Israel
The Mizrahi Struggle in Israel
Between Identification and Integration to Contention and Alternative
1948-2002
Am-Oved Publishers, Tel-Aviv
(Hebrew)
Will appear: Jan. 2004
by Sami Shalom
Chetrit
Introduction:
In the prevailing Israeli historiography, as in its reflections in the
academy and world literature, Israel is still presented as a society
burdened mainly by national conflicts: Jews versus Arabs, Israelis
versus Palestinians. Aside from the extensive and long-standing
interest in the question of the relations of the Jewish religion to
Jewish nationalism, very few studies written in the past decade have
begun to present and examine the depth of the complexity of Israeli
society – the tensions and conflicts within Jewish society with respect
to ethnicity, culture, class, and gender. One of the central and most
significant of these tensions is the cultural and ethnic tension
between Ashkenazim
and Mizrahim, between the founding and dominant group, the first
proponents
of the Zionist political idea and the state, and the groups that were
later
annexed and controlled. This tension is dual and overlapping: between
cultures
and between classes. This encounter between Ashkenazim and Mizrahim
immediately
created relations of dominance and subservience and produced a harsh
class-ethnic
society where the gaps between the groups within it merely widen over
the
years.
The subject of this book is the description and analysis of the
political consequences of these relations for the Mizrahim: their
efforts to adapt and
integrate, on the one hand, and their efforts to rebel, to protest, and
to
propose an alternative, on the other hand. The book begins by
presenting the
encounter itself, even before the establishment of the state. It then
portrays
the creation of relations of class-cultural oppression, which was
reproduced
and transferred from generation to generation. This development was
accompanied
by protests from the first years after 1948, while the immigrant camps
still
stood, through the rebellion of Wadi Salib at the end of the first
decade
of the state, and including the great rebellion of the Black Panthers
in
Israel in the early 1970s, which placed the subject of Mizrahi and
social
struggle at the top of the Israeli internal agenda. Then came the
revolt
at the polls of 1977, after which an breakthrough was made for a new
Mizrahi
consciousness, for cultural and intellectual ascendance, leading to a
comprehensive
alternative, but ideological divided from within: SHAS, on the one
hand,
and the New Democratic Mizrahi Discourse on the other.
This book is the first in any language to survey the political history
of Jewish-ethnic contention in Israel from the establishment of the
state until the end of the twentieth century. Unlike earlier books on
Jewish-ethnic relations in Israel, which dealt with the sociological or
cultural aspect of these relations,
this book reviews and examines the political aspect of these relations.
Naturally,
it refers to earlier works on the subject from every discipline and
makes
selective use of earlier scholarship and theory. However, the
uniqueness of
this book lies in the construction of a new Israeli theory based on
theoretical models from the ethnic politics in the United States. Its
angle of vision is the radical critical approach of the new academic
social discourse in Israel,
making it a daring and innovative study both in the academy and in
Israeli
public life.
Below I shall present the principal questions and conclusions of this
work and the innovations that it offers in its field of research,
justifying its publication. It is important to publish it in English
because it contributes to a more complex portrayal of Israeli society,
which is still largely thought of in the world as a society merely
divided by the "Jewish-Arab" conflict.
The Principal Questions and Conclusions:
1. The central, general premise of this study is the presentation of
the entirety of Mizrahi political activity in Israel, both independent,
radical activity and also that in the center of political hegemony, as:
The Mizrahi Struggle Movement. This is analogous to definition of the
struggle of Black Americans for equal rights during the 1950s and 1960s
as "The Civil Rights Movement," a definition shared by both the
academic community and the public at large. This general view of The
Mizrahi Struggle Movement permits us to summarize two significant
achievements: first is the acknowledgment by the government of its
policy of inequality, and second, the legitimizing of the Mizrahi
struggle as such.
2. This
book presents
two central approaches to Mizrahi politics: identification and
integration, on the one hand, and protest and alternative, on the
other. In the course of the discussion and analysis, we learn that both
approaches were taken from
the very first. In the analysis of the relations between Mizrahi
politics, using Haines’ model (Haines, Herbert H.. 1988. Black Radicals
and the Civil Rights Mainstream, 1954-1970. The University of Tennessee
Press, Knoxville) of radical effects, in various periods and junctures,
I found a number of prominent patterns:
a. The
positive radical effect heightens the level of collective confrontation
and, consequently, the public and political discussion of the question
of inequality between Ashkenazim and Mizrahim.
b. The
Mizrahi movements and leaders who exert radical effects on the
political system in general and on the Mizrahim in particular,
sacrifice themselves by blazing a trail they have no hope of taking.
c. In every
instance, the effect works upon all the organizations and players along
the axis of radicalism and causes movement toward a radical
development. The fruits of the effects on the political system are
gathered by organizations and leaders on the moderate side of the axis.
d. Movement
along the axis of radicalism is mainly from the moderate to the radical
side. The radical groups are pushed to the extreme and disappear, with
the completion of their task, as producers of the radical effect.
