‘Security. A word that these days seems simultaneously both to conceal so much and to reveal so much.’ – John Berger

A man is told that he will die from a fall. Such is the terror this generates in him that he decides never to leave his home again. But confining himself to his house doesn’t remove the fear.A sense of security is not so easily gained, for fear has its own authority. He could, after all, fall down the stairs—he lives in a mansion and there are many flights of stairs. So he decides,‘for safety’s sake’, to confine himself to the ground floor. But soon he realises that the floors downstairs are polished: couldn’t he easily slip and break his neck? The dining-room, however, is fully carpeted, so he decides to live only in that room. Ordering his staff to serve his meals there, he never leaves the room. Yet still he feels unsafe: he thinks,‘I could still stumble and fall, hit my head and die’. So he orders an armchair to be placed in the middle of the room, away from all sharp objects and hard surfaces and—in a moment of triumphant certitude —insists that his servants tie him down into the chair. A sense of security descends. No danger now of a fall, he thinks. The loss of his freedoms is nothing compared to the relief that his fear can never come true. But when he hears the rustling above him, and feels grains of plaster on his skin, he looks up and sees the ancient crystal chandelier over his chair unmoor itself from its casing and begin to fall towards him…

I read this story as a child and it has never let me go. Today, Iassociate it with the quest for ‘security’: the efforts of individuals, groups and nations attempting to design projects that will guarantee their security.The recurring fantasy of total control over one’s fate was mocked millennia ago within the Biblical myth of the Tower of Babel.Yet we still try to design a solution to what is essentially a psychological and existential dilemma: that none of us knows how or when we will die. The story reminds us that viewing the world through the prism of our fears restricts us in damaging ways. It also reminds us that the stories we are told—and tell ourselves—can shape our fears, as well as contain them and that this world-view can unwittingly catalyse the very thing we fear. The world may be a dangerous place, but more often than we are aware it is we who make it dangerous.Although we know there are people ‘out there’ who hate us, it can be hard to bear the reality that ‘security’—what it is, what we need in order to achieve it, where it comes from, and what we feel threatens it—is an internal experience. Implicitly, this story invites us to construct more life-enhancing stories than those ghosted by our fears.

I recently had a conversation with a young Jewish woman who was preparing a Channukah pageant for local children at the provincial Arts Centre where she works. She’d been approached by a woman in a hijab and a conversation had ensued. The woman said she’d just arrived in the UK from the Middle East with her child and was exploring the neighbourhood.The Centre’s publicity had caught her eye and she was wondering if the event was open to everyone. Something about this conversation felt ‘troubling’: the visiting woman seemed ‘glassy-eyed’ and had a ‘vacant’ look; she seemed rather needy and during a follow-up conversation the next day she hadn’t seemed satisfied by the resources offered to her that were available in the area. The woman telling me this story started to wonder if this woman was hiding something: why should a Muslim woman be interested in the details for a Channukah event? Perhaps she was a suicide bomber and this open event, where anyone was welcome, would make a perfect target. Perhaps, she thought, she should cancel the event, just in case.

She called the CST—the Jewish community’s self- appointed ‘Community Security Trust’—to report her suspicions and seek advice, which was duly provided. Although she felt they were ‘measured and reassuring’ in their response, she nevertheless decided, on reflection, to cancel the event. She regretted the lost opportunity for children of all faiths and none to come together, dress up and celebrate, but once her anxiety had been triggered she couldn’t rid herself of her ‘gut feelings’.

This story—and it is not a parable—filled me with an immense sadness. I knew that this enlightened young woman had a sound understanding of how we uncon- sciously project onto others disowned feelings from within ourselves, and then feel ourselves threatened by those very feelings. If even she had succumbed to collective Jewish unease about Muslims, what hope was there for our collective well-being in the UK, when the community is led by those with a less psychologically-informed and more outwardly belligerent approach to questions about security?
Who will reflect on the ways in which our own unconscious aggression, our own explosive rage, is projected—so that we feel we live in a hugely insecure world that is liable to blow up in our face, metaphorically or literally, at any moment? Who or what can we trust, we say, if we can’t trust our ‘gut feelings’? Our deep fear of annihilation may be generated in the earliest stages of our lives and can re-awaken when catalysed by a current situation; or it can be projected forward as a picture of our future.

