Conundrum of Jewish Arab Identity

Polish Jews Versus Jewish Arabs

The blog entry Mizrahi Rejects Anti-Arab Bait references a radio interview in which Isaac Mizrahi describes himself as Arab and Jewish.

The blog entry Attacking Shohat: Falsifying Jewish History provides a discussion of the rejection of such mixed identity by the Forward's commentator Philologus.

Despite this attempt to force Jewish Arab identity to fit the ethnic Ashkenazi pattern, ethnic Ashkenazi Judaism is not the only model of Jewish identity.

Rabbinic Judaism crystallizes in the 10th century as an Arabic Islamic religious community thanks in large part to the efforts of Saadyah Gaon and his colleagues. By modern terminology the members of Arabic Islamic Rabbinic Jewish religious communities were for the most part Arab ethnically.

About the same time period Slavic, Turkish, German, Balkan, and Southern Russian populations practicing various forms of Judaism begin to settle Poland. Eventually, this heterogeneous Judaic population assimilates for the most part to Rabbinic Judaism to develop essentially into a Polish Catholic form of Rabbinic Judaism even if such terminology is never used. Later Polish Jews come to constitute the Ashkenazi Jewish community, which develops a strong sense of separate ethnic identity especially as the group's religious consciousness declines.

Since the establishment of the State of Israel, Jewish identity among ethnic Ashkenazim has further evolved while Jewish Arab identity has been forcibly changed. Uri Ram, whose work has been discussed in the blog entry The Changing Agenda of Israeli Sociology, Theory, Ideology and Identity by Uri Ram, has addressed the question of modern Jewish identity versus historical Jewish identities from a sociological standpoint.

Even though he deemphasizes American Jewish input into the development of Israeli Jewish identity, the following passage from The Globalization of Israel, McWorld in Tel Aviv, Jihad in Jerusalem, pp. 214-221, contains trenchant analysis [highlighted in red]of the Arab Jewish conundrum.

The last sentence of the text below helps explain the effort of Zionist Neocons to create structural anti-Islamism and anti-Arabism within globalized American culture as the pattern for globalized anti-Islamism and anti-Arabism.

If anti-Islamism and anti-Arabism become globalized values, not only are the Arabic and Islamic culture spheres excluded from globalization, but the globalized struggle (crusade or milhemet mitzvah) against the Arab and Islamic world will both overcome the breach between civic Israeli and ethnic Jewish identity and also enable Zionism to function as a (or maybe even the predominant) political ideology of globalization.

The Globalization of Israel, McWorld in Tel Aviv, Jihad in Jerusalem,
pp. 214-221

The Holocaust, and the absorption in Israel of Holocaust survivors since 1945, was indeed a watershed in the shaping of Israeli national identity. It contributed toward the gradual "Jewishization" of Israeli culture since the 1950s; that is, a gradual return of the imaginary internal "repressed." This was only one factor, though, in the identity shift. During the 1950s yet another demographic change had made the former "Hebrew project" come to a halt: the arrival to Israel of a massive wave of Jewish immigrants from Muslim countries. In a very short period, from 1949 to 1952, the ethnic complexion of Israel was radically transformed. The Hebrew settlers had lost their claim for exclusivity. The new immigrants from Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa had not been cultivated in a Zionist hothouse. They brought with them to the new country collec­tive identities rich with a variety of components-traditional, Jewish, and other-but with very little component, if at all, of Zionism, let alone Hebrewism. To draw them quickly into the new national fold, the young state and the (by now) old elite had turned, somewhat reluctantly, toward the wider common denominator of all Jewish groups, namely, Jewish tradition. And so, although the new immigrants were integrated into Israel, their presence contributed to the transformation toward a new blend between Hebrewism and Iewishness. Thus Israeli "civil religion" had turned, as students of it Charles Liebman and Eliezer Don Yehiya noted, from an outright rejection of Jewish tradition to a selective adoption of elements from it (Liebman and Don Yehiya 1983). The Eichmann trial, which took place in 1961, is a benchmark in the destruction of the cultural wall between Israeli identity and Jewish history.

