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Source: The Unz Review
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AJ– This is how Israel erased the Arab-Jewish identity.
Alon Mizrahi– White supremacy is deeply embedded into Zionism, even inside the Jewish world.
AJ– Israeli writer Alon Mizrahi is the son of a Palestinian Jewish father and a Moroccan Jewish mother. He talked to us about the hostility Jews from the Arab world faced after the creation of Israel, and the pressure they felt to abandon their culture and even the way they spoke.
Alon Mizrahi– The humiliation Arab Jews experienced in Zionism is something they never experienced in the Arab countries, in the Muslim countries. They never experienced white supremacy in Morocco or Iraq or Yemen. They only experienced it here.
AJ– 45% of Jews in Israel originate from the mostly-Arabic speaking countries from North Africa and the Middle East. Today they’re called Mizrahi. Many left those countries after a rise in hostility largely sparked by Zionism and Israel’s creation in 1948. But in Israel they faced hostility too. Zionism’s early leaders condemned them for being too Arab calling them “uneducated masses” and “savage.”
Alon Mizrahi– They treated brown Jews and Jews from Muslim origins from Arab countries as inferior.
AJ– When they arrived in Israel, Mizrahi Jews were placed in transit camps then slums, in so called development towns, largely to provide cheap labor to Ashkenazi settlements.
Alon Mizrahi– Arab Jews needed to unlearn Arabic and to unlearn their Arabic accents.
I asked my mother, “How come you didn’t rebel against this?” And my mother told me, You don’t understand. When I was a young woman, the best compliment anyone could give me was “But you don’t look Moroccan.”
Everything that was good was European, and American, and Western.
AJ– The domination of Ashkenazi Jews in Israeli society also meant Mizrahi Jews inherited the trauma of the Holocaust.
Alon Mizrahi– The experience of European Jews, of endless persecution, and pogroms, and all thse experiences they went through, which Arab Jews didn’t go through. They were told that the people they had lived with and lived next to for all those centuries, were now their worst enemies.
For many IDF soldiers, who are ethnic Arabs, who are Arab Jews, when they are mocking those women who look and sound exactly like their grandmothers look; this is saying: “Look how much I am not an Arab anymore. Look at what I am willing to do to show to you that I am not an Arab.”
AJ– Alon says Israel’s desire to carve out a European or Western identity, ultimately works to erase Judaism’s diversity and history.
Alon Mizrahi– Jews are actual Semites, not white Americans telling you they are Semites. We had Jews in Morocco and Yemen and Iraq, living in their places, in their towns, and praying in their synagogues for hundreds of years. This whole world of meaning is gone. And it’s not gone because Germans came and destroyed it. It’s gone because Zionism came.
If you talk about the experience of Mizrahi Jews in Zionism, then Zionism explodes. Because if Jews are not allowed to be themselves in their promised land, then Zionism is a lie.
If you have to hate Arabs the minute you set foot in Israel, then Zionism is a lie because many Jews were also Arabs and spoke Arabic.
Israeli writer Alon Mizrahi speaks to AJ+ about the erasure of the Arab Jewish identity in Israel.
I contributed nothing to this excellent interview except to transcribe it from the video. I hope readers find it as thought-provoking as I did.
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