Here the personal and the collective merge. As a community, have we any sense of the historically-deter- mined unconscious hostility we hold within us that is continually being projected that we are then obliged to protect ourselves from? And what terrifying crimes do we unconsciously imagine we have committed that would need to be punished by all those aggressors ‘out there’ waiting to attack us?

We are driving ourselves mad because of a spurious fantasy: that there is something called ‘security’ that we can achieve and possess.

The stories we tell ourselves—about the persecutory world ‘out there’ and the undying hatred of our enemies— provide a sort of comfort: they offer a coherent narrative for our lives. By constantly reaching for and repeating the same familiar story—the story of our insecurity—we unconsciously fabricate for ourselves a kind of security. It is, of course, a pseudo-security, but its advantage—it offers ersatz ‘meaning’—can outweigh (and help us avoid) the painful psychological task of facing up to the innate vulnerability that is intrinsic to being human.
We are driving ourselves mad because of a spurious fantasy: that there is something called ‘security’ that we can achieve and possess. But feelings of ‘insecurity’ are psychological, spiritual, existential – such feelings can’t be eliminated by more of this chimera we name ‘security’.

Today, bitachon is used in modern Hebrew to mean ‘security’ in a military/political context. It’s travelled a long way from its original meaning in Biblical Hebrew: ‘trust in what we cannot see’. The prophet Isaiah demanded trust in the unseen and intangible—‘God’—rather than in human power alone. Of course since the Shoah such trust has been exposed as hopelessly naïve, even dangerously deluded. In our post-Shoah world, where bitachon has become secularised, Jews put their trust in what they can see, and in the power of their own hands. Who dares to disagree with this pragmatism? Who would disavow this realpolitik? Even the religious settlers on the West Bank with HaShem in their hearts have an Uzi in their hands.

So is that to be the last word on ‘security’? Is that what a 3000 year-old tradition of Jewish struggle to articulate a moral vision comes down to? ‘Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition’? Perhaps Isaiah’s understanding needs re-visioning. Perhaps to experience ‘security’ we need a renewed faith in aspects of ourselves that we Jews used to attribute to the Holy One of Israel: a capacity for compassion and reverence towards other human beings, a capacity to discern forms of idolatry that offer false security, a capacity to transmute anger into a passion for justice, and an enduring capacity for truth-telling that holds the impossible tension between love of the Jewish people and a responsibility to the ‘other’, the stranger, the outsider, who may never love us but whose well-being is still our concern.

Rabbi Howard Cooper is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice, the Director of Spiritual Development at Finchley Reform Synagogue, and an author. His latest book is The Alphabet of Paradise: An A-Z of Spirituality for Everyday Life. He blogs at www.howardcoopersblog.blogspot.com

Rethinking God & tradition

By Arthur Green

Yale University Press, 2010

Everything is God:

The Radical Path of Nondual Judaism

By Jay Michaelson

Shambhala Publications, 2009

What does it mean to be radical? In the context of religion, the term can conjure up images of extremism, violence and fundamentalism (as in ‘Radical Islam’), often through strict adherence to orthodox norms. But to be radical is paradoxically both to depart and return—to depart from conventional or accepted forms, and to return to something essential, the ‘root’ of an ideology or philosophy.

What then would ‘Radical Judaism’ be? Perhaps the gun-toting hilltop nationalism of the Settlement movement? Or the ultra-Orthodoxies of Stamford Hill or Mea Sharim? Or could it be something altogether non-Orthodox, a return to a perceived essence prior to or beyond those outer forms and beliefs?

Two recent books that emphasise their radical credentials are Radical Judaism: Rethinking God & Tradition, by Arthur Green, and Everything is God: The Radical Path of Nondual Judaism, by Jay Michaelson—and they have far more in common than merely their titles. Michaelson, a scholar and activist who writes on spirituality, Judaism, sexuality and law, and Green, rector of the Rabbinical School at Hebrew College Boston and a major scholar of kabbalistic and Chassidic thought, both eschew conventional conceptions of a personal God who is outside of creation and intervenes in the world, in favour of a more mystical—yet immanent and accessible—Oneness.

These works of theology are certainly very far from Richard Dawkins The God Delusion, and much of what dominates public discourse on God. Green states at the very start of his introduction that he is not a ‘believer’ in the conventional Jewish or Western sense. He simply does not encounter God ‘as ‘He’ is usually described in the Western religious context, a Supreme Being or Creator who exists outside or beyond the universe, who created this world as an act of personal will, and who guides and protects it.’ Instead, when Green refers to ‘God,’ he means ‘the inner force of existence itself, that of which one might say: ‘Being is.’ He also refers to it as the ‘One’ ‘because it is the single unifying substratum of all that is.’