Yet this return to Judaism was not only caused by inter­nal reasons. The Palestinians were the major antagonists of the emergent state of Israel and obviously were its major victims. The reinforcement of the Jewishness of Israel since the 1950s should be understood within the context of the Israeli-Arab conflict. This conflict reached a. climax in the 1948 war, which for Israel was a war 0f independence but for the Palestinian Arabs was a war of destruction. Some four hundred villages of them were destroyed, and some seven hundred thousand of them went to exile (Morris 1989). In fact, and despite the distinction drawn between Hebrew and Jewish identities, the Hebrews could have never relinquished Judaism in entirety. Jewish tradition supplied them with the legitimization needed for their project of colonization and with a definition of their group boundary. And so the label "Jewish" would come to mean more and more, and more than anything else, "non-Arab." So the justification for the invasion of a foreign country, the acquisition of the land, and the dis­placement of part of its Arab inhabitants necessitated that even secular Jews turn for justification to the Bible and to Jewish continuity and solidarity (Kimmerling 1994). And so it came to pass that between the late 1940s and early 1970s, main­stream Israeli-Jewish identity had come to be founded on two major pillars: the Holocaust on one hand and the Israeli-Arab wars on the other hand (Oron 1993).

Thus to being Jewish was added in Israel a novel mean­ing of being a non-Arab (as Ian Lustick [1999] lucidly put it).. Another layer of collective memory and forgetfulness was thus augmenting Israeli collective identify. The liberal and left con­science of Israel has started to anxiously recollect the suffering inflicted by Israelis on Palestinians. Within this memory culture of the Left are included a novel by S. Yizhar (1949) about an Israeli soldier who participated in the expulsion of Arab villagers, a novel by A.B. Yehoshua (1968) relating to the ruins of Arab villages underneath Israeli planted woods, and a book by David Grossman (1993) that documents the fate of the "present absentee," a specially Orwellian official term refer­ring to Arab inhabitants of Israel whom the state recognizes de facto but refuses to recognize de jure as citizens. Yet main­stream culture turned its back to the Palestinian issue and was willing to view it only "through the viewfinder of the gun" (Ben-Eliezer 1998).

The memory of the Palestinians and the 1948 disaster was eradicated not only from the canonical texts of history and from school textbooks (Firer 1985) but also from the landscape, which was de-Arabized. Remnants of Arab villages were either given to Jewish immigrants or destroyed, and their lands were dispersed among Jewish settlements. Arab names of places were eradicated and Hebrewized (Suleiman 2004, 137-217), and archaeological sites from Arab periods were disregarded (Abu EI-Haj 2001).

One typical case of the Israeli ambivalent national conscious­ness is the Arab village of Tsuba, near Jerusalem. As art curator Tali Tamir (1995) put it, Tsuba lies at the heart of a prolonged paradox of seeing and blindness. The remnants of the houses in Tsuba are by now covered by thick forest. Public authorities have marked the area with signposts, which relate to the view of the natural landscape, to the liberation of the area during the War of Independence, and to the archaeological sites in it. No Palestinian village is mentioned. Since the 1970s Tsuba has attained a special status in the history of Israeli art. The water­color paints of it by Yosef Zaritsky are recognized as emblem­atic to the "concept of Israeli landscape": "an embodiment of the dazzling Eretz-Israeli light, an exposed and un mediated encounter with nature, an open surveillance of the seasons of the year, light and shade, sunrise and sunset" (Tamir 1995).

Zaritsky's paintings are abstract and lyrical and sensitive to areas, tempos, and color patches but blind t0 details, espe­cially disturbing details such as remnants of desolated houses. During the early 1990s another painter was absorbed by Tsuba, Larry Abramson. Abramson was dazzled by the duplicity of the view in front of him: the Israeli planted forest on the surface and the ruins of the Palestinian village underneath. His paint­ings aimed to offset those of his predecessor and to expose the painful genealogy of the area. The paintings, like the site, are multilayered: as each landscape painting reached completion, having gained the saturated state of a full oil painting on canvas, Abramson pressed a sheet of newspaper to it. After the sheet had been pressed to the surface, it was peeled away, taking the upper layers of paint with it. Abramson was left with two parallel products: the peeled painting, damaged and impaired, but still bearing the picture of the village, and the sheet of newspaper bearing the reversed mirror image, the stripped­-off layer, the traces of the painting. As Tamir comments, "The mechanical abstraction that Abramson obtained by means of the application and the peeling of the newspaper is an abstraction without glorification. … The illuminated radiance in Zaritsky's watercolors is replaced here by a murky and muddy coloration, gray-brown in hue, spotted with patches of olive-green. … In the final state the paintings themselves have turned into something like remains of paintings." This state is metaphoric, of course, for the remains of the abandoned villages that are seen and not seen. For Abramson the Israeli Iandscape cannot be innocent, as it was to Zaritsky. By expos­ing the "double map," Abramson recollects the memory of the forgotten, perhaps hoping to reinclude the dispelled, at least symbolically.

