Defining Israel in Black and White by Shahar Azani:
The narrative of Mizrahi Jews does not and should not exist only as a counterreaction to that of Palestinian refugees. It is much more than a bargaining chip on the table. It is a story very much worth telling. As mentioned above, Zionism drove many members of the ancient Yemenite Jewish community to arrive in Israel in 1881. Those early pioneers, who were lucky enough to survive the journey, faced difficulties upon arrival in the Land of Israel. They were rejected by some of their Ashkenazi brothers and sisters, who doubted their Judaism.
The ignorance did not end there. While Mizrahi Jews were many and present in Israel’s culture and everyday life, the country’s educational system for too long taught Western Jewish history to the letter while only slightly touching on the history of Mizrahi Jews, if at all. This lack of knowledge contributed to the marginalization of this important community in the overall Israeli narrative.
In response, the Israeli government has taken important steps in recent years to narrow the gap. Israel’s Ministry for Social Equality in 2016 allocated about $2.5 million in U.S. dollars for a special project to document the stories, heritage and history of Jews who immigrated to Israel from Arab lands. The goal is to collect personal testimonials from Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews — their lives before they made aliyah, their situation when they left or were expelled from their homes, and the story of their absorption into modern Israel. Upon announcing this national project, Minister Gila Gamliel stated: “This is not a uniquely Mizrahi interest but a national, Jewish and Zionist interest. From now on, the Jewish story will be more complete, and Israeli citizens young and old will get to hear, study and become familiar with both the Eastern and Western sides of the glorious heritage of the Jewish people.”
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We're Jews, we're not white, we define ourselves by Karen Lehrman Bloch:
I wrote a column about that fact this past summer, titled, “We, the Israelites.” The response was mostly positive, but I was intrigued by the negative reactions. Some Jews, no matter how religious or Zionist, didn’t want their whiteness taken away from them. They essentially told me to back off.
I no longer discuss these types of things with my dad, who just turned 89. But if he were younger and I said to him that I no longer identify as white, he would flip out. He would be angry, but more than anything he would be scared. I realized the same fear was underlying the responses of some of my friends.
This conversation probably would have continued in the backwaters of the web if it weren’t for the current practitioners of identity politics. In the past six months, Jews have been told:
- We are inexorably white and thus responsible for colonialism, the slave trade and mass incarceration.
- We are white supremacists, and thus responsible for all racism and oppression.
- We are white and thus incapable of being persecuted — past and present.
- The Holocaust was a white-on-white crime and thus of little import. We should stop “centering” ourselves!
- As part of the white European ruling caste, we are the primary beneficiaries of white privilege.
- We are responsible for tragedies like New Zealand, especially if we dare to call out anti-Semitism (which doesn’t really exist because we are white).
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One Nation, Many faces by Michael Freund
I found the following quote in an academic article. It bears on the issue of skin color which in my mind is a red herring in the Jewish-Arab conflict:
ReplyDeleteArguments based on alleged Jewish skin color also emerged to support the notion of Jews as alien to the Middle East. In the 1960s, some extreme “left” and other publications claimed that the Jews (or “Zionists”) had built their homeland in a country of “non-white people.” This insinuated that Jews were “white” in contrast to “non-white” Arabs, and hence did not “belong” in the Middle East. This argument overlooked the traditional Arab self-image as “white” vis-à-vis Black people.[xx] Further, the Nazi dogma of “non-white” inferiority had not stopped most Arab nationalists from allying or sympathizing with the Nazis. [Nor did it stop hitler from accepting Arab help and adulation]
It is interesting in this context, that George DuMaurier’s novel Trilby, a best-seller in Britain in the 1890s, featured a Jewish villain who was both swarthy and personified evil. The villain takes advantage of a pure white, innocent maiden, thus combining the themes of the Jew as dark alien and the Jew as evildoer. Note that DuMaurier identified the swarthy evildoer as a Polish Jew.[xxi]
In fact, a wide range of skin colors characterizes both Jews –including European Jews, Ashkenazim-- and Arabs. Perhaps for this reason, the charge of “white” Jews despoiling “non-white” Arabs is nowadays seldom to be found. But reasoning based on empirical facts is in any case in short supply nowadays, indeed it is out of fashion when speaking of Israel where often unreason rules.
https://www.academia.edu/15449719/How_Todays_Anti-Zionism_Continues_the_Old_Antisemitism