How Ties Between Mizrahi Jews and Arabs Were Ruined – With Help From Ashkenazi Israelis

Credit: Yael Bogen

There is a story that apparently evaded the memory of the author of this important new book, about relations between Mizrahi Jews and Arabs since the advent of Zionism.

About the time I was reading “Haters: A Love Story” by Prof. Hillel Cohen, they were showing on TV the beautiful and also sad documentary “Savoy” by Israeli filmmaker Zohar Wagner, about the act of terror that took place in the Tel Aviv hotel by that name in 1975.

The movie’s heroine is Kochava Levi, a Mizrahi woman who was among the hostages taken by members of the Palestinian Liberation Organization; the incident ended in the deaths of 11 Israelis and seven of the eight perpetrators. Levi bravely conducted the negotiations with the kidnappers, and even praised them briefly after they had been killed by elite Israeli forces, citing their relatively good treatment of their victims.

When the Ashkenazim would embark on murderous acts of revenge and reprisal against Arabs, no one classified them according to their ethnic origin.

Levi’s story is the story of this book by Cohen – a scholar of Islamic and Middle Eastern studies – in a nutshell. Of how a woman of Mizrahi origins (i.e., of Middle Eastern or North African descent) knew how to talk with the kidnappers in their own language thanks to her own upbringing and appealed to their hearts by drawing on her own family background in an Arab country, but whose character was later intentionally slandered and blackened, rendering her virtually forgotten and unseen.

Had she been a male Ashkenazi fighter, she would likely have gained global fame. But Levi was a woman of Kurdish-Yemenite descent, and it was therefore decreed that her fate would be one of besmirchment – some people even called her a prostitute – and of being wiped clean from the collective memory.

Prof. Hillel Cohen, author of "Haters: A Love Story." Everything goes back to the very beginnings of Zionism, he writes. The racism, patronizing and extreme nationalism.Credit: Emil Salman

She tried to be a bridge between Jews and Arabs, just as there were those before her who had dreamed of such things during the early years of the Zionist movement, but the Jews had subsequently grown fed up with this bridge and did not pursue it. Levi’s voice was stifled because she had something good to say about her Palestinian kidnappers. Her voice was a Mizrahi voice, the sort that was exploited, distorted and stifled, exactly like other Mizrahi voices in the same context, as discussed in the new book by Prof. Cohen.

The fleeting alliance between Levi and her kidnappers was to some degree an alliance of the oppressed; the author engages in this important idea but it is one that's regretfully nipped in the bud.

Atrocities committed by “Marokaim" (Israelis from Moroccan decent) were deemed to be a function of their character and culture.

Cohen’s story is one of love and hate between Mizrahi Jews, who should of course be termed Arab Jews (like German Jews or American Jews), and Palestinian Arabs – all of which is orchestrated by Ashkenazi Jews (i.e., of Eastern and Central European extraction). His comprehensive book is informed by the author’s immense body of knowledge, knowledge that is spectacularly documented in 682 footnotes and a lengthy and impressive bibliography.

But you can’t always see the forest for the trees here. Cohen's book does not have any one real bottom line, nor does it ultimately lead to unequivocal conclusions. Do Mizrahi Jews indeed hate Arabs, as it is customary to believe here, and if so, why?

For his part, the author ends his book with these words: “The writing of this book is complete. Even if it is unable to offer a comforting perspective, maybe it can provide a deliberate and multi-voiced view, and the knowledge that we have within us more than one possibility of understanding the world and acting in it, within each one of the ribs of the Mizrahi-Arab-Ashkenazi triangle, as well as in the entire triangle itself.”

We don’t need a book reviewer or other person to summarize a book when the author does the work all on his own.

The cover of Hillel Cohen's book.Credit: Ivrit Press

Nevertheless, there is one relatively clear conclusion at the end, which Cohen puts this way: “If at the outset of Zionism, Mizrahiness held out an option for close relations with the country’s Arabs, then at the end of this era Mizrahiness became, in the opinion of many, an identity that had crystallized around a rigid anti-Arab approach. A harsh conclusion, to be sure, but one with which we were familiar even before reading this book. And one for which we did not have to complete a successful book."

'Spirit of the land'

Hillel Cohen, 61, was a highly respected and almost legendary reporter at the local Jerusalem weekly Kol Ha’ir, who covered the occupied territories before becoming a Middle East affairs scholar in academia. His own personal background is discernible in the book: It engages in Jerusalem much of the time, perhaps too much of the time.

