Another
Act In The Mizrahi-
Palestinian Tragedy
By Reuven Abarjel
& Smadar Lavie
28 July 2006
Countercurrents.org
On
January 25, 2006, Hamas won a landslide victory in the democratic Palestinian
legislative elections. The elections were conducted under tight U.S.
supervision. Immediately thereafter, Israel's general attorney, Menny
Mazouz, started exploring the legal procedures to jail the movement's
leadership. Soon the IDF started executing the Gazan leadership of the
movement by air strikes. Several dozen innocent Palestinian civilians
were casualties in the process. On June 24 the IDF land forces entered
the Gaza strip and kidnapped two Hamas men. As a response, on June 25
Hamas captured Gilad Shalit, an IDF soldier. The IDF immediately launched
"Operation Summer Rains," to inflict large-scale destruction
and to press for Shalit's release. On 12 July, Hizbollah captured two
more Israeli soldiers--Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser--in the Lebanese
border zone. From then on, IDF's "Operation Just Reward" has
been inflicting heinous carnage and destruction all over Lebanon.
And now here we are, in front
of the Israeli TV screen, bombarded by the discourse of experts. The
channels are broadcasting live from studios and battlefields. Commercial
interludes are part of the show. By default the majority of experts
are Ashkenazi (European Jewish) males. They are flanked by a handful
of Mizrahi men (Oriental Jews who immigrated to Israel mainly from the
Arab World). These men climbed the public service ladder within the
nationalist hegemonic confines. Together, they are Israel's knowledge
mercenaries. Through the tube - Israel's tribal campfire -- they dictate
the national agenda. The viewers are convinced it must be humanistic,
because it is calmly narrated by handsome necktied men. They use professional
lingo and have the standardized, de-Semitized Hebrew accent. These talking
heads say this war is not only for our own good, but is also for the
civic betterment of Palestinians and Lebanese. Their sober discourse
facilitates public compliance with IDF's shift of tactics--from warplane
"surgical killings" to a combination of marine, air and land
forces, to destroy the Hizbollah using the massive weaponry that the
U.S. allocates to the IDF.
The three Israeli TV channels
bombard us with metaphors like "crushing Hizbollah," "the
return of Israeli deterrence," and "the rehabilitation of
the Israeli soldier's fighter image." Such imagery enables us to
peer into the blood, smoke and devastation the IDF sows. Veiled by the
fuss over Lebanon, Israel concurrently continues to plan and execute
the socio-cide of both public and intimate spheres of the West Bank
and Gaza. The present results: reaping the temporary unity of the Jewish
victim-turned-warrior nation-state.
When the cannons roar, the
Mizrahi communities fall silent. Like servants before the master, the
Mizrahim habitually comply. They are the generations flowing from the
Jews who were in Palestine from time immemorial, as well as descendants
of those brought here from the Arab World and other non-European countries
during the previous century. They are the local hosts for those fleeing
the New European anti-Semitism. Mizrahim provide the demographic majority
on whose civic docility the Eurocentric Israeli regime rests. Mizrahim
have been the Jewish labor turning the cogs of the European-Zionist
colonial project ever since its inception, with the Yemeni-Jewish labor
migration of 1882. Mizrahim freed Zionism from its total dependency
on indigenous Palestinian labor. Mizrahim were the Zionists' "natural
laborers," employed in near-slavery conditions. In order for Mizrahim
to work with efficacy, the Zionist hegemonic patriarchy ruptured Mizrahi
extended families. For themselves, they used the appellation "ideological
laborers," and went on to found Israel's socialist-liberal Left.
It is this very Left that is now fighting yet another self-righteous
Israeli war. The Zionist movement's leadership has always conducted
itself, in front of the Mizrahim, the Palestinians, and the citizens
of the Arab World, through the tools of occupation, oppression and humiliation.
Yet Mizrahi communities keep silent. Along the way, the US-European
minority has co-opted the Mizrahi moral, economic and cultural power
to resist.
Israel has always compartmentalized
its occupation into different categories, as if Gaza, the West Bank,
the Palestinian citizens of Israel, and the Palestinian Diaspora were
not all consequences of the 1948 Nakba and 1967 Naqsa. Yet even such
a divisive strategy has failed to diminish the legitimacy of the Palestinian
struggle for a homeland. Despite the peace agreements with Egypt and
Jordan, this strategy has nevertheless resulted in an almost across-the-board
refusal of the Arab body of citizenry to normalize Israel into the region.
The Ashkenazi leadership has repeatedly evoked the image that Israel
is a European villa, planted in the midst of the regional jungle, from
Bible times to the present day.
Mizrahi communities are intricately
positioned along the Israel/Palestine divide as a result of the hegemonic
sophistication of the Ashkenazim. Historically, under Menachem Begin,
it was the Right who offered the Mizrahim a political home of sorts
by not forcing them to secularize in imitation of the Labor party regime.
