This is Entry 16 in the Mondo Awards end-of-year Inspire-us contest.
On the last day of my recent trip to Israel/Palestine, the question I dreaded most finally came and I think I was finally ready to engage it. "What exactly were you doing here for so long?" my father's side of the family asked in discordant unison as we sat down for breakfast. It was an innocent question—not an ambush—but I definitely felt alone, cautious and weary from two months of conversations with Israelis. In this instance, I was talking to my committed custodians and I wanted to be respectful. I was keeping the conversation bland and they were appreciating that my understanding of the country is nuanced, even though I had lived there only as a child. But once the topic of the occupation, or as Israelis call it, "the situation,” came up there was a lot of resistance. Not resistance to the occupation. I wish my family were one of "those" Israeli families. The mere word “occupation”—and not even the description of its horrors—engendered resistance to my views, which were labeled at various moments as “naïve,” “leftist,” and “simplistic.”
After grinding water in a lengthy debate of one versus a hundred, what it turns out I failed to understand was how different from us Arabs are and always will be. They start with "You don’t know what it is like to live under terror," monopolizing the conversation as if they are the only ones with credentials to say anything authentic. Even though I concretely talk about Israeli policy, it continues. "The question of justice is not relevant," roars my aunt. "There is not justice, no morality in Muslim society," my usually reticent but instantly authoritative grandfather interjects. They didn't need to think and did not need to know what was actually happening only miles away in “the territories” because this conflict for them is based on irreconcilable cultural difference.
The jaded conversation ended calmly enough but it lacked a punch line, an exclamation point. At least until I noticed what my grandfather was about to do. Barely twenty minutes after the debate ended, and not five minutes after everyone left, he slipped on his headphones to listen to music in Arabic, on the radio, as he has done every Saturday afternoon since emigrating from Baghdad. Yes, I neglected to mention with whom, exactly, I was sitting at the table. My dad’s side of the family is Iraqi Jewish: Mizrahis, sometimes lumped with the Sephardis, Arab Jews, if you will. That is who we are and that moment of stark contrast between his genuine inhabitation of Arab culture and his total renunciation of that inhabitation was a potent dose of the dissonance that is prevalent throughout Israel.
I, for one, have not always been an Iraqi Jew. A common distinction that is important to Israelis when they meet each other is ancestry. For most of my life I favored mentioning my maternal ancestry, which is Bulgarian. If I said I was Iraqi, it was secondary. Bulgarian Jewish is not Ashkenazi, but it sure is white and Iraqi is, well, Arab. For many reasons, it is hard for me to identify with struggles inherent in the terms Mizrahi and Arab Jew but the fact that I almost exclusively and perfunctorily said Bulgarian means I had internalized some sort of shame. If I say Mizrahi now, however, it comes out with thunderous resolution and intention.
How did I encounter the subversive potential within the dissonance so many Mizrahis exhibit? One day, I went on a tour of Jerusalem that focused on the story and heritage of the Israeli Black Panthers. The Panthers were a group of young Moroccan Jews who came from in the neighborhood of Musrara in Jerusalem. We learned about how they built a social movement to challenge the Ashkenazi hegemony in the country. In the tour we walked the old neighborhood and heard the stories of the Panthers. The tour concluded in our meeting with Reuven Abargil who was one of the original founders of the group. He is now almost 70 years old and still fierce, brilliant and passionate about social justice. In the new and emerging social movement known as the Vendor’s Struggle, he is helping to organize various vendors who are under attack by city hall. In Jerusalem, the preponderance of vendors in the west are Mizrahi and in the east, Palestinian. They are currently protesting against their common tormentor: Mayor Nir Barkat who wants to “ clean up” the city and push his neoliberal agenda using the pseudo-legitimate violence of the police apparatus. The vendors are part of the city rightfully and intrinsically, working on its streets for decades. Their unity in challenging gentrification showed me the destabilizing potential of joint Palestinian and Mizrahi struggle.
I saw them protest together and I saw them speak Arabic to each other. To hell with the claim that Mizrahi’s are an obstacle to peace. Statements like this are meant to uphold the same kind of racial hierarchy, which made me think as a child that I wanted to be Bulgarian more than I wanted to be Iraqi. Once the Mizrahi disavowal of Arab identity and culture can be recognized for what it is, it can also be dismantled. In feeling empowered to reject and fight and dismantle that oppression, I want to acknowledge Ella Shohat, Sami Shalom Chetrit, Reuven Abargil, and Tom Pessah, great activists and scholars who made a difference in my life this year.