His work is composed of chapters that follow a chronological sequence. It is a historical journey that extends from the time of Turkish rule in Palestine up to the time of Benjamin Netanyahu's premierships. Between them are very brief sub-chapters, perhaps too brief, with at times childish titles (“Turn over, Abu Mazen, turn over”; "Mizrahi poverty and Ashkenazi poverty – a passing thought”; “Hold on there: Iraqis on kibbutz?”). There is also an introductory text at the start of every chapter, revealing what we are about to see, not unlike the tour guide on the bus who tells us in advance about our sightseeing highlights.

In general, the book is a bit too didactic for my taste. Moreover, Cohen offers up a lot of questions before responding to them, but maybe that is how they write in the academic world. In the list of acknowledgements at the end, I counted 54 names, equally divided between Ashkenazi and Mizrahi names, but without a single Arab name. Strange. And the book’s title is a bit overused, since the era of the author who first came up with something very similar to it, Isaac Bashevis Singer. But if we’re already talking about that, maybe it would have been better to reverse it? Perhaps it should be “Lovers: A Hate Story”?

Israeli women celebrate outside an Arab-owned restaurant which was vandalized in Bat Yam, during the war against Gaza in May 2021. Credit: Tomer Appelbaum

This book is a sharp, justified and well-documented indictment of the Ashkenazi elite in Israel. In my opinion, that is its primary power and significance. Cohen offers some astounding examples, not all of them known, of the degree of racism that elite exhibited from the dawn of Zionism, both vis-à-vis Palestinian Arabs and the so-called Jewish Arabs.

Cohen also presents the argument that it was Ashkenazi Jews who, for their own purposes, spoiled the relationship between the Mizrahim and the Arabs during the pre-state era, although he hastens to dispel the romanticism hovering above any apparent sense of brotherhood that may have existed between them. At the height of the 1947-49 War of Independence, Rabbi Meir Abuhatzeira (aka the Baba Meir) wrote the poem: “Establish a land with restraint / We beseech you to expel the servant-girl’s child / The flag of Israel has been raised.” Who needs the hard-right racist politician Itamar Ben-Gvir?

But there was also an opposite Mizrahi approach. There was Hayyim ben Kiki, scion of a family of rabbis from Tiberias, who as early as 1921 came out against the Zionist arrogance that had done such harm to the good relationship with the Arabs. Speaking of Zionism, ben Kiki said he felt “that all of this movement is not being done properly.” He suggested, already then, relinquishing this sense of Western supremacy and in its place “going with the spirit of the land.” What a shame no one paid attention.

For his part, Yosef Haim Kastel, the product of a Hebronite-Jerusalemite family, went so far as to propose that the 1917 Balfour Declaration be redrafted such that it would also recognize Palestinian nationalism and present Palestine as a national home of two peoples. But who listened? In Baghdad, at the height of the Arab Revolt in Palestine in the 1930s, Iraqi Jews issued an unequivocal announcement of support for the Arabs of Palestine.

Very regretfully, Cohen determines in his book that all of those were marginal voices. The discourse was quickly taken over by the “Muscovites,” a code word for our Ashkenazi acquaintances. How the wheel had turned: In 1908, it was the Sephardi Jews that called for a calming of tensions between the Jews and the Arabs, at which time the so-called Muscovites inflamed the atmosphere.

Aftermath of an attack by an Israeli mob on an Arab man in Bat Yam, during the war against Gaza in May 2021.Credit: Tomer Appelbaum

In 1936, it was the turn of the Mizrahim, and they were forever blaming one another. But Cohen states that on the eve of the Nakba – when more than 700,000 Arabs fled or were expelled, during the 1947-49 war – insofar as the attitude toward the Arabs was concerned, there was no real difference between Jews of different backgrounds.

'Mizrahi' souls

When the Ashkenazim would embark on murderous acts of revenge and reprisal against Arabs, no one classified them according to their ethnic origin: “Kibbutz members,” the various Meir Har-Zions were called. Or just plain “Israelis.” But when Mizrahim committed acts of revenge, their background was always cited. Cohen brings us a plethora of patronizing quotes from Ashkenazim, who talk about the inborn violent nature of Mizrahim.

For example, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion asserted that “Kurds and others, Etzel members, pride themselves on Deir Yassin [where over 100 Palestinian men, women and child were massacred, in April 1948].” Army commander Israel Galili, referring to another massacre in the village of al-Dawayima in 1948, admitted that there were commanders there who were “people of culture” – a code word for Ashkenazis – who turned into contemptible murderers. However, he hastened to add: “There were many French and Moroccans in Etzel there, who are predisposed to severe behavior.’’

