The Narrative of the Nation and the Discourse of Modernization: the Case …folk.uio.no/guthst/MENA1300/Pensum_Lithist_bakgrunn/... · · 2013-02-28The Narrative of the Nation and

Critique, Spring 1997

The Narrative of the Nation and the Discourseof Modernization: the Case of the Mizrahim

Ella Shohat

Different beginnings have been attributed to the epoch of "modernity," fromColumbus so-called voyages of discovery, through the Renaissance, theIndustrial revolution, to the Post-World War II era of decolonization. WhereasModernism and Post-modernism imply a philosophy and an epistemology, notjust an epoch, modernization often has meant a translation of an ideology intoa political program.1 The ideology of modernization, even in the contemporaryera, has been crucial for assuring nationalist secular, and even scientific notionsof the "nation."2 Modernization theories thrive on a binarist demarcationopposingtwinedconcepts—modernity/tradition.underdevelopment/development,science/superstition, technology/backwardness—to create programs forprogress.In this sense, modernization functions as the liberal bridge between two oppositepoles. It often envisions a stagist narrative that paradoxically can speak of anessential superiority of one community over another while also generatingprograms to transform the "inferior" community into modernity. Modernization

This paper was originally presented at the Middle East Studies Associationannual meeting, 1995, Washington D.C., on a panel on "nationalism and modernity,"organized by Mervat Hatem. I thank her and Joseph Massad for encouraging me toparticipate.

1. By both colonial and anti-colonial discourses.2. Conversely, diverse fundamentalist movements have opposed modernization on

similar binarist grounds, holding it responsible for the ills of the nation.

Ella Habiba Shohat is Professor of Cultural Studies and Women's Studies at the CityUniversity of New York. She has lectured and published extensively on postcolonialism,multicultural feminism, Mizrahi identity and Zionist discourse. Among her books are:Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation (Univ. of Texas Press), and(with Robert Stam) Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (Routledge)which won the Katherine Kovacs Singer best media book award for 1994.

Downloaded By: [New York University] At: 15:34 26 October 2009

4 * Shohat

discourse has been used on a global transnational scale as well as within nation-states, where even "third world" and so-called developing nations grafted it ontolocal class, ethnic, racial, and religious hierarchies. Part and parcel ofEurocentric discourse, modernization became in certain nation-states crucial forthe creation of national cohesiveness.3

This paper examines the Israeli national project of modernization withregard to Sephardi/Mizrahi Jews, or the Jews of African and Asian origins. Inthe case of Israel, Jews of European origins, or the Ashkenazi, promotedmodernization as a central mechanism of policy-making, as well as of identity-shaping within what I have elsewhere called an "anomalous nationalformation."4 The Zionist modernization narrative has projected a Western

3. An idealized notion of the West organizes knowledge in ways flattering to theEurocentric imaginary. Emblems of modernity, science and technology are often seenas "Western," a view that projects the West as "mind" and theoretical refinement andthe non-west as "body" and unrefined raw material. But in a long historical view, theequation of West and Science is misleading. During millennia Europe was largely aborrower of science and technology: the alphabet, algebra, and astronomy all came fromoutside Europe. Quite apart from the historical existence of nonEuropean sciences andtechnologies we should not ignore the inter-dependence of the diverse worlds. Whiletechnological development over recent centuries has undoubtedly centered in WesternEurope and North America, this development has been very much a "joint venture" (inwhich Europe owned most of the shares) facilitated by colonial exploitation then and neo-colonial "brain draining" of the "Third World" now. The "West" and the "Non-West,"a dichotomy crucial for the ideology of modernization, cannot be posited as antonyms,for in fact the two worlds interpenetrate in an unstable space of creolization andsyncretism.

4. In my effort to propose a relational approach to communities identities, mywritings have critiqued Eurocentric discourse and Zionist historiography foruniversalizing Jewish history and for projecting European-Jewish experiences onto thedifferent political and cultural dynamics of the Middle East. My essay, "Sephardim inIsrael: Zionism from the Standpoint of its Jewish Victims," Social Text 19/20 (Fall 1988)was recently reprinted in News From Within as the opening essay for a whole issuededicated to Zionism and Mizrahim. It was written as an amplification of the Palestinianperspective, but also as a call to alternative analysis to engage with Sephardi/Mizrahiperspective and with its historical links to the question of Palestine. My other relatedessays, include: "Master Narrative/ Counter Readings," in Resisting Images ed. by R.Sklar and C. Musser (Temple University Press, 1990); "The Media's War," Social Text28 (Spring 1991); "Notes on the Postcolonial," Social Text 31-32 (Spring 1992);"Staging the Quincentenary: The Middle East and the Americas," Third Text 21 (Winter1992-93); "Antinomies of Exile: Said at the Frontiers of National narrations," in TheEdward Said Reader, Michael Sprinker ed., (Blackwell Press, 1993); "Exile, Diaspora,and Return," in Discourse and Palestine, ed. by A. Moors et al., (Het Spinhius, 1995);"Columbus, Palestine and Arab-Jews: Toward a Relational Approach to Community


