The Idea of Israel (30 page)

The slogan of Shas,
Le’hahzir atara l’yoshna
(to return the crown to its place – in other words, to redeem our greatness) was by itself not something the critical Mizrachi intellectuals were opposed to. They shared the wish to salvage a forgotten, repressed and marginalised religious and cultural tradition. But the wish to reinvent this tradition as a Zionist one, and at the same time as a pointedly anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian one, separated the politics of identity of the scholars from that of the Mizrachi politicians.

And yet what is really impressive about the post-Zionist Mizrachi scholars of the 1990s is that they were quite a large group, and that they persisted in their defiant outlook into the next century, at a time when their immediate constituency rejected their agenda even more categorically than before. They remained relevant, despite the ideological gap between them and other societal forces championing Mizrachi rights, because the discrimination remained intact. The combination of Shas and a relatively open door for Mizrachi politicians within Likud (and later, even in the Labour Party) did reform the status of this community in the political and cultural realm in the late 1990s.
Mizrachim
held key positions in government and in the army. But there was still good reason for a scholar or any other kind of knowledge producer to continue the search for the roots and realities of discrimination against Mizrachi Jews, since the socio-economic gap did not narrow and in many ways worsened. One of the main reasons for this was the mass immigration of Russian Jews in the 1990s. This led to a prominent voice in the anti-Zionist group
of Mizrachi challengers, Smadar Lavie, who attacked the Israeli government for its attempt to ‘whiten the Jewish people’ by bringing in large numbers of Russian Jews, many of whom were in fact Christians.
²⁴

By the end of the twentieth century, still nearly 90 per cent of upper-income Israelis were Ashkenazi Jews, while 60 per cent of the lower-income families were
Mizrachim
. Yoav Peled, a political scientist at Tel Aviv University, noted in the 1990s that there was in Israel ‘a cultural division of labour’ – that is to say, there was a correlation between ethnicity and income.
²⁵
Thus, the vast majority of the low-income and impoverished families were of Mizrachi origin, while the lower-middle class consisted of both Ashkenazi and Mizrachi families, with a small Ashkenazi majority, and the upper-middle and upper classes were almost exclusively Ashkenazi.

Even though the
Mizrachim
account for almost half of Israel’s population, even as late as 2000 there was still only one college-educated Mizrachi for every four college-educated
Ashkenazim
.
²⁶
Indeed, education is one of the areas that Mizrachi activists, whether Zionist or not, cannot ignore. Sami Shalom Chetrit argues that the gap in the educational realm is the outcome of state policies that have not changed significantly since the 1950s. In areas more densely populated by Ashkenazi Jews, high schools have focused on preparation for higher education and careers in academia or more prestigious professions. By contrast, in areas that are primarily Mizrachi, the state has built special high schools (called
Makif and Amal
) that offer mostly vocational training. Differences in levels of education have led to differences in occupation and income.
²⁷

Another scholar, Yaakov Nahon, noted that despite intermarriages and the process of Mizrachi socialisation into Ashkenazi society, the gaps between the two groups not only did not close but even grew at the end of the twentieth century. Although he observed certain ‘objective differences’, such as the larger Mizrachi families, the gap was still, in his eyes, the result of early and present state policies of discrimination and prejudicial social attitudes.

The post-Zionist Mizrachi challengers were pointing to the reality of discrimination, a reality that also informed the actions of Mizrachi
politicians. In this respect, whoever represented the
Mizrachim
in Israeli politics shared parts of the analysis of the post- and anti-Zionist Mizrachi scholars. What the politicians refused to accept was the scholars’ explanation for why discrimination had occurred and would continue to occur as long as the state remained Zionist.