Mizrahim are situated between the rock of economic-cultural oppression
caused by the US-European capitalist Israeli rule, and the hard place
of Palestine's war of independence. Zionism was superimposed on Mizrahi
communities, yet they welcomed it with open arms. Many still believe
in its deceitful vision of an integrationalist inter-racial utopia,
even though they are systematically excluded from the centers of power
due to Zionism's intra-Jewish racism. Those few who succeeded in securing
high-ranking positions in the Ashkenazi regime have long since erased
their own past, as they adopted their masters' worldview. Rebuilding
the ruptured Mizrahi families was difficult, because they were denied
access to the financial and cultural resources necessary to facilitate
an equal participation in the Zionist patriarchy. Mizrahi men's feminism
is epitomized in their struggle to mimic handsomely crested Sabra masculinity,
hoping it might provide them with equal opportunities. Even with the
arrival of South Asian maids in the 1990s, Mizrahi women continue to
occupy the lowest-paying scale of the Israeli job market. Having lost
their production line and house cleaning jobs to Filipinas, they work
as lower level secretaries and service providers, and they constitute
the majority of the unemployed.
Most of the Palestinian suicide
attacks have occurred in the public spaces of the economically deprived
and legally disenfranchised Mizrahi communities: bus rides taken by
people who can't afford to have a private car, markets frequented by
those who can't afford to shop in air conditioned malls and supermarkets,
and 'hoods too poor to afford to purchase the patrol services of private
security companies, and where the police avoid entering except during
drug raids. The majority of the dead and wounded have been Mizrahim,
destitute immigrants from the former Soviet Union, and foreign guest
workers.
The majority IDF casualties
of the al-Aqsa intifada since October 2000 have been Mizrahim, Druze,
Russian immigrants, and Ethiopians - the marginal groups that comprise
the majority of Israel's social fabric. Since the 1982 Lebanon war,
frontline military service is out of fashion among the Ashkenazi elite,
who no longer find it necessary for upward mobility. Due to the historical
conjunction of ethnicity and poverty typical of Mizrahi communities,
young Mizrahi men are excluded from avenues of upward mobility that
would require a major capital investment. Alas, combat zone service
is one of the few routes for socio-economic mobility -- an integrationist
phantom of sorts.
Sderot, a borderzone Mizrahi
town often bombarded by Qassam missiles, has a high percentage of Ethiopian
and Russian immigrants, and high unemployment rates. It is the Israeli
town closest to Gaza. The same demography is true of the development
towns and agricultural co-ops on the Lebanese border, and even of some
of the Haifa 'hoods hit by the Hizbollah Katiushas.
Mizrahi communities were
pushed into the West Bank and Gaza post-1967 settlements through the
back door. Both the Right and Left wing Israeli governments prevented
any reasonably priced housing solutions for residents of Mizrahi slums.
The mass Soviet immigration of the 1990s transformed Israel's center,
the source of most decently paying jobs, into a real estate bubble.
This prohibited Mizrahi families from leaving the ghettos, unless for
subsidized houses in the settlements. These were built by the housing
ministry on the pristine West Bank hills and virgin Gaza beaches. They
made the Israeli dream of a single-family dwelling come true. The superior
public school system was an additional benefit. The Judaization of the
Galilee project was designed for Ashkenazim who could not afford single-family
dwellings in central Israel - gated communities with strict admission
committees, whose majestic mansions overlook Palestinian villages situated
within the 1949 Rhodes armistice agreement.
In the mid 1980s, when the
welfare state disappeared from Mizrahi communities' lives (if it had
ever been there), ultra-orthodox Sephardic Judaism entered the scene
in the form of the SHAS party. At its height, during the 1999 elections,
SHAS won 17 seats in the Knesset. Four of them were ministers of influential
government offices, and four were deputy ministers. SHAS offered an
apparatus of education and food to rehab Mizrahi honor, either by preaching
the return to the forefathers' pious morality or by exposing the racism
in the disenfranchisement and poverty. Eventually, such an intrusion
was destructive. In fact, the ultra-orthodox Mizrahi new sages adopted
the old Ashkenazi method of discipline: a controlled dispensation of
charity so that the very act of dispensing becomes a shock absorber
against any possible social upheaval. Since SHAS's entry into the public
sphere, even the feeble resistance of Mizrahi ghettos has ceased to
exist.
The centrist walls of the
Arab nation-state cracked during the Infitah with Anwar Saadat's Opening-to-the-West
policy. Multinational cultural and market globalization forces entered
the Arab World's civic sphere. Forming alternative societal institutions,
the Islamist movements started substituting for the state. Like SHAS,
these institutions were constructed on the premise of injecting pious
morality into the civic sphere. The communalist power of both SHAS and
the Islamist movements rested in part on a reformulation of strict religious
familial patriarchy as a liberating feminist praxis. Concurrently, the
Islamist movements, as in the cases of Egypt and the Occupied Territories,
have integrated women into all spheres of their public activism but
fighting.