The de-Arabization of the land, the obliteration of the Arab memory, and in general the escalation of the Israeli-Arab conflict generated yet another painful consequence. Whereas Jewish immigrants from Europe were expected and encouraged to forsake their pasts and traditions when they assimilated into the new Hebrew or Israeli culture, Jewish immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa were compelled to forsake their very identities. The Jews from Europe were "non-Arabs" in the first place, yet the identity of Jews from the Muslim societies was in part Arab. And to be an Arab in the Jewish state would have meant to be an enemy. To be entirely dissociated from the enemy, these Jews were redefined as Edat HaMizrach (literally, oriental communities) and had to drop anything Arab about them-names, languages, music, literature, family patterns, and lifestyle. Anything contaminated with Arabism had to be concealed (Shenhav 1996; Shohat 1989).

This was the paradigm of Zionist-Israeli national iden­tity, with all its inherent ambiguities and inconsistencies, in its Hebrew (pre-1948) and Israeli (post-1948) stages. As said, with the passage of time, especially from the 1960s onward, crucial transformations have started to take place in the patterns of memory and forgetfulness. These transfor­mations are attributed to the changes in the complexion of Israeli society and to changes in its balance of power. In the prestate era the Jewish community was quite small (around six hundred thousand people in the War of Independence of 1948) and quite homogeneous, especially in terms of ethnic origins, and even though it was composed of several social sectors, all were united around a potent nation-building center (Horowitz and Lissak 1979). The creation of the state even strengthened the hegemonic center, yet it was preceded and immediately followed by waves of immigration of both Jewish refugees from Europe and Jews from North Africa and the Middle East, which in three years more than doubled the number of the Jewish population and transposed its ethnic and cultural complexion. As said previously, the immigrants of the late 1940s and early 1950s were not Hebrews or Israelis by socialization or upbringing, and in most cases they were not even Zionists. They were rather refugees moving overnight from the Diaspora to Israel.

In 1967 another forgotten group reemerged on the Israeli pub­lic agenda: the Palestinians. The occupation of the Palestinians since 1967, many of whom were refugees from 1948, reminded the Israelis of the past they wished to put behind them. The Palestinian rebellions, the first intifada, which started in 1987, and the second intifada, which broke in 2000, brought the issue to the headlines. And finally, in the 1980s yet another sort of disruption emerged that challenged national identity: an upcoming middle-class stratum, whose members are repugnant toward any form of collectivistic and traditional sanctifications. In response to all these trends that started to crack the solid facet of the national (i.e., Hebrew-Israeli) identity, a new group of faithful adherents and staunch defenders of it had emerged, Gush Emunirn, which mingled old Judaism with new Hebrewism to design the new mold of the settlers' religious nationalism (Zertal and Eldar 2004).

Thus the scene of national identity and historical conscious­ness in Israel in the 1990s became much more heterorganic and conflictual than it had ever been before. Zionism, modern Jewish nationalism, has emerged in eastern Europe since the last third of the nineteenth century. As said, it arose in the midst of a gigantic flux in Jewish identity and an enormous wave of Jewish mobility and immigration. In its first decades Zionism was a minority trend, which remained in the margins of the flux, mobility, and immigration. Only a drizzle of the Jews who emigrated from eastern Europe had made their way to Palestine, and those who stayed established the nucleolus of the new Israeli society there. The Holocaust of European Jewry, on one hand, and, on the other hand, the emergence of an influ­ential and prosperous Jewish community in the United States and the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, marked a new and different phase in modern Jewish and Israeli history.

By the 1990s the old, nineteenth-century national para­digm had passed its peak. In terms of world Jewry, the state had exhausted the potential of immigration (the last waves arrived from the Soviet Union and from Ethiopia), and in terms of Jewish Israelis, the very success of the state had made it a taken-for-granted reality rather than an aspiration. Alongside the nation-state paradigm there emerged the two conflicting paradigms in the era of globalization: Jihad versus McWorld, an ethno-Jewish nationalist paradigm, and an Israeli civic-liberal paradigm. It is as if the hyphen conjoining Israeli-Jewish identity had broken down, and "civic Israelis" and "ethnic Jews" had started to drift in opposite and mutu­ally hostile directions. On one hand, Israeli political culture has become ever more universalistic and globalistic, and, on the other hand, Jewish political culture in Israel has become ever more particularistic and localistic.

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