the Mizrahi Jew who solved
the problem of "otherness" in the Jewish context. The Mizrahi
combined in his image of the "other" both the Diasporic identity,
traditional and religious identity, and the Orientalist, i.e.,
non-European "other." Zionism could not derive these "others" from
its own essentially universalistic Eurocentrist roots, so it
therefore created its own private "other," based on the
traditionalism and the religiosity of the Jewish Arabs who came
from Arab and Muslim countries. They embodied the universal,
Oriental dimension in their Arabness, and the particular aspects in
their Jewishness.
As stereotypes, they came to serve as a basis for the
fictionalization of an Israeli identity, the new Sabra
(Israel-born), which created, from within the confines of its own
consciousness, its own private "other," aimed at giving concrete
expression to the negation of Jewish foundations from the past.
This took shape in the immigrants from Arab and Muslim countries
who were almost reinvented as "Mizrahi," emphasized in the early
1950s with the mass immigration from North Africa. This influx
constituted a threat to what the Zionist enterprise saw as its
continuity, at a time when the leadership viewed laying the
groundwork for national political sovereignty as one of its central
goals. As against this, the massive flood of immigrants from Arab
countries imposed the threat of reversing cultural trends in the
opposite direction towards Orientalism, Diasporism and
pre-modernism.
Identity Crisis
Here, in my opinion, lies the explanation for the two levels of
violence employed against the immigrants. One level took the form
of actions, like the trimming of earlocks, anti-religious coercion,
sending most of the immigrants away from the geographical center of
Israel to the periphery and to outlying areas of settlement. The
second level consisted of an active educational policy that laid a
foundation for portraying the children of the Mizrahi as "others,"
their internalization of these concepts regarding themselves and
their projection onto their parents as well.
Programs assuring their assimilation were created for children and
parents of immigrants from Arab and Muslim countries. Israeli
literature concerning "collective identity" has dealt little with
the crisis of identity experienced by immigrants from Arab and
Muslim countries, and their consequent political and cultural
behavior. It has not addressed the questions of alienation and
cultural discrimination, and the ramifications of the
deconstruction and reconstruction of their identity. Neither has it
tackled the complex sense of social belonging that the Mizrahis
developed vis-à-vis the imagined Israeli collective. Instead,
psychological and educational studies have developed in the
direction of constructing the Mizrahi identity as one that is
perverse, retarded and intellectually undeveloped, usually
contrasted to European cases. Zionist educational systems
ultimately ended in a decisive failure and demanded a high price:
the multi-dimensional alienation and identity crisis of the
Mizrahis. The founding fathers and mothers, in determining the
place of the immigrants according to their own worldview, failed to
ask them for their opinion on their "new" identity.
Ben-Gurion and his colleagues, other policy-makers from the same
school of thought, found themselves trapped by the obligation to
open the gates of immigration to all Jews, and at the same time to
construct a modern non-Diasporic society. This is why they took the
decision to remove hundreds of thousands of immigrants to the
geographic and social periphery. They explained this as an attempt
to lessen what Ben-Gurion called the "predicted damage."4 The
immigrants from Arab and Muslim countries were viewed as an object
to be crushed and shaped, and not as a subject with status,
opinions, will or entity of its own. Their desires, feelings,
values, culture, aspirations and problems were viewed as dangerous
and perceived as foreign, different, "other."
The Mizrahis were objects for religious or proletarian
resocialization and for electoral-political co-option. They were
also objects to be drafted into the cheap labor force, or to
receive less valuable lands in the settlement process. Rather than
being essential for the definition of the new Zionist Israeli, they
were omitted from the textbooks and excluded from cultural
expression. In many areas of life the situation remains similar to
this day. Their political and cultural patterns of oppression and
exclusion arose from condescension and paternalism. The efficiency
of manipulations, and the weakness of the Mizrahis as an object,
rendered official discrimination superfluous, as opposed to the
case of Palestinians, homosexuals and women, against whom
discrimination is founded in the legal system.
Captive Subjects
The Mizrahi problem was that of a population whose origins were in
Arab and Muslim countries, but whose strongest desire was and is
for the right of entrance to Israeliness, if only the Mizrahis
would adopt universal ideas of equality and progress as dictated by
the founders. Within these boundaries, the Mizrahis were trapped,
hearing promises that they would win great happiness in the
likeness of an egalitarian and humanistic society. In practice, the
Mizrahi population was ensnared within an oppressive and aggressive
social and cultural order, which erased its knowledge, silenced it,
and removed it from history.
One of the results was the creation of a second generation of
captive subjects with an identity of dependence, characterized by
scattered and random patches of culture and folklore, the essence
of which was a longing for resemblance, for being "similar to," for
equality and self-definition like everyone else. The histories of
the Mizrahis remained excluded from the history of the state, and
if small, superficial sections were admitted to this history by
elites with a European majority, it was only due to the result of
local struggle, to marginal successes in moments of crisis.
This was what occurred after the "Black Panther" demonstrations in
1971, when the Ministry of Education established the Department of
Jewish Mizrahi Heritage, and memorials for the pioneers of Dimona
were established, as if to say, "We too have a part in the
pioneering epic." Folklore departments, exhibiting mainly the
folklore of Jews from Arab lands, were opened in the Israel Museum,
the shrine of canonic Israeli cultural assets. But all this
occurred in grotesque proportions, with the result that "the
Zionist activity of Mizrahi Jews" was blown out of proportion. The
portrayal of Mizrahis as a deviation from the accepted Israeli
image also led to internal splits among the Mizrahis
themselves.