We do not wish here to judge
Arab society. Yet to the best of our understanding, the impact of Islamist
movements in the Arab public sphere has been diametrically opposite
to that of SHAS in the Mizrahi ghettos. With a middle class professional
core, the Islamists presented the Arab world with a new agenda. All
the while, the Mizrahi ultra-orthodoxy imposed the forefathers' morality
as yet another strategy for integrating the Mizrahim into the bosom
of the Zionist lived reality. But how could they not? SHAS sensed it
had no other option. Its middle class emerged from the rank and file
of party apparatchiks. The Question of Palestine was one of the unifying
themes of the Islamist movements. During the 1980s, Sabra and Shatila
reverberated into the First Intifada. Palestinian nationalism gathered
constituencies in the West. Hoping to counter Palestine's secular nationalism,
the worried Israeli regime nurtured the Islamist movements in Lebanon
and the Occupied Territories. Assuming that these movements would be
nothing but SHAS-style charities, the Israeli regime hoped they might
also serve as its tools to deny yet again the Question of Palestine.
As the PLO welfare apparatus relocated from Lebanon to Tunis, the Islamist
movements patched the cracks and flowered forth. The 2006 democratic
elections in the Palestinian authority ended in a sweeping Hamas victory,
which of course disappointed Israel's expectations. This time around,
the Zionist regime preferred the necktied and conventionally handsome
Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) over hennaed and long-bearded Muhammad abu-Tir.
Henceforth Israel, backed by the US, sweepingly refused to recognize
and negotiate with the legitimate government of the Palestinian people.
These days the Mizrahim are
the ones who pay the high price required to join Israel's "family
of blood," a key concept in the Zionist discourse of national honor.
They fall like ripe fruit into Ashkenazi-Zionist militant adventurism.
The Western pro-Israeli lobby, with its Israeli branches, does not pay
the price. On the contrary, it shares the profits with the G-8 superpowers.
This axis of evil will come to an end only if Mizrahi communities are
able to conjoin the memories of their Arab past with a vision for a
future that will be shared with the people of this region--not just
the Palestinians, but the rest of the Arab World as well.
As long as the Arab World's
public discourse does not differentiate between Yahud (Jews), Sahyoniyin
(Zionists), and Yahud-Arab (Arab Jews), and as long as all Israelis
are considered Yahud-wa-bas (just Jews), such a process is impossible.
As long as the Western peace discourse does not designate separate categories
for Mizrahi Jewry, the majority of Israel's Jewry, for the Ashkenazi
peace movements, and for Zionism, Mizrahi communities' processual reworking
into the region will lack the transnational aura necessary to render
it possible. As long as the Arab leadership, not to mention the Palestinians,
prefers talking peace with the ruling Ashkenazi minority -- be it Zionists,
post-Zionists, even anti-Zionists - Mizrahi communities will continue
to view the peace discourse as part of the repertoire of exotic antics
that the Ashkenazi cosmopolitan elite perform for the West. At the same
time, they will continue to conceive of the Arabs, particularly Palestinians,
only as lethal enemies.
Those who present themselves
as seekers of peace -- Shimon Peres and Yossi Beilin -- are actually
supporting the present destruction of civil society in Lebanon, the
West Bank and Gaza. They are the spokesmen explaining the necessity
for the atrocious measures taken by the Israeli government. Mizrahim
remember them mainly as those who started the move to privatize and
outsource labor from their community into the globalized economic wonderland
that the peace dons termed "the New Middle East." For Mizrahi
communities, unemployment and debt were the most immediate results of
the Oslo agreement's peace festival. These days the peace dons also
brandish a Moroccan defense minister, Amir Peretz, to execute their
policies, even though they are the ones who publicly dissed him and
failed him along his political career. No wonder this discourse of peace
is so alien to Mizrahi communities.
The experts on TV tell us
that the purpose of the present destruction is to secure the release
of the "kidnapped" soldiers. If this were indeed the purpose
of operations "Summer Rains" and "Adequate Pay,"
the release of all Palestinian and Lebanese political prisoners from
Israeli jails would be far more cost effective, whether in blood or
money. But, alas, when the canons stop roaring, when we finish counting
our dead and cleaning up our ruins, we are likely to return to point
zero--1882. The Mizrahim, Palestinians and foreign guest workers will
resurrect Lebanon, Palestine and Israel from under the rubble, at near-slavery
wages and with no social benefits. The US will provide the funding.
As long as Mizrahi communities fail to understand that these wars commemorate
their disenfranchised poverty, as long as there is no insistence on
organized, popular Mizrahi resistance, no just peace will be achieved
in our region.
Reuven Abarjel is co-founder of the Israeli Black Panthers;
Smadar Lavie is a Professor of Anthropology and Mizrahi Feminist Activist.