Initially, my trip to Israel/Palestine was meant as sort of a culmination of two years of transformation in California. I had been part of a community of students dedicated to engaging directly with social change organizations and activists in Israel/Palestine. That experience profoundly changed me and engaged me a process of critical thinking, which continues to inform my activism. Now, I wanted to meet all the wonderful people I had been working with, see everything up close, and go to the Apartheid Wall and to the protests in Bil’in. Rather than a conclusion, however, I found deepened commitment, vitality and inspiration.
As I move forward, my grandfather and the story of his life continue to permeate my consciousness. My curiosity, at first, sought to understand what it meant to arrive in Tel Aviv as a 23-year-old Iraqi cut off suddenly from your entire world. By now, I have committed to a personal journey of extracting new and more profound parts of my grandfather’s history while avoiding the mentality of proving to him that he is actually an Arab or that he has been oppressed. Instead, I find personal empowerment in a unique account of struggle in Israel—unique to my family—but common to millions of Jews. What I eventually found this year was not a culmination but transformation, a bridge to new possibilities.
“Once the Mizrahi disavowal of Arab identity and culture can be recognized for what it is, it can also be dismantled.”
Well what is it then? Why does your grandfather, who grew up in an Arab country, speaks fluent Arabic and understands Arab culture far better than you, have the attitude he has to Arabs?
Let me give you my answer. At the personal level, there is no difference between Arabs and Jews whatsoever. However, the problem so far exhibited by Arab society is that it is usually led by the most extreme segments in society or by those that yield the most force.
When your grandfather says:
“There is not justice, no morality in Muslim society,”
he does not mean that Arabs are not moral or just at the personal level. They are obviously just as moral or just as any other people. However, his observation is basically correct at the societal level. Not one Arab country has a truly independent and free justice system. Political disagreements in Arab countries tend to be solved by force and it seems that only dictatorships are stable in the Arab world. These are the facts and any solution needs to take them into account or risk being called naive.
With all due respect, eee, I find it HARD TO BELIEVE you could write this “the problem so far exhibited by Arab society is that it is usually led by the most extreme segments”, without any apparent awareness of Israel’s and the USA’s “contribution” to the phenomenon you describe.
Here is a hint at the USA’s “gift” to Arab countries…
link to news.antiwar.com
And here are Israel and the USA literally “conspiring” to bring about “regime change” in Iran…
link to therightperspective.org
And Israel’s relentless war mongering against Arab countries, , and it’s apparent attitude that it has the right, any time it so chooses, to interfere with the political life of Arab countries…
link to ipsnews.net
Not to mention the seemingly daily increase in political extremism in Israel itself.
It’s a shame Ben Gurion was intent on destroying the beautiful culture the Arab Jews brought with them to Israel. It’s another shame that Asaf’s grandfather still has to listen to his favourite music using a headset in fear of people like eee hearing him.
Along the same feelings expressed by Asaf, exactly a year ago today, we read Mya Guarnieri’s interview of Tom Mehager, 32, an Israeli with Iraqi roots and confused loyalties here in Mondoweiss’ mini series on post-Zionism . From the interview:
“My father was born in Iraq. All my family names are Arabic. I’m Arab,” Mehager says. “From the Zionist point of view, I’m supposed to be the same as a Jew from Holland. But I really feel connected to Israeli Arabs. [We] speak the same language.”
Zionism creates another paradox, according to Mehager. “The guy from Holland has rights in both Europe and Israel. The Palestinian who is born here has no rights here or anywhere else.”
link to mondoweiss.net
Put that in your pipe and smoke it, eee.
Walid,
Nicely said. Thanks.
And Asaf, thanks for sharing. I really liked your essay.
