[Marxism] Warschawski on Shohat (2007 translation of Le Monde Diplo article)

[Anon Anon]

http://jao.org.au/?p=22

Half-Price Citizens: Sephardic Jews in Israel
By Michel Warschawski Le Monde Diplomatique July 2007

Who are the victims of Zionism? Evidently, the Palestinians. But are 
they the only victims of this colonial movement? To this question, Ella 
Shohat responds clearly in the negative, by asserting that Zionism has 
also produced Jewish victims [1]. An academic of Israeli origin, Shohat 
has taught in New York for many years. In Israel, except in small 
circles, she has always been completely ostracised by the academic and 
intellectual world.

Without constituting an autobiography, Shohat’s writing recalls her own 
history – a woman, a Jewish Arab and in addition an anti-Zionist – like 
that of many Israelis born in the Arab culture, who never could, for 
this reason, be recognized as true members of the Israeli national 
community, in particular amongst the country’s elites.

The Zionist movement was born, at the beginning of the 20th Century, as 
an attempt to respond to anti-semitism. Its ideologues and pioneers have 
all been the children of European culture, colonial and modernist, 
encompassing its racism towards all that was not European. Wishing for 
the Jewish communities of the Arab world to emigrate – in need of 
manpower familiar with hard labour and no more expensive than local Arab 
labour, or to realise the dream of “return” of Jewish communities to 
their historic homeland – the Zionist leaders never considered those who 
were called the “brothers from the Eastern communities” as true equals.

Some of the the oldest Jewish communities in the world, such as the Jews 
of Iraq or Yemen, were truly manipulated in coming to reinforce the 
young state; the Zionist elite did not hesitate in using terrorist 
methods to frighten Jews into leaving their countries, as in the case of 
the Iraqi Jewish community, where Shohat comes from.

If some leading Zionists never hid their anti-Sephardic racism, the 
majority held a paternalistic view, promising an equal place to the new 
Arab Jewish immigrants, following a period of socialisation and adaption 
to modernity, so as to be like the Ashkenazim. Victims of an uprooting 
they did not desire, the Arab Jewish immigrants of Israel are, for the 
author, refugees. Admittedly privileged compared to the Palestinian 
refugees, but refugees nevertheless, and victims of a structural and 
more or less open racism.

This essay was published in 1988 in the New York journal Social Text, at 
the time when, in Israel, the second generation of Zionism’s Jewish 
victims began to call into question Ashkenazi hegemony, first in the 
political sphere and then in the cultural. Yet, it was not until 2001 
that the essay was translated and published in Hebrew…by the Alternative 
Information Centre – an organisation of the radical left – and a new 
publishing firm, Kadem, specialising in the works of Arab Jewish 
authors. Which is to say it is still on the periphery of the dominant 
Israeli culture.

However, by the time this seminal text was finally published in Israel, 
it was not totally isolated. Writers such as Sami Shalom Chetrit, 
researchers like Yehuda Shenhav and film makers like David Ben Chetrit 
[2] are finally recognised for their true worth and are beginning to 
find their place. They all carry an extremely critical view of the 
racist foundations of Israeli society, and for the most part, call into 
question Zionism for what it has done to the Palestinians.

[1] Ella Shohat, Le sionisme du point de vue de ses victimes juives. Les 
juifs orientaux en Israël [Zionism from the Standpoint of its Jewish 
Victims. Oriental Jews in Israel], La Fabrique, Paris, 2006, 124 pages, 
8 euros.

[2] David Ben Chetrit’s last film, Dear Father, devoted to conscientious 
objectors in the military, was presented in preview in Paris at the 
beginning of November 2006.


Translated from French by Jews Against the Occupation (Sydney), 11 July 2007.