In the neighborhood of Kerem
Hateymanim, the bougainvillea spill out over the terraces. The one-story homes,
built higgledy-piggledy, jostle for space. Here, like in much of south Tel
Aviv, outsiders have been buying up property as the area undergoes inevitable
gentrification. But in the beginning, the neighborhood was constructed out of
wooden beams and tin roofs by desperately poor Jews from the Yemen in 1904,
before Tel Aviv itself was founded.
It has become almost received
wisdom that the first Zionists to resettle in 19th century Palestine were
European Jews. Not so. The Jewish immigrants from Yemen arrived in 1882, seven
months before the first wave of Jewish farmers from Russia.
The Zionists arriving from Yemen on foot were living proof that
their yearning to live as masters of their own destiny in the land of Israel
had been a motivating force for Mizrahi (oriental) Jews before Theodor Herzl made his
mark. For centuries before them, waves of Sephardi (Spanish) Jews from the
Ottoman Empire had resettled in Hebron, Jerusalem, Safed and Tiberias.
Why is it important to put the record straight? Because
propaganda such as Zionism Unsettled, a
congregational study guide produced by the Israel-Palestine Mission of the U.S.
Presbyterian Church, tries to paint Zionism as an unjust European settler
movement. Yet none can describe Jews who had been in the Arabian peninsula for
3,000 years as other than indigenous.
The guide goes further: It implies
that Mizrahi Jews were lured under false pretenses to Israel. In the words of
the maverick New York academic Ella Shohat -- who incidentally never lived in
an Arab country -- these Jews have been swindled out of their cultural heritage
by European Zionism -- 'an immense confidence trick.'
For Shohat, Mizrahim can only ever
be victims of 'Ashkenazi' Zionism. Never mind that today Mizrahim and Sephardim
are prominent businesspeople, entertainers, army generals and government
ministers -- Shohat will forever think of them as the 'Second Israel' -- fit
only for exploitation and discrimination by their European brethren.
For Shohat's theory to make sense, the guide has to create a
pre-existing myth of 'peaceful coexistence' between Jews and Arabs. Thus, the
diaspora is really not such a bad place for a Jew. Anything is better than
living in that 'unsettling' Zionist state. Jewish life 'is alive and well' in
Iran under Islamist rule. (An assertion ably refuted by Karmel Melamed here).
In truth the booklet is not
especially aware, or interested, in the 50 percent of Israeli Jews whose
families escaped with their lives from Arab and Muslim lands.
It makes scant mention of Jews from Arab countries. But on page
14, we come to:
"In the first decade, hundreds of Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews flooded Israel to escape the blowback or fear of blowback, as the region became inflamed at the perceived injustice of the enforced partition of Palestine...
The word 'blowback' is the only
reference in 78 pages of this ferociously anti-Zionist screed to the Jewish
Nakba -- the mass persecution and expulsion, from 1948 onwards, of a million
Jews from the Arab world.
Blowback. A reaction. A backlash.
Had those dastardly European Zionists not dared partition Palestine, the
'region would not have been inflamed at the perceived injustice.' There would
have been no blowback. In other words, the Jews themselves, even non-combatants
minding their business miles from a war they did not start, are to blame for
the Arab and Muslim antisemitism that drove them out.
The Presbyterian authors have barely a word -- and no word of
sympathy -- for these Jews, sent packing with a single suitcase. The guide has
plenty about the 500 depopulated villages of Palestine, whose inhabitants were
complicit in an Arab war of extermination against the newborn state of Israel.
Not a sentence about the deserted Mellahs of
the judenrein Middle
East and North Africa, the Jewish property abandoned, the now overgrown
cemeteries, the sequestrated clubs and schools. No Presbyterian need lose sleep
over the injustice done to these Jews.
Just a few streets away from Kerem
Hateymanim is a Tel Aviv street called Shabazi. That area of Tel Aviv too was
founded by working class Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews. Today it is a bustling
thoroughfare of trendy shops, upmarket apartments and ice cream parlors. But
its name recalls a great Jewish poet who lived in the 17th century and is
considered the Shakespeare of Yemen.
Shalom Shabazi's writings helped
the Jews of Yemen weather some of the worst persecution in their history. He
wrote a recitation for the Ninth of Av (the day when Jews mourn the destruction
of the Temple in Jerusalem) recalling the terrible exile of Jews in his
lifetime from all cities and towns in Yemen, to an inhospitable desert called
Moza. A fifth of their number perished.
What did the Jews do to deserve banishment and death? The
persecution suffered by the Jews of Yemen predated the Zionist movement by
three centuries. The good Presbyterians cannot begin to fathom the plight of
Yemen's 'dhimmis.' Jews were
at the very bottom of the social pile. Well into the 20th century until the
mass airlift of 40,000 Yemenite Jews to Israel in 1948, it was the job of a
subcaste of Jews to clean the sewers. From the 1920s Jewish orphans were
forcibly abducted and converted to Islam. Subjugation, servitude and
humiliation, unrelieved by European notions of equality and human rights, were
the order of the day.
For these Jews, self-determination
in a Jewish state represented their liberation from colonizers and
task-masters.
The word 'blowback' turns on its head the true sequence of
events. Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, was
stirring up anti-Jewish hatred from the 1930s on. The Arab League drafted a plan for
the dispossession and victimization of their Jewish citizens before Israel was
established. The Libyans committed a massacre three years before Israel. The
Palestinian leader, Haj Amin al-Husseini incited the Farhud pogrom against the
Jews of Iraq -- seven years before Israel
was born.
How far back does one have to go in history before 'blowback'
can be termed anti-Semitism, pure
and simple?
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