The Narrative of the Nation •!• 5

national identity for a state geographically located in the Middle East andpopulated by a Middle Eastern majority, including Palestinians and non-Ashkenazi Jews. The dominant discourse of Euro-Israeli policy makers andscholars suggests that Asian and African Jews come from "primitive,""backward," "underdeveloped," "pre-modern" societies and, therefore, needmodernization. This ideology has permeated programs in such diverse areas aseducation, culture, health, labor, and housing. Mizrahim were placed in"development towns" (Ayarot Pituha) on the state borders, in "special care"school programs,5 and in "neighborhoods' rehabilitation" projects in workingclass urban areas. The Euro-Israeli discourse of modernization, implicit in allthese programs, goes beyond merely identifying a "problem" and offering a"solution;" it defines the parameters of national identity, in which the "East,"associated with underdevelopment, has to be transformed into the modernity ofthe "West." These discourses and policies have had devastating consequencesfor Mizrahim.

The converging discourses of the Enlightenment, progress, and modern-ization are central to the Zionist master narrative. A series of equations betweenmodernity, science, technology, and the West has contributed to the civilizingmission not only in relation to Palestine but also in relation to Arab Jews.6 Justas the mystique of modernizing Palestine by "making the desert bloom" helpedavoid basing land claims exclusively on Biblical evidence, it has also sabotagedMizrahi cultural and political expression. Zionist discourse claims to have"saved" Sephardi Jews from the harsh rule of their Arab "captors."7 It tookthem out of "primitive conditions" of poverty and superstition and ushered themgently into a modern Western society characterized by tolerance, democracy,and "humane values," values with which they were but vaguely and erraticallyfamiliar due to the "Levantine environments" from which they came. WithinIsrael, according to this discourse, Mizrahi have suffered from "a gap,"(ha 'pa 'ar) not simply between their standard of living and that of EuropeanJews, but also a gap resulting from their "incomplete integration" into liberalmodernity, handicapped as they have been by their Oriental, illiterate, despotic,sexist and generally pre-modern formations in their lands of origin. Thepolitical establishment, the welfare institutions, and the educational system,according to this discourse, have done all in their power to "reduce this gap"

Identity," in Cultural Identity and the Gravity of History: Reflections on the Work ofEdward Said, ed. by B. Parry et. al., (Lawrence & Wishart, 1997).

5. Have been targeted as the audience for "Art for the People" (Omanut La'am).6. Science became crucial for legitimizing Zionist nationalism as part of the West and

modernity.7. The civilizing mission towards the ancient land and traditional Jews became

important.


6 * Shohat

by initiating the Oriental Jews into the ways of a civilized, modern society.Inter-marriage is proceeding apace, this discourse affirms, and the Sephardimhave won new appreciation for their "traditional cultural values," for theirfolkloric music, their rich cuisine, and warm hospitality.

An ideology that blames the non-modern third world countries of origin has-been elaborated by the Israeli elite, and it is expressed by politicians, socialscientists, educators, writers, artists, and the mass-media. Reporting on theSephardim in a 1949 article, during the mass-immigration from Arab andMuslim countries, the journalist Arye Gelblum, for example, wrote:

We are dealing with people whose primitivism is at a peak whose level ofknowledge is one of virtually absolute ignorance, and worse, who have littletalent for understanding anything intellectual. Generally, they are only slightlybetter than the general level of the Arabs, Negroes, and Berbers in the sameregions. In any case, they are at an even lower level than what we knew withregard to the former Arabs of Eretz Israel .... These Jews also lack roots inJudaism, as they are totally subordinated to the play of savage and primitiveinstincts. As with the Africans you will find card games for money,drunkenness and prostitution. Most of them have serious eye, skin and sexualdiseases, without mentioning robberies and thefts. Chronic laziness and hatredfor work, there is nothing safe about this asocial element. "Aliyat HaNoar"[the official organization dealing with young immigrants] refuses to receiveMoroccan children and the Kibbutzim will not hear of their'absorption amongthem.8

Lest one imagine this discourse to be the product of the delirium of an isolated,retrograde journalist, one only needs to read then Prime Minister David BenGurion's repeatedly expressed contempt for the culture of the Oriental Jews:"We do not want Israelis to become Arabs. We are in duty bound to fightagainst the spirit of the Levant, which corrupts individuals and societies, andpreserve the authentic Jewish values as they crystallized in the Diaspora."9

Golda Meir similarly projected the Sephardim as coming from another, lessdeveloped time. For her, it was the sixteenth-century (for other Euro-centrics,a vaguely defined "Middle Ages"): "Shall we be able," she asked, "to elevate

8. Arye Gelblum, HaAretz, April 22, 1949 (All translations from Hebrew aremine, ES).

9. Quoted in Sammy Smooha, Israel: Pluralism and Conflict (Berkeley: Universityof California Press, 1978), p. 88. Abba Eban expresses similar concern: "One of thegreat, apprehensions which afflict us ... is the danger lest the predominance ofimmigrants of Oriental origin force Israel to equalize its cultural level with that of theneighboring world." In Smooha, p. 44.