Around 2000, the post- and anti-Zionist Mizrachi scholarly challenge reached its peak. It was an important challenge, but not, as we have shown so far in this book, the only challenge to the way the idea of Israel was marketed inside and outside the state. To a certain degree, the other challenges petered out after 2000. Yet the critical Mizrachi viewpoint persisted into the twenty-first century, since both mainstream Zionist politicians and scholars of Mizrachi origin shared major elements in its critique. The claims of discrimination were not denied. If scholars continued to observe its existence in the twenty-first century, and if poets, film-makers, and artists continued to protest it, this was all perfectly legitimate. As a result, the analysis continued while the debate about the prognosis was pushed aside.

In the present century, Mizrachi scholars have tried a softer approach, requesting recognition of their cultural rights. They have demanded that the state’s educational and cultural policies be based on a more multicultural perspective; today, in the midst of the second decade of this century, this demand is still regarded as quite reasonable, provided it is wrapped in a Zionist discourse and frame of mind. Unlike the scholars, some artists, poets and writers, each in his or her own way, have continued the agenda of Arab Judaism that was first set forth by the scholars of the 1990s. To this day, the Mizrachi contingent of culture producers continue to pose some sort of challenge and alternative to the idea of Israel as presented by the establishment and as understood by the vast majority of Jews within the state.

NINE

The Post-Zionist Cultural Moment

In a little town in the south of Iraq, Basra, there were thirty million palm trees, but there was not even one sunflower by Van Gogh … George Shemesh was among those who left the rivers of Babylon and arrived in Jerusalem. There he found out that Zarisky [a well-known Israeli Ashkenazi painter] was the king of painters. And this truth was also revealed to Benny Efrat from Lebanon, Ben Haim and Doctori from Iraq and many young ‘Franks’ [derogatory term used by Ashkenazi Jews to refer to
Mizrachim
] who arrived in the land. But from these ‘Franks’, Zariskies did not emerge; nor did they engage with ‘Jewish’ or ‘Zionist’ art … However, when they arrived in America they learned from Matisse the Frenchman and Sol Lewitt the American that everyone [in the West] was talking about Islamic art and for a short moment this reignited their memories.

– George Shemesh, text accompanying the exhibition
Six Israeli Artists from Arab Countries
, Tel Aviv, 1978
¹

I
n the spring of 2002, the Mother Tongue Festival was launched with exhibitions, a film festival and an academic conference. In more ways than one, it summed up the 1990s attempt to
produce, or at least point to, the existence of a distinct Mizrachi discourse. The gist of the films, the visual arts exhibits and the talks delivered at the conference had to do with connectivity – the strong, almost undeniable ties that had been exposed between Arabism and Mizrachi Judaism. Yet this theme captured the paradox of the event: could Mizrachi culture return to its roots without re-adopting at least the mother tongue of that civilization, Arabic?

Most of the films and discussion at the events were in Hebrew, reinforcing the fact that the Arabic language was not part of the new culture. The participants in the event were, in their own eyes, Arab Jews, but culturally they wished to be defined as
Mizrachim
, the Orientals. Loyalty to Hebrew was probably pragmatic, not ideological. Or perhaps the use of Hebrew involved deeper layers, for as one acute Mizrachi observer noted, this attitude to the Arabic language in the new post-Zionist Mizrachi culture, including music, was also an attempt to run away from the role played by Mizrachi Jews in the oppression of the Palestinians:

We did all kinds of things there; we were governors in the occupied areas of 1948, agents in the Mossad, agents in the Secret Service, officers in the military rule inside Israel until 1967 and then in the occupied territories [the West Bank and the Gaza Strip].
²

The documentary films produced by the
Mizrachim
tried to revive the contribution of Jews to Arab culture in general, especially Egyptian and Iraqi culture. An example of this is the fiim
Desperado Square
by Benny Toraty, a feature film about one of Tel Aviv’s poorest neighbourhoods, Shechunat Hatikva, which ironically means ‘neighbourhood of hope’. Hatikva, located on the southern outskirts of the city, was populated by North African Jews in the 1950s; lately the government has dumped tens of thousands of Eritrean refugees there, a move that is the source of constant friction between two disadvantaged communities locked in a slum separated from the rest of Tel Aviv by a highway.