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Emmanuel Levinas, Beyond the Verse

There is a familiar view about Judaism—and specifically its difference from Christianity—that is expressed in the contrast between particularism and universalism. On this view, Christianity is inclusive, embracing all people everywhere regardless of their national or ethnic identity. Judaism, in contrast, is exclusive, a private club for the chosen few. There are Jews as well as Christians who subscribe to this view. Some are embarrassed by our so-called tribalism. Others take pride in our supposed superiority. Sometimes, especially these days, this pride takes the form of a politics that asserts our prerogative and privilege over other groups. But, whatever form it takes, there is a fatal flaw, a tiny ingredient that is missing from this characterization of the Jewish people: its Jewishness.

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What this self-mockery belied was a profound connection to Jewish tradition, one that characterised and influenced Dylan’s entire oeuvre. His work stems from the ancient tradition of Jewish prophecy. The prophet, or navi, was a truth-teller to and an admonisher of his people: literally, a ‘proclaimer.’ The Prophets, whose sermons and declarations are collected in the biblical books of Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and others, were, in a sense, social critics—the original protest singers, if you will. They warned against backsliding, immorality and lawbreaking and foretold the bloody consequences of this behaviour. The torah of Dylan and the Torah of Moses share many overlaps: in the book of Prophets, Ezekiel recounts a vision of angels: ‘The soles of their feet… their appearance was like fiery coals, burning like torches’ [Ezekiel 1:7, 13]. In ‘The Wicked Messenger,’ a song about a scorned prophet from his 1967 album, John Wesley Harding, Dylan sings, ‘The soles of my feet, I swear they’re burning.’ In Exodus 33:20, G-d warns Moses, ‘No human can see my face and live’ a warning repeated in the chorus of ‘I and I,’ on the 1983 album, Infidels:

I and I

One says to the other

No man sees my face and lives.

Dylan’s echoing of this encounter between G-d and Moses also references the ‘I-Thou’ theology of Martin Buber, to whose work Dylan was reportedly introduced years earlier by his manager, Albert Grossman. The song paints a bleak portrait of absolute alienation: the narrator is alone even when he’s with a sleeping lover (‘if she wakes up now, she’ll just want me to talk/ I got nothin’ to say, ’specially about whatever was’); he goes out for a walk and concludes ‘Not much happenin’ here/ Nothin’ ever does’ and sees a train platform ‘with nobody in sight’; and he contemplates the end of the world (‘The world could come to an end tonight, but that’s all right’). Yet through all the emptiness he perseveres—‘I’m still pushin’ myself along the road, the darkest part’—towards the world, holding on to Buber’s teaching, ‘One who truly meets the world goes out also to God.’

Consciously or not, Bob Dylan’s use of the modes of Jewish prophetic discourse as one of his primary means of communication, determine not just the content of his songs but also his style of delivery, which is closer to declaiming rather than melodic singing. The vocals on his live albums from the 1970s (Before the Flood, Hard Rain, and Live 1975: The Rolling Thunder Revue) are positively stentorian, underscoring his relationship to his audience, whom he never wooed but chided and provoked: You who philosophise, disgrace, and criticise all fears Take the rag away from your face/ Now ain’t the time for your tears.  (‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’)

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So wrote Gershom Scholem to his colleague Franz Rosenzweig in his 1926 letter, ‘A Confession about our Language’. Scholem, a young Jewish philosopher from Berlin, had just immigrated to Palestine. He was among the founders of Brit Shalom, an organisation that supported the establishment of a bi-national Jewish-Arab state, and was concerned not only by the dominant political trends of Zionism, but with its very tongue, with the project of reviving, modernising, and secularising Hebrew. Scholem believed that recruiting the sacred biblical language for the modern political Zionist cause would plant a messianic ticking bomb in the hearts and minds of the Jewish people in Palestine.

