Also can we talk about the deliberate erasure of the entire Mizrachi community’s exile by leftists and others?

returnofthejudai:

This is an enormous problem to be sure and if Linda weren’t on hiatus I’d let her take this question. 

Mizrachi Jews, the Jews of MENA who never left the region, along with the Sephari Jews of MENA and other, smaller Jewish communities, were exiled from their home countries in the Diaspora between the 1940s and 1970s. The vast majority of them moved to Israel because they were guaranteed admittance.

Mizrachi Jews and other exiled Jews of MENA are often erased because they complicate the narrative of Israel being a White Supremacist Colonial State. Like the major waves of Jewish immigration from Europe in the 1930s, there weren’t many options when it came to finding a safe place to live. So a majority settled in Israel. (It’s worth pointing out that most Jews in France are North African Mizrachim and Sephardim who fled countries that were formerly French colonies like Algeria). 

So what happens is we start to get weird acts of logical invention designed to make sure that Israel gets painted in the most evil possible light and the “White Supremacy” narrative doesn’t develop any leaks around non-White Jews whose lives were saved by the existence of Israel.

So we see Israel getting blamed for the expulsion. This is pretty much bullshit. If MENA countries wanted to keep their Jews, they wouldn’t have exiled them. You could say “Zionists encouraged it!” but many Jews who fled MENA were not Zionist and wanted to stay where they were. But property theft, mass executions of Jews who were labelled “Zionist” regardless of their personal beliefs, pogroms and the belief in “pan-Arabism,” a unification of MENA peoples under one religion and ethnicity, made Jewish life impossible and flight necessary. 

So now there is a significant population of non-White Jews in Israel, many of whom are Zionists, some of whom claim that Zionism saved their lives. Today, a majority of the world’s Mizrachi Jews live in Israel, and because they live in Israel, the adherents of BDS have decided that they are to be denied voices in academia and culture.

In other words, BDS silences Mizrachi Jews. Mizrachi Jews who manage to get their voices heard are accused of being White Supremacists. Because they suffered exile by non-White populations, people on the left who don’t feel confident in criticizing those in power in MENA lest they be feeding orientalist stereotypes choose to stay silent lest they face ostracism for being insufficiently anti-racist (even if that means being racist against Mizrachim who despite rhetoric against oppression olympics, really don’t seem to rate in the hierarchies of the left).

So what happens is that Mizrachim end up tokenized as a tool to attack other Jews while having their own voices ignored. Racism against Mizrachim in Israel becomes not a type of oppression to be fought, but just another piece of evidence that Israel is evil and Mizrachim don’t deserve solidarity unless they are in favor of destroying the country that, however flawed, played a role in saving their lives. 

This isn’t to say that all Mizrachim are Zionists. There are plenty who are not. Like all Jews, there is a diversity of opinion. But if one looks at how Israelis vote, one will discover that Mizrachim are more likely to support Right Wing candidates because, in part, the Israeli Left is dominated by affluent White European Jews who have less to lose and will more easily integrate into other countries if Israel were eliminated. 

The Israeli left, like much of the global left, can come down with really bad tunnel vision when reality comes into conflict with its ideals and tunes out voices that risk complicating the purity of that vision. 

The global left doesn’t see Mizrachim as real Jews. They see them as a distraction from the hated White European Imperialist Jew who are only as useful as their willingness to perpetuate that narrative, their own value as human beings be damned. Again, look at the way Academic and Cultural BDS disproportionately silences Mizrahi Jews. If it’s not by design, the left’s apathy to this reality is damning enough in its own right.