By the time Mizrahis began responding to their situation, it was
already impossible to change it through resuscitation, possibly
nostalgic, of their Arab past. What was needed was not to negate
the emptiness of modernity. Mizrahis who decided on a critical
stance vis-à-vis their place in Israeli society as Mizrahis
discovered that their position was intrinsically tied to a critique
of modernity and the West. However, failure to give credit to and
legitimize modernity did not involve wishing to return to
pre-modernity. We are dealing with a process that is simply
irreversible. What remained open was the option of developing
post-modern viewpoints, expressing the struggle of the Mizrahis for
change.
Shas
The various types of struggle taken up by Mizrahi activists can be
identified in stages: outbursts of violence; an appeal to the
ruling political circles with claims of entitlement; and even the
adoption of practices used by the ruling political forces. The
latter process culminated in the Shas party, the ultra-Orthodox
Sephardic5 movement, which set about building a political model
based on that of Mapai (the Labor Party that ruled the country for
30 years), with a wide system of pervasive and ubiquitous
political, cultural, economic and educational practices. The very
ability to reconstruct the mechanisms of manipulation and to draw
attention to the presence of power by creating and silencing
identities, contains an element of liberation. Shas, as an
ideological movement, was the Israeli model of that which seeks
power through exposing the colonial concealment of the ethnic
"other"; while, at the same time, it speaks for those who were
considered marginal and offers them an alternative interpretation
of the political reality and their role in it.
Two arguments are brought up whenever the present position of the
Mizrahi is discussed. The first is that the problem of deprivation
and under-representation of Mizrahis is over, and it is enough to
look at the many political and military positions they now occupy,
in order to see that there is a massive penetration of many
Mizrahis into the system. But this argument fails to see that those
Mizrahis did so at the cost of discarding their Arab-Jewish
traditional legacy and becoming Europeanized. This process has been
even termed in Hebrew "Ashkenization." Hence, even if all the 120
Mizrahi members of the Israeli parliament were to be Mizrahim, that
would not indicate that the Mizrahi identity problem has been
resolved.
The second common argument is aimed at the Shas Party. It is argued
that Shas is manipulating its electorate just as the previous Mapai
establishment did. Shas furnishes its people with a religious
education that is so restricted in its curriculum that it
completely fails to provide the necessary qualifications for a
successful absorption into a modern and sophisticated economy. This
argument is brought up by Shas's political rivals, such as the
leftist secular Meretz Party and its leaders Shulamit Aloni and
Yossi Sarid. However, this is only one side of the coin and Shas's
supporters have a twofold response: first, that the party is
providing the welfare needs that the state should have provided in
the first place, and, if there is somebody to be blamed, it is the
state and not the party. Second, the party has developed its
educational system with very limited resources and, whenever there
is a possibility, it is developing an advanced educational system
such as Ulpanot for young women in high schools and at the college
of Ariel in the Jewish settlement of the same name in the West
Bank.
Conclusions
The conclusions that arise from what I have written is that, while
the concept "Mizrahi" grew out of a Eurocentrist and Zionist
Israeli reality, in the course of time it became a hump on the back
of the very identity that invented it, but no longer needed it.
"Mizrahi" was brought in through the back door by the shapers of
Israeli culture, who turned it into a part of their own culture.
This is reflected in every realm of Israeli life and values. But
wherever it exists, it causes conflict and represents a negative
value: the hegemonic Israeli society (Mizrahi and Ashkenazi) is
interested in discarding it.
When all is said and done, Mizrahi represents the failure of the
melting pot. It divides and damages the ethos of "national unity,"
showing that the concept of Israeliness has been corrupted and is
actually merely a collection of rifts and social fragments. Even
so, the ethnic dimension has germinated in every one of these
fragments. Facing post-modern reality, nothing remains in the
Israeli ideal that is not expendable. In such a reality, even
identity is not preserved, neither for Sabra, for Ashkenazi nor for
Mizrahi. This does not yield universal liberation from mechanisms
of control over identity, memory, and individual and collective
knowledge. Rather, in these and other areas of life, it provides an
opening of the arena for participants to struggle to define power
relations, and to mold cultural and social conditions.
1. The idea of freedom to choose one's language, as it
originated in Europe, was related to the trend towards
universalism, of which the interest in developing Esperanto as a
universal language was also a part. Ironically, this universalism
was actually a mix of exclusively European languages, and certainly
did not include Arabic.
2. Edward Said (1979), Orientalism (New York: Vintage), p. 3.
3. As quoted in Sammy Smooha (1978), Israel, Pluralism and the
Conflict (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press), p.
88.
4. David Ben-Gurion (1957-1962), A Vision and a Way, Vols. D &
E (Tel Aviv: Am-Oved [Hebrew]), pp. IV, 212; V, 267.
5. Sephardi is the term replacing that of "mizrahi." Its connection
is different for it refers also to Jews of Spanish origin who came
prior to the establishment of the State of Israel, and goes back
hundreds of years to the Ha-Rambam epoch.