The Narrative of the Nation • 7

these immigrants to a suitable level of civilization?"10 Over the years Euro-Israeli writings and speeches frequently advanced the historiographically suspectidea that "Jews of the Orient," prior to their "ingathering" into Israel, weresomehow "outside of" history, thus ironically echoing nineteenth-centuryassessments, such as those of Hegel, that Jews, like Blacks, lived outside of theprogress of Western civilization.

Again in the early 1950s, some of Israel's most celebrated intellectuals fromthe Hebrew University in Jerusalem wrote essays addressing the "ethnicproblem." For Karl Frankenstein, "the primitive mentality of many of theimmigrants from backward countries," might be compared profitably to "theprimitive expression of children, the retarded, or the mentally disturbed."" In1964, Kalman Katznelson published his openly racist book The AshkenaziRevolution, in which he protested the influx of Sephardi Jews, and he argued theessential, irreversible genetic inferiority of the Sephardim, warning againstmixed marriage as tainting of the "Ashkenazi race" and calling for theAshkenazim to protect their interests against a burgeoning Sephardi majority.

In ethnographic films and folklore books, Euro-centric discourse takes amore patronizing "humane" form. For Example, Dvora and Rabbi MenachemHacohen's One People: The Story of the Eastern Jews (published in 1986, withan introduction by Abba Eban) is an "affectionate" text thoroughly imbued witha Euro-centric narrative. It describes "traditional garb," "charming folkways,"pre-modern "craftsmanship," cobblers and coppersmiths, and women "weavingon primitive looms." One learns of a "shortage of textbooks in Yemen," andthe photographic evidence shows only sacred writings on the ktuba or on Torahcases, never secular writing. An entire chapter is devoted to "The Jewish Cave-Dwellers." What is striking about this book is a "desire for primitivism," amiserabilism which feels compelled to paint the Mizrahim as innocent oftechnology and modernity. The pictures of Oriental misery then are contrastedwith the luminous faces of the Orientals in Israel itself, learning to read andmastering the modern technology of tractors and combines. The book formspart of a broader national export industry of Sephardi "folklore," an industrywhich circulates (the often expropriated) goods—dresses, jewelry, liturgicalobjects, photos—among Western Jewish institutions eager for Jewish exotica.

10. Ibid., pp. 88-9.11. Another scholar, Yosef Gross, saw the immigrants as suffering from "mental

regression" and a "lack of development of the ego." Quotations taken from Tom Segev,1949: Hayisaelim Harishonim, p. 157 (Hebrew). The extended symposium concerningthe "Sephardi problem" was framed as a debate concerning the "essence of primitivism."Only a strong infusion of European cultural values, the scholars concluded, would rescuethe Arab Jews from their "backwardness."


8 * Shohat

Time and again, the dispossession of subaltern peoples has been justified bythe concept of "the inevitable march of Western progress."12 The pre-capitalistsocieties of Asia and the Americas, even for the critic of capitalism, Marx, livedin a historically condemned temporality and inevitably would disappear beforethe productive march of progressive capitalism.13 In Time and the Other,Johannes Fabian discerns a similar tendency within traditional anthropology—adesire to project the colonized as living "allochronically," in another time,associated with earlier periods of individual life (childhood) or of human history(primitivism).14 A more adequate formulation, however, would see time asscrambled and palimpsestic in all the worlds, with the pre-modern, the modern,the post-modern, and the para-modern co-existing globally, although the"dominant" might vary from region to region.

Within colonialist discourse, metaphors and tropes played a constitutive rolein "figuring" European superiority. The trope of infantilization, as Robert Stamand I point out in our book Unthinking Eurocentrism, projects the colonized asembodying an earlier stage of individual human or broad culturaldevelopment.15 The infantilization trope also posits the political immaturity ofcolonized or formerly colonized peoples, seen as Calibans suffering from whatOctave Mannoni called a "Prospero Complex," i.e. an inbred dependency on theEuropean leadership. The in loco parentis ideology of paternalistic gradualismassumed the necessity of white trusteeship; for colonialist discourse, wholepeoples and entire continents were not "ready" for democracy. Terms like"underdeveloped," as diplomatic synonyms for "childlike," project theinfantilizing trope on a global scale. The third world child, even when theproduct of a millennial civilization, is not yet in control of his body/psyche, and

12. Leftists writings are also not exempt from the Eurocentric narrative of Progress.Although Marx turned Hegel on his head in some respects, in others he prolonged theEurocentrism of Hegelian philosophy with his idealization that Africa is unhistorical andundeveloped spirit that Asian "natural vegetative existence" therefore have to besubjugated to Europeans.

13. Comtean positivism, meanwhile, saw the "order and progress" of human historyas developing in predictable, universal stages. For a Native American critique of theEurocentric premises of Marxism, see Ward Churchill, ed. Marxism and NativeAmericans (Boston: South End, 1983).

14. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its ObjectQiewYork: Columbia University Press, 1983), p.155. A "denial of coevalness" marks thestate of the native culture as either "decadent" or "prehistoric." A frozen, inert, behind-the-times "tradition" is pitted against a vibrant "modernity," in a temporal displacementthat masks the fact that what are in fact opposed "are not the same societies at differentstages of development, but different societies facing each other at the same Time."

15. Renan, for example, speaks of the "everlasting infancy of [the] non-perfectibleraces." Ernst Renan, The Future of Science (Boston: Roberts, 1891), p. 153.


The Narrative of the Nation * 9

therefore needs the benevolent help of the more "adult" and "advanced"societies.16

The projection of third world identities and cultural practices as untouchedby modernity and postmodemity often is subliminally imbricated with a view ofthe third world as "underdeveloped," or "developing," as if it lived in a anothertime zone apart from the global system of the late capitalist world. Like thesociology of "modernization" and the economics of "development," theaesthetics of modernism (and of postmodernism) often covertly assume a telostoward which third world cultural practices are presumed to be evolving.17

In Israeli modernization discourse, Mizrahim always seem to lag behind, notonly economically but also culturally, condemned to a perpetual game of catch-up in which they only can repeat on another register the history of the"advanced" Euro-Israelis.18 From the perspective of official Zionism, Jewsfrom Arab and Muslim countries enter modernity only when they appear on themap of the Hebrew state, just as the modern history of Palestine is seen asbeginning with the Zionist renewal of the Biblical mandate. Modern Sephardihistory, in this sense, is presumed to begin with the coming of Sephardi Jewsto Israel, and more precisely with the "Magic Carpet" or "Ali Baba" operations.Borrowed from A Thousand and One Nights, the names themselves foregroundthe putative technological naivete of the Sephardim, for whom modern airplaneswere "magic carpets" transporting them to the Promised Land.

The same historical process that dispossessed Palestinians of their property,lands and national-political rights, intimately was linked to the process thataffected the dispossession of Arab Jews from their property, lands androotedness in Arab countries, as well as their uprootedness from that history and

16. Within postwar cosmology, Carl Pletsch has suggested, the first world nationswere seen as the most developed because shaped according to scientific, rationalknowledge; the second world nations was seen as developed, but held back by socialistideology; and the third world, as "developing." See Carl Pletsch, "The Three Worlds,or the Division of Social Scientific Labor, circa 1950-1970," Comparative Studies inSociety and History, XXIJJ, 4(1981), pp. 565-90.

17. Modernization discourse is projected into a less developed, less modern frame,and those of aesthetic and cultural periodization (where it is projected into a "pre-modernist" or "pre-postmodernist" past). A residual economism or "stagism," leads tothe equation of late capitalist/postmodernist and pre-capitalist/pre-modernist, as whensome speak of the "belated emergence of a kind of modernism in the modernizing thirdworld, at a moment when the so-called advanced countries are themselves sinking intofull postmodemity." See Unthinking Eurocentrism.

18. According to this stagist discourse, when Euro-Israelism reach the stage ofpostmodernism, the Mizrahim hobble along toward modernism. "Postmodern" is notused here as honorific, but as a critique of the stagist narrate.


10 * Shohat

culture within Israel itself.19 An ideology that orchestrates an interlockingseries of Euro-centric hierarchical discourses has laid the foundation for allsocial areas in which Sephardim have to be modernized, a euphemism fordismantling the fabric of their Arab, Persian, or Turkish cultures.

The Eurocentric projection of Middle Eastern Jews as coming to the "landof milk and honey" from desolate, backwater societies lacking all contact withscientific-technological civilization, once again set up an Orientalist rescue trope.Zionist discourse portrayed Sephardi culture prior to Zionism as static andpassive, and like the fallow land of Palestine, as suggested by Edward Said,20

lying in wait for the impregnating infusion of European dynamism. Whilepresenting Palestine as an empty land to be transformed by Jewish labor, theZionist "founding fathers" presented Arab Jews as passive vessels to be shapedby the revivifying spirit of Zionism. The question of modernization further iscomplicated by the socialist aspects of Zionism. In Zionist discourse, theconflict between the socialist ideology of Zionism and the real praxis ofEuro-Jewish colonization in Palestine was resolved through the reassuring thesisthat the Arab masses, exploited by Arab feudalism, only could benefit fromZionist praxis.21 This presentation embodies the historically positive self-imageof Israelis as involved in a non-colonial enterprise and therefore morallysuperior in their aspirations.

Furthermore, the hegemonic socialist-humanist discourse has hidden thenegative dialectics of wealth and poverty between first and third world Jewsbehind a mystifying facade of egalitarianism. The Zionist mission of ending theJewish exile from the "promised land" was never the beneficent enterpriseportrayed by official discourse, since from the first decade of this century ArabJews were perceived as a source of cheap labor that could replace the

19. Neither Palestinians nor Arab Jews have been compensated for their lostproperty. But while Palestinians have fostered the collective militancy of nostalgia inexile (be itfil dakhel, under Israeli occupation, or fil kharij, under Syrian, Egyptian,American passport or on the basis of laissez-passer), Sephardim, trapped in a no-exitsituation, have been forbidden to nourish memories of at least partially belonging to thepeoples across the river Jordan, across the mountains of Lebanon, and across the Sinaidesert and Suez Canal. The pervasive notion of "one people" reunited in their ancienthomeland, actively disauthorizes any affectionate memory of life before the State ofIsrael.

