The 17 page document, written by Ehud Ein-Gil and Moshe Machover, is available in pdf format here. The reading does require patience and attention. After which, you can begin to explore the analysis of the document as written by David Shasha, below:
For those who think that anti-Sephardi racism is solely a product of Right-Wing Zionism and Ashkenazi Orthodoxy, the following article from the journal of the Israeli Communist party is a sobering read.
Couched in the “revolutionary” language of the radical Left, featuring all the correct buzzwords of the “progressive” cause, the article is grounded in precisely the same socio-historical context as that of more overt racists like Bernard Lewis and Daniel Pipes.
The basic premise of the article is that Jews are not, and cannot be, Arabs. This is an assertion that we have seen many times before in many different places. It is generally the provenance of the more fanatical Zionists, but remains a relatively mainstream idea in Israeli-Zionist discourse.
Let it be said that the article makes it clear that the Arab Jews – Mizrahim in the pejorative Israeli locution – were indeed persecuted in Israel and recounts a number of critical episodes in this sad and tragic history. But the article goes way beyond this history and wants to establish certain basic ideas that would, if accepted as true, eliminate the possibility of a Mizrahi activism based on principles of unity with the Arab peoples.
The authors reject the idea that Arab Jewish ethnicity is linked to the Palestine question. Evidence is marshaled to separate out the two struggles and in this sense the appeal to history is logical.
But whose history is presented?
Is it that of the Sephardim themselves, or the history of Ashkenazi Orientalists?
Without making use of the pioneering writings of Sephardi activists like Elie Eliachar and Nissim Rejwan, the authors mount an attack on contemporary figures like Ella Shohat and Sami Shalom Chetrit by making use of Orientalist definitions of Sephardic history.
Critically, the article presents a balkanized version of Sephardic history which marks as separate the Arab Sephardim from the Latin Sephardim; a matter that I have discussed a number of times in my own writings.
This maneuver allows the authors to divide Sephardim from one another and fracture the history of a people which has always been rooted in the Arab-Islamic experience.
This strategy permits the contemporary discussion to take place in a diffuse and ambiguous context. It allows the question of whether Jews can be Arabs to assume a prominent place in the discussion.
And here, as with the Right Wing Zionists, the Communist writers assert that there can be no such thing as an Arab Jew.
Strategically this functions differently than the normal Zionist approach. Rather than seeking to unify the Jewish people under an Ashkenazi-Zionist rubric which promotes a clash of civilizations between Christian Europe, represented by the Ashkenazi Sabra, and an Arab-Muslim Middle East, the article seeks to build links between radical European Communists and the Arab proletariat.
The inconvenient linkage between Arabs and Mizrahim proposed by contemporary activists like Shohat and Chetrit would serve to undermine the hegemony of Leftist Ashkenazim like the members of Matzpen.
Without going into the lengthy history of Matzpen as an organization exclusively led by Ashkenazim, it is more than a little curious that the conceptualization presented by the article serves to assure this Ashkenazi hegemony. It recalls for us the uncomfortable role of the French Communists during the Algerian War and the many internal conflicts that emerged over support for the Algerian Occupation. There too was a discussion over European and Arab identities and nationalist sympathies. The complex nature of Israeli Communism is not related to the Palestinian Arabs, but to the Arab Jews – the Jewish “Other.”
Once the article has made its unassailable assertion that Jews cannot be Arabs, it proceeds to examine the current record in Israel as it applies to Mizrahim. And, indeed, the present reality shows us that the Mizrahim in Israel have adjusted to the Ashkenazi hegemony and have sought to “fit in.” But in order to accept this contemporary reality we must remain oblivious to the history of anti-Sephardi oppression in Israel. The authors move from point A to point C while ignoring point B.
And what is this point B?
Point B in this context is the massive self-examination that took place among Israeli Sephardim that led to a rejection of their native identity as Arab Jews and an adoption of the hegemonic Ashkenazi-Zionist culture.
It is undoubtedly true that the laundry list of names presented in the article is what it is – there can be no question regarding where Sephardim are right now. The question however is whether the names listed in the article have remained true to their Sephardic cultural identity.
And here it is critical for the authors to put into question the cultural integrity of the Sephardim.
If the Sephardim are not unified in a cultural sense, then there is no default Ashkenazi mechanism for the Israeli Mizrahim to reject and be who they are. The authors challenge the idea that Sephardim are not being Sephardim. The claim is that Sephardim have not changed and that the activists are dreaming worthless, unsustainable dreams of a fictional Sephardi unity. In this sense, individuals like Shohat and Chetrit are presented as vain romantics who are hearkening back to an identity that never existed.