The echoes of ‘God will not remain silent’ still whisper in the streets of Jerusalem, eighty-four years after these words were written. Although Scholem feared that religious sanctity would either dominate or destroy the people, he did not anticipate the more complex, ambivalent relationship that Zionism would form with religion. He did not assume that the very political struggle that facilitated the return of the Hebrew language actually included asking God, very politely, to remain silent. This attitude enabled the founders of Zionism and the majority of Israelis today to pull out of the sea of Jewish knowledge religious precepts that support their agenda. Like skilful pearl divers, Israeli society has brought up to the surface only those glowing stones which have Zionist purposes, and kept those which do not (including those in which God himself is mentioned) deep at the bottom of the ocean.  Consider some of the more popular Israeli-Jewish ‘moral validations’ of state policy. These validations, drawn exclusively from Jewish tradition and texts, have become part of the political consensus, and secure the place of religion not just in the ‘secular’ political debate but in wider Israeli-Jewish society.

Ha-Ba le-Horgekha Hashkem le-Horgo is a teaching of increasing popularity among Israelis.  Taken from the Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 72:1, its most precise translation is: ‘If someone comes to kill you, get up early to kill him first.’ It seems that every online newspaper Comment section will include this sentence when discussing Israeli aggression: the Gaza offensive? ‘Kill him first’. The Second Lebanon War? ‘Kill him fi rst’ again. A Google search for the expression ‘kill him first’ and ‘flotilla’ yields more than 4,200 Hebrew results, confi rming the centrality of this narrative.  This convenient license to kill extends beyond the online community to Israeli decision makers and politicians. Following the Second Lebanon War, Ehud Yatom, a Likud MK, explained the asymmetrical death toll of 44 Israeli civilians and 1,191 Lebanese civilians with the same trump card:

‘and if someone comes to kill you, get up early to kill him fi rst.’ It has been used by Minister of Strategic Affairs Moshe Ya’alon when addressing university students about their military reserve service and by Minister of Public Security Avi Dichter when lecturing about IDF strategy. It was also the explanation provided by Minister of Minorities Avishai Braverman for the assassination of a Hamas leader in Dubai. Even Ayoub Kara, a Druze MK from Likud, has used it. When asked about the Iranian nuclear plan Kara showed little originality: ‘I think an attack on Iran will be justifi ed’, he said, ‘since if someone comes to kill you, get up early to kill him fi rst.’ Meharsayikh u-Makharivayikh Mimekh Yetse’u is another overexploited formula. Translated as ‘your destroyers and devastators will depart from you,’ and taken from Isaiah 49:17, this sentence has become Israeli society’s remedy for criticism that comes from ‘within’—from Jews, either Israeli or Diaspora. It stems from a refusal to acknowledge wrongdoing and brands all critics ‘destroyers’.  From Gideon Levy’s Haaretz articles on the eviction of Palestinian families in Sheikh Jarrah to Judge Goldstone’s report proving that IDF soldiers shot at Palestinians waving white fl ags, the chorus rings out: ‘Destroyers and devastators will depart from you.’ Also for Channel 10’s Shlomi Eldar when he dares to say that ‘Hamas is not a diabolical junta’, and for the eminent Israeli poet Natan Zakh, who supports the end of the siege on Gaza, even volunteering to swim there. The Israeli Government’s recent revival of the embarrassing ‘Ministry of Propaganda’, offi cially known as the Ministry of Public Affairs, effects a similar principle—it ignores the dissenting voices from within Israel, rejecting them as ‘destroyers’ rather than as concerned players. In other words, Israel is not going to rethink its policies, but will only strive to explain them better.

Almost as popular as these two precepts is‘Aniyei ‘Irkha Kodmim, loosely translated as ‘the poor of your city take precedence over the poor of a different city.’ Taken from the Babylonian Talmud, Bava Metzia 71:1, this is used by Israelis to justify the

