WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: A JNS article this week argues that the key to maintaining the Arab-Jewish peace breakthrough of this month’s Abraham Accords is making clear to at least moderate Arabs that half of Israel’s population is Mizrahi – indigenously Middle-eastern like themselves. Agreed, but it’s equally important to get through to Americans, not least American Jews, that Israel is an indigenously Middle-eastern state largely inhabited by indigenously Middle-eastern Jews, not just European Ashkenazim like us.
Driving Home the Significance to Americans of Israel’s Mizrahi Jews
An American Mizrahi (indigenously Middle-eastern) Jewish journalist wrote a, by me, extraordinarily insightful article this week arguing that the “key to maintaining” the Arab-Israeli peace breakthrough begun by this month’s Abraham Accords “will be educating the Arabs about the [mostly-Israel-absorbed] 850,000 Jewish refugees from the Islamic countries.” JNS, Karmel Melamed, The Abraham Accords and the Forgotten Mizrahi Refugees, 9/22/20.
I agree with this Mizrahi journalist on the importance of at least moderate Arabs coming to appreciate that Israelis are far from “’foreign colonialists from Europe’ who have no true roots in the Middle East,” and are instead largely people who lived for centuries, in cases millennia, in the same lands and culture as themselves. But Arabs aren’t the only ones to whom the composition of Israel’s Jewish population must be driven home. Equally critical are Americans, and not least among them American Jews.
Although, as I maintained in my book, Israel 3000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine, we never physically abandoned our homeland presence during the 1800 years between Hadrian and Herzl, and were more significantly present during that foreign rule than most people think, the big bulk of our people dwelt during those centuries in three Diaspora streams – Ashkenazic (European), Sephardic (Spanish and post-Inquisition communities elsewhere) and Mizrahi (Middle-eastern) – in foreign lands as permanently persecuted homeland-less “others.” Major portions of all three streams made their way home over the centuries, especially in recent times. As Melamed’s article points out, “more than 50 percent of the Israeli population is of Mizrahi background today.”
We American Jews understand that Israel is the size of New Jersey, but too many of us don’t that it isn’t New Jersey – a place populated by people like us in a non-ethnic democracy with neighbors who really are. And I think that American Jews’ misunderstanding of what Israel is and of who Israelis are is at the root of the significant measure of alienation residing in many American Jews’ and a majority of American Jewish institutions’ attitude toward Israel today.
But let’s start with misperception of Israel held by Americans in general. An alas likely irrevocable unforced error we Jews made decades ago was gratuitously surrendering Jewish homeland equity in “Palestine” and “Palestinian.” It was the archetype for our shameful acquiescence in “West Bank” for Judea-Samaria, “East” Jerusalem for the core of our historic city itself, “settlers” and “settlements” for Jewish communities over the old 1949 military ceasefire lines in pointed media contradistinction to nearby “Palestinian neighborhoods … villages … towns,” etc. All these and other pejoratives combine to paint a deliberately false picture in Americans’ minds of Jews as European outsiders in Arab lands.
A point that needs to be driven home to Americans (and to Europeans, but they’re hopeless) is that Israel is not an outpost of Europe but is as indigenously Middle-eastern as Arabia. Effective as, e.g., Eban and Bibi have been in arguing Israel’s case in the West, it may be time for Israel to present a more Mizrahi face to that West, in diplomat postings and leadership and grassroots interaction. And perhaps Ethiopian Israelis, a fourth stream, could get across a fairer picture of Israel to American Blacks.
American liberals side with the natives and their national liberation movements. Exists there a clearer case of this than Mizrahi Jews – as authentically Middle-eastern as any of the region’s inhabitants, downtrodden for centuries as dhimmis in Arab lands, striving now for their independence in that sliver of that Middle East that constituted their original home? Maybe American liberals won’t buy this case, deeply as they’ve been poisoned by portrayal of “the Palestinians” as Palestine’s aboriginal natives, but the Mizrahis (and Ethiopian Jews, and Sephardim, and Ashkenazim) escaping from dhimmitude, Inquisition, Holocaust, ghetto, pogrom back to their homeland and fighting there for its independence is a legitimate case, and we ought to be making it. The alienation of American liberals from Israel needs challenging.
The alienation of American Jews from Israel needs challenging more. Self-respecting Jewish response to UN, EU, Democratic party consensus, et al clamoring for “the two-state solution along the 1967 lines with mutually agreed territorial swaps” is not American Jewish joinder in that land of Israel-halving “two-state solution.” It’s up to Israel whether or not to accept that, but Diaspora Jews should back Israeli Jews in claiming Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem, none of which “the Palestinians” have ever ruled ever, as intrinsic parts of our homeland, and that the Jordan River is the land of Israel’s natural defensible boundary, not the zig-zagging, Jerusalem-cutting, happenstance, where-their-armies-then-stood, long-gone 1949 Israel-Jordan military ceasefire lines, which have never been among the Holy Land’s holy places.
Perhaps, American Jewish alienation from Israel is based in part on the American Reform and Conservative movements not doing well there in attracting adherents. Perhaps part is American Jewish joinder in misperception of “the Palestinians” as the legitimate natives. Perhaps, they feel that Israel has no more right to be officially “Jewish” than America to be officially “Christian.” Whatever, it may be that if American Jewish leaders were conversing more with Mizrahi Israelis than with Ashkenazim like themselves, they’d have more of a respectful sense that Israel isn’t New Jersey.