In this, the Communists are no different from the Bernard Lewis crowd – they all have the same benighted socio-cultural perspective.
But if we look at the writings of the aforementioned Eliachar and Rejwan – Sephardi authorities who spoke out when speaking out was a very dangerous thing – we will see a very different picture presented. Conveniently, much of this history has been ignored and marginalized by Ashkenazi Israelis.
First, the history presented in this article is not the one that Sephardim themselves accepted as true. The authors here engage in a selective reading of the record; a reading that ensures that their foundational premise is taken as fact. The article tells us that Sephardim never thought of themselves as Arabs, and yet this is not the case at all.
As I have previously written, there are two ways of dealing with the falsity of the premise:
First, we have the actual nomenclature of the Sephardim themselves. In order to distinguish between native Middle Eastern Jews after the Spanish Expulsion, the Arabic terms “Musta’arab” was used. This term was used to distinguish the Iberian immigrants to the Ottoman Middle East and not to mark a distinct civilization. For those who study rabbinical texts, they are well aware that there was one single conceptual community where legal matters were discussed and adjudicated – a Sephardic Jewish world. For such religious matters, there is a distinct separation between Sephardic legal decisors, Poskim, and Ashkenazi ones. But between Arab Jews and Spanish Jews there is one socio-religious culture.
Second, names should be used to identify things that are taken as axiomatic in cultures. That the term “Arab” itself has a long and complicated history should not at all change the way that it is used today. Arab civilization was inclusive of non-Muslim minorities and was relatively unified until the formation of national identities. This however does not at all change the empirical fact that Jews who lived for many centuries in the Arab Middle East thought of themselves to be native members of their lands of birth. The contemporary scholar is duty-bound to determine whether these Jews had adopted the Arab culture even as they remained Jews by religious affiliation.
And we have numerous examples – completely ignored by the authors – of Arab Jews who saw themselves as intimately tied to the Arab culture. Prominent Jews like Haim Nahum Effendi, Sasson Khedouri, Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff, and Yitzhak Shami were not simply Arabs in a cultural sense, they saw their reality as inextricably tied to the region they lived in and refused to abdicate their place in that world. I am not at all sure how these people would have reacted to the assertion that they were not Arabs.
In the end, what we have here is the standard Ashkenazi hegemonic racism gussied up in radical Communist garb. The net effect of this racism is always the same: to assert the hegemony of the Ashkenazim at the expense of the Arab Jews native to the region.
As we look at the historical record of the Israeli Communists we see the same futility and despair regarding peace and integration into the region as we do with the more Right Wing or Centrist groups. This is because, in spite of their political differences, the groups all maintain the primacy of their European origins and reject any and all claims to a Sephardic role in the larger socio-political discourse.
This article is just another salvo in the never-ending barrage of Ashkenazi control over all forms of Jewish articulation. It cynically presents the fruits of many years of Sephardi self-hatred and acculturation as the “natural” way of understanding Israeli Mizrahi existence. It completely ignores the complexity of what I have called “Sephardi Typologies” where Sephardim have bought into the propaganda promulgated by Ashkenazi-Zionism and often upped the ante and become more Ashkenazi than the Ashkenazim themselves.
Perhaps the most heinous aspect of the argument made in this revolting article, an article that cloaks its profound anti-Sephardi racism in the language of radical Leftist platitudes, is the way in which it reframes the discussion in order to make Mizrahim responsible for their own oppression. Having caved into the Ashkenazi racism, contemporary Sephardim are blamed for becoming Ashkenazim. Having had their cultural identity stolen from them, Sephardim are then marked as guilty for acquiescing to their own demise.
Such a “blame the victim” mentality can only go so far: While it is most certainly true that Sephardim have “gotten over” being Arab Jews, it is no less true that the Arab Jewish identity, now dormant, continues to remain a possibility in the re-engineering of social change and progressive political reform.
By denying Arab Jewish identity, this repugnant and deeply offensive article not only castigates and marginalizes those courageous Mizrahi voices seeking social justice for Sephardim and Arabs, it even more nefariously seeks to eliminate even the possibility for what we have called “The Levantine Option”; a construct that is predicated on the native culture of the Middle East, founded on the principles of Religious Humanism, and the unity of all peoples of the region based on those principles as they are embodied in the history and culture of the region itself.
DS