20. See Edward Said, The Question of Palestine (NY: Times Books, 1979).21. See Maxime Rodinson, Israel: A Colonial-Settler State? Translated by David

Thorstad. (NY: Monad Press, 1973).



dispossessed Palestinian fellahin.71 The "Jews in the form of Arabs"23 thuscould prevent any Palestinian declaration that the land belongs to those whowork it, and contribute to Jewish national demographic needs.

In its actual historical implication, however, Aroda Ivrit had tragicconsequences, engendering political tensions not only between Arabs and Jews,but also between Sephardim and Ashkenazim and between Sephardim andPalestinians. "Hebrew Work" then meant in reality the boycotting of Arabwork. After the failure of Ashkenazi immigration, the Zionist institutionsdecided to bring Sephardim. Ya'acov Tehon from The Eretz Israel Office wrotein 1908 about the problem of Hebrew workers. "There is a place for the Jewsof the Orient... in the profession of agriculture ... [they] are satisfied with verylittle" [and] "in this sense they can compete with them [the Arabs]." Anothercommentator wrote: "the Yemenite element should remain in its ... barbarian,wild present state ... the Yemenite of today still exists at the same backwardlevel as the Fellahins ... they can take the place of the Arabs."24 Regarded byEuropean Zionists as capable of competing with Arabs but refractory to morelofty socialist and Nationalist ideals, the Sephardim seemed ideal importedlaborers. Thus the concept of "natural workers" with "minimal needs,"exploited by such figures as Ben Gurion and Arthur Rupin, came to play acrucial ideological role, a concept subtextually linked to color. To quote Rupin:"Recognizable in them [Yemeni-Jews] is the touch of Arab blood, and they havea very dark color."25

Sephardim were excluded from the socialist benefits accorded Europeanworkers. Labor Zionism managed to prevent Yemenites from owning land orjoining cooperatives, thus limiting them to the role of wage-earners. Whilepresenting Palestine as an empty land to be transformed by Jewish labor, thefounding fathers presented Sephardim as passive vessels to be reshaped by thePromethean spirit of Zionism. It was only after the failure of Europeanimmigration—even in the post-Holocaust era most European Jews chose toemigrate elsewhere—that the Zionist establishment decided to bring Sephardiimmigrants en masse. The European Zionist rescue fantasy concerning the Jewsof the Orient, in sum, masked the need to rescue itself from possible economic

22. See Yoseff Meir, Hatnua haTzionitveYehudei Teman (The Zionist Movement andthe Jews of Yemen (Tel Aviv: Sifriat Afikim, 1982); G.N. Giladi, Discord in Zion:Conflict Between Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews in Israel (London: Scorpion Publishing,1990).

23. The phrase was used already at the first decade of this century by the earlyengineers (such as Shmuel Yaveneli) of "Aliya" of Jews from the regions of the OttomanEmpire, see Yoseff Meir, The Zionist Movement and the Jews of Yemen.

24. Ibid.25. Ibid.


12 * Shohat

and political collapse. Once again demographic and economicnecessities—settling the country with Jews, securing the borders and havinglaborers to work and soldiers to fight—forced the European Zionist hand.

Contrary to egalitarian myths, Israel's rapid economic development duringthe 1950s and 1960s was achieved on the basis of a systematically unequaldistribution of advantages. The socio-economic structure thus was formedcontrary to the egalitarian myths characterizing Israel's self-representation untilthe last decade. The discriminatory decisions of Israeli officials against MiddleEastern Jews began even before their arrival in Israel and consciously werepremised on the assumption that the Ashkenazim, as the.self-declared "salt ofthe earth," deserved better conditions and "special privileges." While thesystem relegated Sephardim to a future-less bottom, it propelled Ashkenazim upthe social scale, creating mobility in management, marketing, banking andtechnical jobs.

Documents published in the 1980s, reveal that discrimination was acalculated policy that knowingly privileged the European immigrants, at timescreating anomalous situations in which educated Sephardim became unskilledlaborers, while much less educated Ashkenazim came to occupy highadministrative positions.26 The largely segregated and unequal educationalsystem in Israel also reproduces the ethnic division of labor through a trackingsystem that consistently orients Ashkenazi pupils toward prestigious white-collarpositions while pointing Mizrahi pupils toward low-status, blue-collarjobs. MostMizrahi children, furthermore, study in schools designated by the Ministry ofEducation as schools for the "teunei tipuah" (literally, "those who neednurture," or "culturally deprived"), a designation premised on the equation ofcultural difference with inferiority.27

The same pattern of discrimination touches even the details of daily life.28

The government, for example, subsidizes certain basic dietary staples, one of

26. For citations from some of the document see Segev, particularly "Part II:Between Veterans and Newcomers," pp. 93-194. Unlike the classical paradigm whereimmigration is linked to a desire for individual, familial and community improvement,in Israel this process, for Sephardim, was largely reversed. What for Ashkenaziimmigrants from Russia or Poland was a social aliya (literally "ascent") was for Sephardiimmigrants from Iraq or Egypt a yerida (a "descent"). What was for persecutedAshkenazi minorities a certain solution and a quasi-redemption of a culture, was forSephardim the complete annihilation of a cultural heritage, a loss of identity, and a socialand economic degradation.