e. A form
of coupled
relations of symbiosis is formed between the producers of the radical
effect
and those who gather the fruit. The moment that the producer of the
radical
effects steps down from the political arena, his moderate counterpart
loses
his power and status in his party, and finally he, too, vanishes
(Chetrit versus Elyashar, Levi and Abu-Hatzera versus the Panthers, the
Tent Movement, and Tami).
f. the
paradox of SHAS. SHAS changes the rules of the radical axis. While it
is situated on the radical side of that axis because it produces
radical effects by sustaining an ongoing ideological confrontation with
the dominant Zionist establishment and by maintaining an atmosphere of
contention in public politics; at the same time, it also gathers the
fruits of its own radical effects, as a moderate ruling party, serving
in all coalition since its foundation.
3. The
third finding
is in fact a new question that arises from the entire discussion. How
did
it turn out that, despite all the calls and demands of all the groups
involved
in the struggle along the entire axis, for the integration of Mizrahi
identity
within the Zionist Israeli identity, an alternative identity was born
in
the second generation? Further, why and how is it that new and complex
Mizrahi
identity (both religious and democratic) is far stronger formed and
defined
among the Israeli-born generation, than that of the first and second
generations?
4. Another
question that arose in this study is whether, in all of the politics of
the Mizrahi struggle, it is possible to distinguish specifically social
movements? Our discussion shows that non-parliamentary social movements
were very few in the Mizrahi struggle. Among them were: the Union of
Emigrants from North Africa,
which led the Wadi Salib revolt in 1959; the Black Panthers, who
produced
the most protracted confrontation in 1971-72; the Tent movement in
Jerusalem
in the late 1970s, which quickly established itself within the
framework
of local neighborhood administration; and last on the list is the
Democratic
Mizrahi Rainbow Coalition, which produced an intense confrontation in
its
early days in 1997. Ultimately most of the aforementioned social
movements adopted the model of political party action, and that was
usually their last act in political life. The Democratic Mizrahi
Rainbow Coalition is the only Mizrahi movement that rejected the
possibility of participation in elections and viewed itself as a
non-parliamentary social movement. However, as we have
seen in the exceptional case of SHAS, going to the polls is not
necessarily the last step of a Mizrahi movement.
5. A new
question that arose from this study, one that demands additional,
comprehensive research, is the question of Mizrahi political discourse
in its various forms from the
1940s to the end of the 1990s. ever since the early 1970s, with the
uprising of the Black Panthers, Mizrahi political discourse took the
shape of collective contention between Ashkenazim and Mizrahim. That is
to say, the explanation for inequality systematically emphasized the
overlap between social class and cultural origin. At the time of the
Black Panthers, the local became universal
in the discourse of the struggle. From that point of view, the time of
the
Black Panthers constitutes a radicalization of the discourse of the
Mizrahi
struggle. In the 1980s and 1990s another dimension was added to the
struggle:
the radical criticism of European political Zionism as the creator of
social
and cultural relations and of the Israeli nation. Thus that discourse
became
an entire paradigm, leftist from the economic and political point of
view,
and comprising all areas of Israeli life: nationity, religion, culture,
and
the arts, society, the economy, education, historiography, the academy,
and
the media.
6. A
question remaining open for the future: where will Mizrahi politics go?
How will it choose between integration and an alternative within the
general framework of Israeli politics, regarding which the same
question may be asked? With the deteriorating increase in economic
polarization within Israeli society during the last two decades,
Mizrahim seem to continue to move outward from the European-Zionist
political hegemony in alternative directions, like SHAS. This process
depends strongly upon the situation of the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict. The more acute that conflict becomes, the more the
centrifugal process
among the Mizrahim will tend to be moderate and even stalled, and vice
versa.
The Main
Innovations of this Study:
1. As noted, this is the first academic study providing a comprehensive
survey of the entire political history of the Mizrahim in Israel over
the
generations, covering all the approaches and organizations from the old
period
before the state until the present.
2. This
study places new conceptual tools available for the comparative study
of ethnic politics in Israel, tools based on post-modern, multicultural
theoretical and critical frameworks. In so doing, it contributes to
freeing political-ethnic study in Israel from the limitations of
Euro-centric modernism.
3. This
study contributes new definitions to broaden academic discourse in the
area of Israeli
politics with respect to ethnic and class tensions.
Note:
Sami
Shalom Chetrit
The Mizrahi Struggle in Israel
Between Identification and Integration to Contention and Alternative
1948-2002
Am-Oved Publishers, Tel-Aviv (Hebrew)
Will appear: Jan. 2004
It's based on a PhD study, approved by the Hebrew University of
Jerusalem, Department of Political Science, Oct. 2001, with the
instruction of: Prof. Ehud Sprinzak
Article
originally printed in Authorsden.com and reprinted with Author's
permission.