preferential treatment of Jews. It is quoted almost every time human rights organisations highlight the inferior treatment of Palestinian citizens of Israel or the living conditions for Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. The use of this quote has intensified lately due to the debate about the thousands of refugees and migrant workers threatened with deportation. The fact that many of them have children who were born in Israel, or that deporting them would endanger their lives, does not convince large parts of the Israeli public, who cleave to principle of the ‘precedence of our poor’. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Minister of Finance Yuval Steinitz announced that at the heart of their plan to reduce unemployment is a strategy of encouraging Israelis not to hire migrant workers, and emphasised that ‘precedence of the poor of your city’ is a sacred principle.  This Talmudic proverb has also served well during wars and military operations. One month before the Israeli attack on Gaza, Yossi Peled, a Minister from Likud, gave a good ‘Jewish’ explanation for the future use of excessive force. ‘I don’t want to hurt the Palestinians living in Gaza Strip, but we need to defend ourselves, or as the Jewish tradition teaches: “The poor of your city take precedence”’ Six weeks later, the poor people of Gaza had buried 1,400 men and women.  These three verses, overused in Israeli-Jewish discourse, exemplify the hijacking of ‘Judaism’ to suit the Zionist programme. It is therefore not surprising that they are much more popular among ‘secular’ and national-religious Jews in Israel than among the traditionally Orthodox Jews. Interestingly, when considered in their religious context, their assumed meanings appear to be quite different. ‘Get up early to kill him first’ refers in contemporary Israel to the pre-emptive strategy of the Israeli military, particularly the notion of defensive rather than offensive action.  The expression supports the Israeli ‘self-defence’ theory by presuming that all enemy casualties are caused either in response to a previous act or a pre-emptive ‘response’ to a future act. But the original verse refers to an individual acting in self-defence, and there is no indication that this teaching applies at state level. Indeed, one can even argue that the sacredness of life lies at the heart of this precept, since it sanctions killing only to preserve life, and only when the enemy is coming to kill you. It is anything but a religious ‘license to kill’. Similarly, ‘your destroyers and devastators will depart from you’ originally taught that foreign elements will eventually leave the country they are trying to destroy and carries no reference to internal criticism and how to handle it.

Zionism’s basic separationist aspirations—Hebrew labour, a Hebrew market, a Hebrew state—have been nurtured and protected by the belief that ‘the poor of your city take precedence over the poor of a different city’. In contemporary Israel, this verse provides a pseudo-religious justification for racist practice, while in its original context it is closer to our own ‘charity begins at home’. According to the Talmud, if two people request a loan from the same rich person and he or she is unable to help both of them, that wealthy individual is ordered to be more generous with the poor of his own city, regardless of religion. In the case of ‘the Jewish state’ of Israel, ‘the poor of your city’ are actually the Palestinians and the migrant workers who remain socially and politically disenfranchised.

Selecting religious texts for political use is not a Jewish invention. But the selected adages, which all stem from a Diasporic experience, acquire new meaning and dangers when used by a majority in a sovereign state, and even more again when that state also happens to be the strongest military power in the Middle East. Ironically, Israeli society attributes fundamentalist readings of religious text to Islam, choosing to deny its own decontextualised following of violent texts. With respect to Bava Metzia, the Sanhedrin, and even to the Prophet Isaiah, there are texts more central to Judaism with more urgent lessons for Israeli society: ‘Foreigners living among you will be treated like your own people. Love them as you love yourself, because you were foreigners living in Egypt’ (Leviticus 19:34).  A clear threat to Zionism’s founding principles, this has been marginalised, together with God, and more politically comfortable quotations selected.  Israeli scholar Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin has summed up the relationship between Zionism and ‘secular’ Judaism: ‘There is no God, but He promised us the Land.’ God has indeed been left outside the Israeli political debate, replaced by the People and the Land of Israel. Slowly but steadily, concepts such as ‘the State of Israel’, ‘the Arab’, ‘security’, or even the Iranian ‘existential threat’ have been shaped through misquoting of Jewish religious texts, a process aided by national institutions like the Chief Rabbinate, the IDF rabbinate, and the Religious-Zionist movement.  Gershom Scholem warned that God would not remain silent in the language that invoked him thousands of times. The revival of Hebrew and its common use in Israel did not bring God into the lives of ‘secular’ Jews but instead created a dangerous validation of contemporary political dilemmas with the authority of ‘omnipotent’ religious texts.  Contemporary Hebrew with its ancient Biblical resonances grants this political-religious God-free coalition the illusion of entitlement. How long God will remain silent is another story.

Yonatan Mendel is completing a PhD on the relationship between security, politics and Arabic language studies in Israeli-Jewish society.  The research is conducted at the Department of Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge. He is the co-editor of ‘Reflections on Knowledge and Language in Middle Eastern Societies’, which will be published in 2011.