27. The educational system functions, as Shlomo Swirski puts it, as "a huge labellingmechanism that has, among other things, the effect of lowering the achievement andexpectations of Oriental children and their parents."

28. On whatever level—immigration policy, urban development, labor policygovernment subsidies—we find.



them being European-style bread; the Arab "khubbz" (pita) favored as a stapleby both Mizrahim and Palestinians, meanwhile, is not subsidized. Thesediscriminatory processes shaped in the earliest period of Zionism reach into thevery interstices of the Israeli social system. As a result, the Sephardim, despitetheir majority status, are under-represented in the national centers of power—inthe government, in the Knesset, in the higher echelons of the military, in thediplomatic corps, in the media, and in the academic world—and over-represented in the marginal, stigmatized regions of professional and social life.The project of modernizing Middle Eastern Jews took many forms: theseparation of families, the humiliation of traditional leaders, the dispersal ofcommunities, segregation in housing, and the erasure in education and the mediaof Sephardi-Arab-Jewish history, culture and identity.

In cases where Sephardim were moved into pre-existing housing—and inIsrael pre-existing housing means Palestinian housing—the Sephardim oftenended up living in promiscuous conditions because the Orientalist attitudes of theIsraeli authorities found it normal to crowd many Sephardi families into thesame house, on the assumption that they were "accustomed" to such conditions.These poor Sephardi neighborhoods then systematically were discriminatedagainst in terms of infrastructural needs, educational and cultural advantages,and political representation. Later, when some of these neighborhoods becameobstacles to urban gentrification, the Sephardim were forced, against their willand despite violent demonstrations, to move to other "modern" poorneighborhoods. The pattern is clear and systematic. The areas forcibly vacatedby the Sephardim soon become the object of major investments leading toAshkenazi gentrification, where the elite enjoys living within a "Mediterranean"mise-en-scene but without the inconvenience of a Palestinian or Sephardipresence, while the newly adopted Sephardi neighborhoods become de-capitalized slums.

The dominant sociological accounts of Israel's "ethnic problem" attributethe inferior status of Sephardim/Mizrahim not to the class and racial formationof Israeli society but rather to their origins in "pre-modern" societies.Borrowing heavily from the intellectual arsenal of American "functionalist"studies of development and modernization, Shumuel Eisenstadt and his manysocial scientist disciples gave ideological subterfuge the aura of scientificrationality. The influential role of this "modernization" theory derives from itsperfect match with establishment needs. Eisenstadt borrows from American"structural functionalism" (Talcott Parsons) its teleological view of a "progress"that takes us from "traditional" societies, with their less complex socialstructures, to "modernization" and "development."29 Since the Israeli socialformation was seen as that entity collectively created during the Yishuv period,

29. See Shlomo Swirski, The Oriental Majority.


14 * Shohat

the immigrants were perceived as integrating themselves into the pre-existingdynamic of a modern society patterned on the Western model. The underlyingpremise of Zionism, the "ingathering of the exiles," thus was translated into thesociological jargon of Structural Functionalism. The "absorption" (Klita) ofSephardi immigrants into Israeli society entailed accepting the establishedconsensus of the "host" society and the abandonment of "pre-modern"traditions. While European immigrants required only "absorption," theimmigrants from Africa and Asia required "absorption through modernization."Within this discourse, Oriental Jews had to undergo "desocialization"—that is,erasure of their cultural identity—and "resocialization"—that is, assimilation tothe "Israeli" way of life.30

Ashkenazi Israelis, however, hid behind the flattening term "Israelisociety," as embodying the values of modernity, industry, science anddemocracy. As Shlomo Swirski points out, this presentation camouflaged theactual historical processes by obscuring: First, that the Ashkenazim, also camefrom countries on the "periphery" of the world capitalist system, countriesentering the process of industrialization and technological-scientific developmentroughly at the same time as the Sephardi countries of origin; second, that aperipheral Tishuv society also had not reached a level of developmentcomparable to that of the societies of the "center"; and third, that Ashkenazi"modernity" was made possible thanks to the labor force provided by Mizrahimass immigration. The ethnic basis of this process is often elided even by mostMarxist analysts who speak generically of "Jewish workers," a simplificationroughly parallel to speaking of the exploitation of "American" workers inSouthern cotton plantations. Thus cultural difference was posited as the causeof maladjustment.31

The Sephardi/Mizrahi Jew clearly represents a problematic entity for Euro-Israeli hegemony.32 The Mizrahi's Oriental "difference" threatens the Euro-Israeli fantasy of a prolongation of Europe "in" the Middle East, but not " o f

30. The theory would have trouble explaining why other Sephardim, coming fromthe same "pre-modern" countries, at times from the very same families, suffered noparticular maladjustment in such "post-modern" metropolises as Paris, London, NewYork and Montreal. At times the victim is even "blamed for blaming" an oppressivesystem. Here is sociologist Yosef Ben David: "...The immigrant will tend to rationalizethe failure by putting the blame openly or implicitly on ethnic discrimination."

