Not the Enemy Israel's Jews from Arab Lands

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Rachel Shabi's book at Not the Enemy Israel's Jews from Arab Lands is about to be released. Here is the description.

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In this remarkable, page-turning book, Rachel Shabi lays bare the painful division within Israeli society between Ashkenazi Jews, whose families come from Eastern Europe, and Sephardic or Mizrahi Jews, who come from the Arab countries of the Middle East.

Herself from an Iraqi Jewish family, Shabi explores the history of this relationship, tracing it back to the first days of the new state of Israel. In a society desperate to identify itself with Europe, immigrants who spoke Arabic and followed Middle Eastern customs were seen as inferior; David Ben Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, famously described them as lacking the most elementary knowledge.

Sixty years later, Mizrahis are still much less successful than Ashkenazis, condemned, often, to substandard education, low-quality housing and mockery for their accents, tastes and lifestyles. Through a combination of archival research and personal interviews, Shabi brings to light the prejudices that permeate Israeli society and demonstrates how they affect Mizrahi lives and hopes. Even more importantly, she argues that the treatment meted out to Mizrahis reflects a wider Israeli rejection of the Middle East and its culture, a rejection that makes it impossible for Israel ever to become integrated within its own region.

While I agree very much with the last sentence, I am extremely dubious of tracing the Israeli ethnic division only back to the early days of the State of Israel.

Not only was Zionist Kultur already well-defined by 1914 in terms of late 19th and early 20th century European concepts of race, civilization, and eugenics, but oriental Jews believed of insufficiently high-quality ethnic stock were already excluded from all ready well-developed Zionist society except for occasional propaganda uses or for entertaining appearances at Zionist conferences.

When the Zionist leadership realized shortly after 1948 that Zionist colonists could not hold Stolen Palestine (pre-1967 Israel) without a mass influx of oriental Jews, the leaders were forced to abandon the previously theoretical, contingent or tentative exclusion of oriental Jews from Zionist concepts of culture and civilization by redefining Jewishness to be fundamentally non-Arab. (See Conundrum of Jewish Arab Identity.)

In this way Jews of Arab and other non-Western identities could be absorbed into the Zionist state effectively as a Ersatz native collaborator class without ever admitting their real status, without threatening Zionist Kultur, and without the contradictions that a real native collaborator class would have created for the state.

If you do not read German and do not have the time to analyze the primary sources, Zionist Culture and West European Jewry Before the First World War by Michael Berkowitz is a good backgrounder to understand to status of Oriental Jews vis-a-vis the Zionist state and to understand the fracturing of Israeli identity as described by Baruch Kimmerling in The Invention and Decline of Israeliness: State, Society, and the Military.

Author Biography

Read more about Rachel Shabi. Rachel Shabi was born in Israel to Iraqi Jews and grew up in England. A journalist, she has written for the Guardian and the Sunday Times. She currently lives in Tel Aviv.



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