In between beatings and arrests by the police, we managed to hold a bilingual (Hebrew and Arabic) Selichot evening with both Israeli and Palestinian participants. It began with a joint study of Talmud portions on repentance and forgiveness and continued with the chanting of Selichot and Palestinian poems in front of the stolen houses in Sheikh Jarrah. We also built a Sukkah in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood, with young Israeli and Palestinian children working together and preparing decorations. This Sukkah was demolished as an illegal building by the munici- pality’s inspectors minutes after it was set up; they neglected to give any excuse why our Sukkah was illegal while thousands of Sukkahs all over the city are considered legal. And every several weeks we conduct a full Shabbat evening ceremony in this tormented neighbourhood, with prayers, Kiddush, and dinner.

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Reality-TV aficionados know that the format is predicated on the sort of psychological profiling that is designed to create precisely such tensions. But that doesn’t mitigate the point that ethnic tensions clearly do still exist in Israel. The Big Brother incident — variations of which repeat on a daily basis in real life, some harmless and some serious — is proof of the one thing that so many Israelis believe is no longer the case: that ethnic origin is at all relevant or a source of disharmony within the Jewish state.

It’s a statement based more on wishful thinking than on actual fact. Clearly, (Jewish) Israelis both desire to be and define themselves as a well-integrated nationality — for a people whose nationhood seems constantly to be scrutinised by others, this is understandable. But the most cursory of examinations would reveal that Israeli society is split along ethnic lines, with Ashkenazi (European-origin) Jews more predominantly a feature of the upper layers of society and Mizrahi or Sephardi (Middle Eastern/North African-origin) Jews more present in the lower scions. If you don’t believe me, take the standard university test: walk on to an Israel campus and see how many lecturers are of Mizrahi origin. Now check out the cleaning staff. Or take another test: ask an Israeli to impersonate a market-trader and count how many times the mimicry is carried out using a ‘Mizrahi’ accent.

In fact, academics have figures that easily back up such anecdotal assessments: children of Ashkenazi origin, they report, are three times as likely to hold university degrees as those of Mizrahi origin, while Ashkenazi employees earn over a third more than their Mizrahi peers. By the late 1990s, 88 per cent of upper income families were Ashkenazi, while 60 per cent of low income families were Mizrahi, according to the Israeli policy analysts, Adva. A concerned Israeli education ministry picked up on the schooling gaps sometime in the 1950s and concluded that Mizrahi kids were falling behind because they were playing catch up. Not because they were innately dumb, but because they’d come from the intellectually crippled backwaters of the Middle East. Actually, a team of top-notch Israeli sociologists came up with such theories, which became the backbone premise of the education system. Two generations later, the Mizrahi kids are still playing catch up, and the gap hasn’t been bridged.

Education obviously dictates earnings potential, but there are other reasons for the lag. Mizrahis experienced a constantly reduced allocation of national resources and were excluded from political and state power. Again, Mizrahi and other Israeli academics have shown that this sector of the population was disproportionately sent to live in the periphery, was allocated inferior land and did not relocate to the county’s centre as swiftly as their Ashkenazi counterparts. Ask Mizrahis living in Israel’s periphery — the notoriously neglected city slums and development towns once disparagingly referred to as ‘the Second Israel’ — and many will angrily related exactly how relevant they still feel ethnicity to be.

Meanwhile, there overwhelmingly exists in Israel the sense of a country seeking a Western or European alignment, in tastes, in culture and in sensibility. Sometimes you have to concentrate really hard to remember that you are living in the heart of the Middle East, among a majority population of Middle Eastern origin. Mizrahis suffered a negation of their heritage and culture — perceived as low-quality and belonging to the enemy Arab camp. Having developed over a two- thousand-year period in hospitable, sustainable and creative Arab or Islamic environments, the Mizrahi heritage reflects that — which is why the historians refer to it as a Judeo-Arabic culture. But scores of Mizrahis still recall how this culture was scorned in the Jewish state, causing them either to put it away or to enjoy it in private. Many children of those first-generation Mizrahis were so ashamed of this home culture that they tried to ban it. Actually, some Mizrahis speak of inventing new identities for themselves when they were young, identities that were bleached of all those embarrassing Oriental hallmarks. Nowadays, few Israelis know about the rich and myriad culture brought to the Jewish state by its Mizrahi citizens — something that Mizrahi campaigners, activists, educators, rabbis, writers, poets, artists and musicians are desperately seeking to redress.