31. Shlomo Swirski, Orientals and Ashkenazim in Israel (Haifa: Mahbarot LeMehkarUleBikoret, 1981), pp. 53-4 (Hebrew).

32. Modernization has to be seen in the context of Zionism's search for a homogenousnational identity in the face of menacing heteroglossia. Although Zionism collapses theSephardim and the Ashkenazim into the single category of "one people," at the sametime.


The Narrative of the Nation • 15

it. The Sephardi cultural difference was especially disturbing to a secularZionism whose claims for representing a single Jewish people were premised notonly on common religious background but also on common nationality. Thestrong cultural and historical links that Sephardim shared with the Arab/Muslimworld, stronger in many respects than those they shared with the Ashkenazim,threatened the conception of a homogeneous nation akin to those on whichEuropean nationalist movements were based.33

The Zionist modernization project did not go unchallenged by Mizrahim. Inthe transient camps during the 1950s there were "bread and jobs"demonstrations, and in Haifa the well-known Wadi-Salib uprising occurred in1959. Another large-scale rebellion broke out again in the 1970s, when theBlack Panthers launched demonstrations that shook the entire country. Takingtheir name from the American movement, the Black Panther revolt was led bythe children of the immigrants. Gradually becoming aware of the imposednature of their "inferiority," they sabotaged the myth of the egalitarian Jewishnation by showing that there is in Jewish Israel not one but two peoples. Theyoften used the term dfuldm veshehorim (screwed and blacks) to express the raceand class positioning of Sephardim and viewed the American Black revolt as asource of inspiration. (The choice of the name "Black Panthers" also ironicallyreverses the Ashkenazi reference to Sephardim as Shvartze Chaies—"blackanimals"). All these protests, however, were suppressed systematically andeven violently.

In the 1980s and 1990s, alternative organizations in education (Hila,Kedma,) and cultural practices (Bimat Kedem, Forum Hanashim HamizrahiotHabrera Hativ'it, Iton Aher) challenge the Euro-centric assumptions of thediscourse of modernization. They also raise the question as to whether suchchallenges inevitably themselves also reproduce the discourse of modernization,and at least partially have to operate within the nation-state framework ofmodernization. However, by asserting their cultural links to the "East," thesepractices demonstrate the limits of the modernization ideology and point to afissured national identity.

The establishment, meanwhile, consistently has tried to explain away allmanifestations of Mizrahi revolt. The "breads-and-jobs" demonstrations weredismissed as the agitational work of communist Iraqi immigrants; the Wadi Salibuprising and the Black Panthers were the expression of "violence-prone

33. Modernizing in the is context was clearly related to a nation-state in an anxiousstate about its national identity. The Sephardi "desert generation," as the immigrantswere described, had to die. Ashkenazi institutional apparatus has proliferated with"Oriental Departments," which took upon themselves to modernize Asian and AfricanJews.


16 * Shohat

Moroccans;" individual acts of resistance were symptoms of "neurosis" or"maladjustment." Demonstrators were described in the press and in academicstudies as lumpen proletarian deviants, and the movements were caricatured inthe media as "ethnic organizing" that attempt to "divide the nation." Class andethnic antagonism often were suppressed in the name of a supposedly imminent"national security" disaster. In any case, all attempts at independent Sephardipolitical activity have faced the carrot-and-stick counter measures of theestablishment, measures which range on a spectrum from symbolic gesturestoward token "change" channeled via the welfare infrastructure, throughsystematic cooptation of Sephardi activists (jobs and privilege are a major sourceof power in a small centralized country) to harassment, character assassination,imprisonment, and, at times, pressures to leave the country.

The Israeli modernization project continually generates theunderdevelopment of Mizrahim. In many respects, European Zionism has beena huge confidence trick played on Sephardim, a cultural massacre of immenseproportions, an attempt, partially successful, to wipe out, in a generation or two,millennia of rooted Oriental civilization, unified even in its diversity. Myargument here, I hasten to clarify, is not an essentialist one. I am not positinga new binarism of eternal hostility between Ashkenazim and Sephardim. Inmany countries and situations, the two groups, despite cultural and religiousdifferences, have co-existed in relative peace; it is only in Israel that they existin a relation of dependency and oppression. (In any case, only 10 percent ofAshkenazi Jews are in Israel). My argument is structural, an attempt to accounttheoretically for the "structure of feeling," the deep current of rage against theIsraeli establishment that unites most Sephardim independent of their declaredparty affiliation. My argument is situational and analytical; it claims thatmodernization as a form of constructing a Western identity for Israel has haddevastating consequences for Mizrahim. The taboo around the Arabness ofSephardi history and culture clearly is manifested in Israeli academic and mediaattacks on Mizrahi intellectuals who refuse to define themselves simply asIsraelis, and who dare to assert their Arabness in the public sphere. TheAshkenazi anxiety around Sephardi-Mizrahi identity (expressed both by the rightand left) underlines that Sephardi Jews have represented a problematic entityfor Euro-Israeli hegemony. Although Zionism collapses the Sephardim and theAshkenazim into a single people, at the same time the Sephardi difference hasdestabilized Zionist claims for representing a single Jewish people, premised notonly on a common religious background but also on common nationality.