Atrocities committed by “Marokaim" (Israelis from Moroccan decent) were deemed to be a function of their character and culture. Identical acts committed by Ashkenazi members of the left were presented as a deviation that was a typical of the men who carried out those acts; their ethnic identity is not cited and they are described as “well-bred persons,” notwithstanding the murdering and plundering.

Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky, who is also quoted by Cohen, stated that the Jews were going to the Land of Israel in order to seek "national comfort,” but also ‘‘'to expand the frontiers of Europe to the Euphrates River.’ In other words, [we are here] in order to sweep away from the Land of Israel thoroughly, as far as Judaism is concerned, in the present and in the future, all traces of the ‘Mizrahi soul.’”

Arabs and Jews at a café in Jaffa, in 2021.Credit: Avshalom Halutz

And there you have it. Jabotinsky, Netanyahu’s teacher and spiritual guide, spoke of the need “to sweep away… all traces of the ‘Mizrahi soul." Why? “Not because we are Jews or even Europeans, but simply because we are men of culture.” And Judah Leib Magnes wrote to the effect that the Chosen People in the Land of Israel were growing "increasingly closer to the primitivism of the desert” – all due to their "Asianness," the Ashkenazi scholar from San Francisco explained.

At a gathering of the Israeli army's high command in 1950, Ben-Gurion had this to say about immigrants from the Islamic lands: “We must educate the young man who has come here from these countries to sit properly on a chair in his home, to take a shower, not steal, not capture an Arab teenager and rape her and murder her… This takes precedence over other things…The ingathering of the exiles has brought us a rabble.”

Ben-Gurion even laid the blame for the murderous raid on the West Bank village of Qibya in 1953, in which some 70 Palestinians were killed, on the residents of “the fringe” – a synonym for Mizrahi Jews, although he knew well that that was a lie. His Mapai party had from its start endeavored to portray itself as not hating Arabs, as opposed to the Arab-hating Herut movement. But even today there is more Palestinian blood on the hands of the Zionist left than on the hands of the right.

From the Nakba to Hebron's casbah

One of the unavoidable conclusions reached from reading the book is that very little has changed in 120 years of Zionism. From the mutual violence between Jews and Arabs on up to the Arab anxiety over the fate of al-Aqsa; from the colonialist Eliezer Ben-Yehuda to the racist Itamar Ben Gvir, almost nothing has changed. The most powerful conclusion one gleans from the book is that everything goes back to the moment of genesis, the very beginnings of Zionism. The racism, the patronizing and the extreme nationalism.

The beginning of Zionism? Cohen shares a few thoughts from the Bible: “When your God brings you into the land that was sworn to your fathers Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, to be assigned to you – great and flourishing cities that you did not build, houses full of all good things that you did not fill, hewn cisterns that you did not hew, vineyards and olive groves that you did not plant – and you eat your fill…” (Deuteronomy 6:10-12). This despicable divine command is meticulously and devotedly observed by Israel, spanning the period from the Nakba to what is happening today in the casbah of Hebron.

Cohen comes up with a summary of numerous examples, from the period after Israel’s establishment, of rare Mizrahi-Arab solidarity, such as the brief cooperation between the Black Panthers and Arab demonstrators in Jerusalem, mentions the case of Tali Fahima (an Algerian-born, pro-Palestinian activist jailed for her connections to a leading Palestinian activist and militant), and also cites instances of violence perpetrated by Mizrahim in the context of the conflict – such as by Yona Avrushmi (who murdered Emil Grunzweig at a Peace Now demonstration), by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's murderer Yigal Amir, by so-called Hebron shooter Elor Azaria, and by people who carried a violent attack on an Arab man in Bat Yam during the war against Gaza in May last year.

The depressing historic journey into the heart of the discrimination, the roots of the conflict and the hatred, not only between Jews and Arabs but also between Ashkenazi and Mizrahi, no less bitter and difficult, ends very badly.

If at the beginning of Zionism Mizrahiness signaled a potential for close relations with the Arab natives of the land, it has been transformed in the eyes of many into an identity that has crystallized around a hatred for Arabs. But to lay full blame for the conflict on Mizrahi Jews, or even on the right wing, would be an unforgivable historic sin. Read this book and see how true that is.