But Mizrahi campaigners lament the cultural loss for another reason, too. It’s not just that Mizrahi Israelis have been disconnected — from themselves. It’s not just that Judaic culture in Israel has been stunted by losing one of its supporting columns. It is also that Israel as a nation has disconnected itself from the region — even while the Judaic culture of the majority of its citizens has distinctly regional roots. Throughout the history of Israel, Mizrahi commentators have been arguing the geopolitical stupidity of such a move.

First there was Elie Eliachar, a Sephardi Jewish notable of Mandate Palestine, who later served in several Israeli Knessets. He constantly warned the Zionist movement of the time of the dangers of ignoring the Sephardi community, which he described as ‘a ready-made barometer of Arab sensibilities’. Eliachar thought that the Zionist New Settlement was alienating the native Palestinian Arab population — which might have been avoided, had the movement watched and learned from the long-standing and well-established Sephardi community. The leaders of the New Settlement ignored him. Years later, the Iraqi-Israeli academic Nissim Rejwan would lament Israel’s missed chance as he wrote: ‘The way Mizrahis were looked upon and received — ambivalent, derogatory, and on the whole openly hostile — has proved to be one of the cardinal in a series of fateful mistakes that Israel committed, and continues to commit, that have led to its isolation and alienation and continued rejection by the world surrounding it.’

This is a multi-tiered argument and sometimes difficult to disseminate, especially when the dominant narrative has Israel’s Mizrahi populace cast as Arab-haters rather than proponents of a negotiated peace (the voting polls indeed show this to be the case, but there are myriad possible explanations for it that are not at all connected to the Arab-Israeli conflict). Still, on one level the case is perfectly straightforward: if Israel was not so alternately condescending and ignorant of Arab culture then it might be more inclined to foster harmonious relations in the Arab world — and naturally, those knowledge gaps start to narrow at home, with Israel’s Mizrahi population. Having come from Jewish homes that moved to the cultural rhythms of the Arab world, many older generation Mizrahis are well-equipped to dispel a few myths and misconceptions over the Middle East. Their children might be too, if they grew up within an openly proud Mizrahi environment which nurtured an awareness of the family’s valuable culture-stock. On another level, Mizrahis across the political spectrum often speculate that they might have made better negotiators in peace talks with the Palestinians. This perspective is based on a perception of mindset or outlook that Mizrahis are claimed to share with Palestinians, but which European-origin Israelis do not have. The accuracy of such a statement is debatable — Palestinian negotiators don’t agree with and in any case argue that Mizrahi politicians did not make a refreshingly different contribution to proceedings at the talks tables. But such observations speak volumes about a Mizrahi sense of exclusion from the corridors of power and a desire to bring something new to the Israeli identity at its interface with ‘the enemy’.

Rejwan and others relate that a rejection of the surrounding world has contributed to a false dichotomy of Arab versus Jew, as though the two are polar opposites destined to forever be at each other’s throats. Nothing could be further from the truth: Mizrahi history reveals a long, shared past – not always harmonious (whose history was?) but very often tolerant and productive. Mizrahi kids are often shocked to discover this to be the case: they’d just assumed that Arabs have historically hated the Jews. Indeed, some Mizrahi-Israeli academics have recently tried to challenge the polarity by self-defining with a taboo hyphenation: ‘Arab-Jew’. Such campaigners argue that Jews who once lived in Iraq or Morocco or Egypt are as much Arabs as Jews who once lived in Germany or Austria are European. Such arguments usually prompt fierce reactions, as the dominant narrators of this story seemingly prefer a script of permanent, preordained enmity.

But however Mizrahi-origin Israelis choose to define themselves, what is clear is that Israel desperately needs to rectify the imbalance and bring the Mizrahi fully into its history and culture — as equals, not as some kind of folkloric embellishment (witness the Israeli appreciation of Mizrahi food, traditional dress and customs of hospitality).  Researching a book on this subject, I was fortunate to meet countless Israelis of Middle Eastern origin who showed me many manifestations of what I like to think of as ‘Mizrahi booty’. Some of these individuals are first-generation Israelis with clear memories of past lives once easily shared with Arab and Muslim neighbours in Iraq, Morocco or Yemen. Those recollections are stamped with the templates of a possible coexistence today. It is not too late to listen and to learn from these valuable oral histories — for within these memories are the almost buried tracks of a shared, peaceful future for these two nations of the Middle East.

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Rachel Shabi is a freelance journalist. Her book Not the Enemy: Israel’s Jews from Arab Lands is published by Yale University Press in January 2009.