Who Gets to Speak for Mizrahi Jews?

Loading

Earlier this month, I wrote an op-ed in The Los Angeles Times titled “No, Israel isn’t a country of privileged and powerful white Europeans.” I speak from experience: I am neither white, nor European—my grandparents came to Israel from Iraq and North Africa. And, as a gay man, I don’t feel particularly privileged, either.



Marc Lamont Hill, a political commentator and professor of media studies and urban education at Temple University, did not like my piece. In a Facebook post he shared with his 90,000 followers before curiously deleting it, he made the following argument: “the racial and political project that transformed Palestinian Jews (who lived peacefully with other Palestinians) into the 20th century identity category of ‘Mizrahi’ as a means of detaching them from Palestinian identity,” he wrote.

Like Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, who made the preposterous claim that Palestinians helped make the land of Israel into a safe haven for Jewish Holocaust survivors, Lamont Hill’s account of history is blatantly and laughably false. There has never been a group that self-identified as Palestinian Jews. Nor did Jews live in peace with other Palestinians: In August of 1929, for example, Palestinians turned on their Jewish neighbors in Hebron, unleashing a pogrom. The peaceful leaders of the Jewish community refused to fire at their Arab neighbors, even though they were armed with guns, and pleaded instead for reconciliation. The Arabs responded by smashing skulls, castrating men, beheading babies, and tossing one Jewish man into an oven more than a decade before the Nazis would have the same idea, slaughtering 67 Jewish men, women, and children. Similar tales of Palestinian violence toward their Jewish neighbors abound.

Sadly, that is not Lamont Hill’s only lie. He also claim that Mizrahi is an identity manufactured for nefarious political reasons by Israel’s largely Ashkenazi founders. It’s a claim that’s easy for me to personally refute: When my grandparents arrived in Israel, together with 850,000 other Jews who lived in the Middle East and North Africa, they understood three things.

First, they understood that they were being forced to leave their Arab homelands. My Iraqi grandparents, for example, had very clear memories of the Farhud, the 1941 pogrom that left more than 180 Jews dead at the hands of their neighbors. They finally fled their native country in 1951, pushed out by an Iraqi government determined to rid itself of all of its Jews.

When they arrived in Israel, my grandparents did not see themselves as Palestinian Jews—they had never before lived in Mandatory Palestine. They saw themselves as Jews of Iraqi descent returning to the ancient homeland they and their ancestors had dreamed of and prayed of for thousands of years, the land from which they were once expelled and to which they were overjoyed to return. And they also understood themselves to be distinct from their Ashkenazi brothers and sisters: They were all Jews, but my grandparents were proud of their Mizrahi heritage just as the 200,000 Israelis of Ethiopian descent are proud of theirs.

Lamont Hill ignores all that. He also turns the imperial narrative on its head, accusing Israel of the crimes that were, in reality, committed by its Arab neighbors in the name of pan-Arabism. Since the 20th-century rise of pan-Arabism, leaders advocated Arabization policies of indigenous national groups—whether the Kurds, the Berbers, the Arameans, or the Sudanese—and sought to permanently reduce the status and power of indigenous religious groups, such as the Copts and Maronites, across the region. This sort of abuse goes on: Two decades ago, there were 1.4 million Christians living in Iraq; today, there are fewer than 250,000, an 80% drop. It’s precisely the same imperialist policy, intolerant of minorities, that drove my grandparents out all these decades ago.

Read more

0 0 votes
Article Rating
Subscribe
Notify of
2 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments

You’d think that Lamont Hill, a self-proclaimed researcher of these topics, would know these facts.

It’s not that these liberals don’t KNOW the facts; they just don’t like them.

Rewriting History is what the Left does. Muslims do it, too.
On this one the two are working together to erase the heritage of NON-European Jews from Israel, so as to pretend Israel is sort of a colonial construct worthy of deconstruction.
It won’t work.

BTW, I find it slightly ironic that Hen Mazzig’s parents were so happy to go to live in Israel in the 20th c after Christ.
After the fall of the Babylonian Empire all the Jews enslaved in it were freed by the new Persian leader at that time, over 500 years before Christ.
Any Jews who desired to go back to Israel were free to do so back then, but many Jews stayed even tho they’d been slaves in that area.