The film tells the story of the neighbourhood through the chronicles of one family. The father used to own a cinema and, after it
closed, beseeched his children never to operate it again. There are two sons, who, after their father’s death, decide to defy his request, as one of them claims he was granted permission to do so by his dead father in a dream. To celebrate the reopening of the cinema, the brothers look for a copy of the Raj Kapoor film
Sangam
. The search for the rare copy reveals the neighbourhood’s subculture, in which dreams are fulfilled only on the screen.

Many Mizrachi film-makers and visual artists regarded themselves in the 1990s as Arab Jews. But the Arabic language appeared only as it does in the testimony of a prominent Arab Jewish author, Shimon Ballas – in a dream, or rather a nightmare.

In addition to including Arab Jews, the Mother Tongue Festival featured North African Jewish writers who asserted that it was not only the relearning or re-respecting of Arabic that could pose a linguistic challenge to the idea of Israel. Some of them regarded French similarly. Before emigrating to Israel and becoming Zionised, North African Jews conversed mainly in French. The Mizrachi author Dror Mishani even suggested that a return to French as the strategy for cultural definition might be less alienating to the general Israeli Jewish public. After all, it was not the language of the enemy. Or, as Mishani put it, it would create a linguistic space ‘where the Mizrachi Jew is not disturbing the cultural scene’.
³

In fact, the Mizrachi Jews had not only lost their Arabic or French; they also lost their ability to speak Hebrew in an accent that could capture the similarities among the Semitic languages, especially the closeness of Arabic to Hebrew. This loss is beautifully expressed in a poem by Sami Shalom Chetrit:

On the way to ’Ayn Harod [a veteran Zionist settlement]

l lost my trilled
resh
[the letter ‘r’ in Hebrew].

Afterwards I didn’t feel the loss of my guttural
’ayn

And the breathy
het
[the letter ‘h’ in Hebrew)

I inherited from my father

Who himself picked it up

On his way to the Land.
⁴

Post-Zionist Music

If there was a clear point of dialogue between the Mizrachi constituency that emerged in the 1990s and the post-Zionist challengers, it was a longing for the music they had left behind but could still listen to on the radio and television and more recently via the Internet. There has been a concerted attempt to market Israel as a Western, modern state in the midst of a sea of Arab primitivism and barbarism. But music is part of the local culture and, like Arabic food, it may have the potential to play a more significant role some day in integrating a new kind of Israel into the Arab world. At present, however, it serves no such purpose.

This was the motivation behind the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, the Arab–Israeli philharmonic orchestra founded by Edward Said and Daniel Barenboim. If the fortunes of Arabic music in Israel are any indicator, one cannot be too sanguine about the prospects. The popularity of Arabic music demonstrates a process of appropriation by local Mizrachi musicians of Arabic music as exclusively Mizrachi music. Yet the music had no political or substantial cultural implications for the identity or behaviour of the society or state, and indeed, on occasion, right-wing parties have played it at the very rallies at which they have vented anti-Arab rhetoric. Even the West Bank settlers’ Gush Emunim radio station,
Arutz 7
(Channel 7), energetically broadcasts a somewhat Hebraicised version of Arabic music. Despite all these caveats, in the 1990s, music was one of the many means by which Ashkenazi cultural hegemony was challenged.

Mizrachi music, minus any Arabic language, became a salient feature of the post-Zionist musical revolution that took place in the 1990s. It became a genre by itself – Hebrew lyrics set to Arabic-style music. Today, Israel’s national airline, El Al, offers an audio channel designated ‘Mizrachi music’, a category that also appears in music shops and on radio and TV channels. Back in the 1990s, even Arabic music itself – that is, the music emanating from the Arab world – became popular, whether classics such as Umm Kulthum or the new genre of North African
Ra’i
.