Fearing an encroachment from the East upon the West, the Israeliestablishment has attempted to repress the Middle Easterness of Sephardic Jewsas part of an effort to mark clear borders of identity between Jews as Westernersand Arabs as Easterners. Arab-ness and oriental-ness have been consistentlystigmatized as evils to be uprooted, creating a situation where Arab Jews, for



the first time in history, were urged to see Judaism and Zionism as synonymsand Jewishness and Arabness as antonyms. They were prodded to choosebetween anti-Zionist Arabness and a pro-Zionist Jewishness. Distinguishing the"evil" East (the Muslim Arab) from the "good East" (the Jewish Arab), Israelhas taken upon itself to redeem Arab Jews from their "primal sin" of belongingto the Orient.

The Zionist establishment, since its early encounter with Palestinian(Sephardi) Jews, has attempted to eradicate the Middle Easteraess of those otherJews—for example, by marginalizing these histories in school curricula, and byrendering Mizrahi cultural production and grass-root political activities invisiblein the media.34 However, Mizrahi popular culture, despite its obvious shiftssince the partition of Palestine, clearly has manifested a vibrant intertextualdialogue with Arab, Turkish, Iranian, and Indian popular cultures.35 Thiscreativity partly is nourished through an enthusiastic consumption of Egyptian,Jordanian, and Lebanese television programs, films, and Arabic video-musicperformances, which rupture the Euro-Israeli public sphere.

Some Mizrahi intellectual and activists have organized against the generationof underdevelopment, often within modernization's discursive framework.Within more leftist groups, the critique takes the form of articulating a Mizrahi,and at times, an Arab-Jewish identity, challenging the devastating consequencesthat the Zionist and Arab nationalist binarism of East versus West, and Arabversus Jew has had for Arab Jews (or Jewish-Arabs). Since the beginnings ofEuropean Zionism, the Jews of Islam have faced the imposed dilemma ofchoosing between Jewishness and Arabness, in a geopolitical context thatequated on the one hand Arabness with Middle Easterness, Islam andbackwardness, and on the other hand Jewishness with Europeaness, Westernessand modernity.36

However, the very names of the 198O's movements—"East for Peace" and

34. The Israeli establishment, therefore, has made systematic efforts to suppressSephardi-Mizrahi cultural identity. The leitmotif of Zionist texts was the cry to be a"normal civilized nation," without the "distortions" and forms of pariahdom "typical"of the gola (diaspora), of the state of being a non nation-state. The "ostjuden,"perennially marginalized by Europe, realized their desire of becoming Europe, ironically,in the Middle East, this time on the backs of their own "Ostjuden," the Eastern Jews.

35. Oriental-Arabic music produced by Mizrahim—at time in collaboration withIsraeli-Palestinians—is consumed by Palestinians in Israel and across the borders in theArab world often without being labeled as originating in Israel.

36. See Shohat, Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation. As anintegral part of the topography, language, culture and history of the Middle East,Sephardim have also threatened the Euro-Israeli self image which sees itself as aprolongation of Europe, "in" the Middle East but not "of it.


18 * Shohat

the "Oriental Front" in Israel, "Perspectives Judeo-Arabes" in Paris, and the"World Organization of Jews from Islamic Countries" in New York—assert thehistorical and a future interwovenness with the East. Sephardi Jews, along withPalestinians within Israel proper (Israeli-Palestinians), compose the majority ina state that rigidly has imposed an anti-Middle Eastern agenda. In contrast tothe negatively connoted term "orientals" (in the United States), in Israel"orientals" (Mizrahim) now signifies radical politics, evoking a commonexperience shared by all Asian and African Jews in Israel, despite our differentorigins. On the part of radical Sephardi movements, it also suggests a resistantdiscourse that calls for linkages to the East as opposed to the hegemonicdiscourse of "we of the West."

In a first-of-its-kind meeting between Mizrahim and Palestinians held at thesymbolic site of Toledo, Spain, in 1989, we insisted that a comprehensive peacewould mean more than merely settling political borders. It would require theerasure of the East/West cultural borders between Israel and Palestine, and thusthe remapping of national and ethnic-racial identities against the deep scars ofcolonizing partitions. Furthermore, a critical re-examination of culture andidentity may open an intellectual space for working against taboo formulations,policed identities, and censored affiliations.