Ben Gurion destroyed Mizrahi culture? What are you smoking? The Mizrahi culture influenced the Ashkenazi culture just as much as the other way around. For example, Mizrahi music is very strong in Israel and liked by a majority, including myself. The Hebrew we speak is with Sepharadic intonation. In fact, I think it would be wrong to say there is Ashkenazi or Mizrahi culture. There is Israeli culture which is a blend of the two. There is so much intermarriage between the Mizrahi and Ashkenazi Jews that in a generation or two the distinction will be moot. You guys are fighting the wars of 60 years ago.
eee, you should look into your racist country’s not so illustrious history and how it treated the Oriental Jews, especially when it came to Ben Gurion, the master racist. Those Jews that you elegantly call Mizrahi that were rushed in to pack the numbers in Israel, were considered cockroaches just like the Palestinian Arabs. Here are bits and pieces that shows you what Israel thought of the Oriental Jews and I’ll spare you the details on how Israel sprayed them with DDT upon their arrival in Israel or how Israel stole some of their babies and gave them to Ashkenazi families to raise them as “proper” Jews:
Ben Gurion describes the Sephardi immigrants as lacking even “the most elementary knowledge” and “without a trace of Jewish or human education”.
Ben Gurion repeatedly expressed contempt for the culture of the Oriental Jews: We do not want Israelis to become Arabs. We are duty bound to fight against the spirit of the Levant, which corrupts individuals and societies and preserve the authentic Jewish values as they cristallized in the Diaspora.”
Abba Eban: “the object should be to infuse (the Sephardim) with an occidental spirit, rather than allow them to drag us into an unnatural Orientalism.
Golda Meir: “Shall we be able to elevate these immigrants to a suitable level of civilization?”
Ben Guron at a Knesset committee called Moroccan Jews “savages” and compared the Sephardim to the black slaves and questioned their spiritual capacity.
Get the sources of these quotes from the link:
link to books.google.com
You should read the section from the link, eee, it details how the Ashkenazi went about destroying the oriental culture of the Arab Jews by using disinformation about the Orientals’ under-development and how they were prevented from learning about their eastern history while European Jews were not.
Walid,
Were some Ashkenazi racist? Sure. But your claim that Ben-Gurion destroyed Mizrahi culture is just nonsense. Just visit Israel and see. You are fighting the wars of 60 years ago.
thank you Asaf, i love your voice in this essay. i love it you opened yourself so much to us while declaring your thunderous resolution to embrace yourself at the same time.
you are probably acquainted w/the writing of Yehouda Shenhav, an israel iraq jew who teaches at tel aviv uni. the subject matter is extremely intriguing and i highly recommend his writing , here’s more. thanks again.
Rachel Shabi that wrote a book about Oriental Jews and of how many had voluntarily come to Israel and of their mistreatment there, in one of her Guardian articles last year said:
“… One of the most striking sentiments expressed by Mizrahis in Israel is a sense of disbelief. Some of these Jewish migrants from Arab countries are still stunned at the level of ignorance and prejudice that greeted them in the new Israel. For some reason, their new Jewish co-nationalists – who often came from the ghettos of Eastern Europe – thought the Mizrahis were backward and inferior, or, as Lyn Julius puts it, “badly educated” and “unwashed”.
The Europeans couldn’t get their heads around the fact of Mizrahis being poets or communists, driving cars or using toilets. How could they not know, wondered the Mizrahis, about the manner of life in Baghdad, Beirut, Cairo or Casablanca?
What was at first a sense of shock swiftly turned into despair, as Mizrahis understood that the prevailing preconceptions among those in power would shape social status in Israel. It would also dictate the type of Jewish individual that would come to represent the country.
Zionism, the ideology that built the Jewish state, was conceived in Europe and was, inevitably, set to a European tune. This would be fine, were it not for the fact that half of Israel’s Jewish population (and until recently a clear majority) is of Oriental origin. Or for the geographic inconvenience of Israel being in the Middle East.
Israel has a particular narrative about the “ingathering of the exiles”, the Jewish migrants that arrived after its creation in 1948 from all corners of the world. The talk is of equality, melting pots and a “new Israeli”, an amalgam of all those composite cultures. But in reality, Mizrahi culture was, and still is, considered to be an oxymoron. It was channelled into harmless outlets such as cuisine, craftwork and folklore – inconsequential gloss, the presence of which could then be used to bat off complaints of underrepresentation.
Meanwhile, proper, high culture is maintained as a European preserve. That’s why former Jewish musical legends of the Arab world – feted performers, whose names still inspire adoration in the Middle East – ended up selling pots in the city slums of Israel. That’s also why there are over 20 European classical music ensembles in the Jewish state, and just one Mizrahi outfit – currently on the verge of extinction.”
for more:
link to guardian.co.uk
Time eee turned to other sources for his history.
wow, thanks walid. you are a wealth of information…
i have read a fair amount about iraqi jews in baghdad from an iraqi perspective. it is such a shame the manipulations that contributed to them leaving there.