The Arab Jews: A Postcolonial Reading of Nationalism, Religion, and Ethnicity 9781503625655

Citation preview

The Arab Jews

CULTURAL SITINGS

Elazar Barkan, Editor

CULTURAL SITINGS presents focused discussions of major contemporary and

historical cultural issues by prominent and promising scholars, with a special emphasis on multidisciplinary and transnational perspectives. By bridging historical and theoretical concerns, CULTURAL SITINCS develops and examines narratives that probe the spectrum of experiences that continuously reconfigure contemporary cultures. By rethinking chronology, agency, and especially the siting of historical transformation, the books in this series go beyond disciplinary boundaries and notions of what is marginal and what is central to knowledge. By juxtaposing the analytical, the historical, and the visual, the series provides a venue for the development of cultural studies and for the rewriting of the canon.

The Arab Jews A Postcolonial Reading of

Nationalism, Religion, and Ethnicity

Yehouda Shenhav

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

~

Stanford, California 2006

Stanford University Press Stanford, California

© 2006 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or ttansmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording. or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archivalquality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Shenhav, Yehouda A [Yehudim-ha-'kvim. English] The Arab Jews: a postcolonial reading of nationalism, religion, and ethnicity I Yehouda Shenhav. p. cm.- (Cultural sitings) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN o-8047-5296-6 (cloth' alk. paper) 1. Jews, Oriental- Cultural assimilation- IsraeL 2. Jews- Arab countries- Migrations. 3· Politics and culture. 4· Ethnicity- Israel. 5· Israel- Emigration and immigration. 6. lsrael-Ethnic relations. I. Title. 11. Series.

DS11J.8·'+'541J zoo6 956·-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean, the use of the term has diverged into additional subcategories, such as Nigerian American and Jamaican American. 11 A similar process occurs in the Israeli context and in this book as well. The archival materials on which the analysis is based refer primarily to the Jews of Iraq, beginning in 1941, and to some extent to Iranian and Yemenite Jews. Plainly, the focus on Iraqi Jewry is closely bound up with my personal biography. However, in light of the fact that the dominant conception in the hegemonic discourse adds the Jews of Iraq to the identity category of Mizrahim and tends not to distinguish between them and Jews of Moroccan or Yemenite origin, for example (and also in light of the fact that this generalization is often accepted among Jews from Iraq themselves), I consider it legitimate to use the Iraqi example as a tentative case study for the encounter between the Zionist movement and all the Arab Jews. At the same time, it is clear that this study does not constitute a representative work encompassing all the Arab Jews. The necessity for the different points of view stems precisely from the dialectical character of the use of the category of Mizrahiness. That dialectic is manifested by being, on the one hand, a "true" category as used by various agents, establishments (e.g., the state and its branches, the media, and academe), and critical agents (e.g., protest groups); yet, on the other hand, it is plain that its use is an invention resulting from defining historical circumstances. Deconstructing those circumstances necessitates the adoption of additional points of view. It is more than likely that an analysis based on the Jews ofYemen or of Morocco instead of Iraqi Jewry would cite a different terminus a quo and very possibly arrive at conclusions that differ from mine. Such an approach invites additional alternative Mizrahi points of view. These might demonstrate that Mizrahiness is not the opposite of Ashkenaziness but is a category with broad margins, whose boundaries have to be clarified within its historical and discursive context. These theoretical questions are extensively discussed throughout the book.

History Begins at Home Finally, I would note that the complex connections between nationalism, religion, and ethnicity, as they emerge in this book, constitute one analysis, or one show, in a complex pageant that is rich in additional variables. Because of the complexity of the critical project with which this book deals, together with the nature of the historical encounters that are its focus, the gender perspective is not included as one of the modes of looking at Zionist and Mizrahi history. 12 That perspective can turn the nationalism-religionethnicity triangle into a quadrangle and give rise to an additional observation point that challenges the Zionist narrative and exposes further relationships within it- among concepts of gender, nationalism, ethnicity, and religionas well as problematizing each concept separately. Examples of the fascinating questions that I was unable to address in this book would include an analysis of the connection between concepts of gender in Zionism and the method by which Zionism approached and constructed the Jews in the Arab countries; the connection between gender otherness (of women in the Zionist project) and ethnic othemess (of the Arab Jews within the project); the national-ethnic-religious place to which the Zionist project assigned Arab Jewish women (see Melamed 2002); and the way in which these women themselves perceived their ethnicity (see Khazzoom 2002), religiosity, and nationality in relation to Mizrahi men, on the one hand, and the national project, on the other. A study of these and other questions could help dismantle the monolithic character of the national discourse~ generate new starting points, and add new precincts of memory and alternatives to the Zionist narrative.

'7

CHAPTER

1

The "Discovery" of the Arab Jews

Anyone who is familiar with the mentality of oriental people will of course understand that this

[establishing relations with Arab Jews] was no easy matter.

-Zionist emissary, 1946

Defining Zionist Nationalism Through Networks In 1942, a group of Zionist Jews formed a new settlement. At its peak, it comprised about 450 men, skilled and unskilled workers, engineers, foremen, construction workers~ engravers, mechanics, plumbers, accountants, and clerks. They established an infrastructure for day-to-day life, engaged in productive labor in the form of construction and maintenance, set up a labor council, organized sports activities, held cultural evenings, formed hobby groups, founded a library that collected about a thousand books, and published a bulletin in which they documented their experiences.' Numerous settlements of this type existed in Mandatory Palestine at the time. In Zionist historiography, the new settlement might be called a moshava and the inhabitants "settlers" or "pioneers," while others might speak of a "colony" and describe the inhabitants as "colonists." The choice of term will depend on theoretical perspective, language, ideological persuasion, or the historical period in which the research was conducted. Yet this particular settlement phenomenon, which is at the focus of the next three chapters, had singular features. It was located far from Mandatory Palestine, in the region of the Iran-Iraq border, some 1,ooo miles from Tel Aviv. The group in question was a "labor battalion" of the Solei Boneh construction company, which won a public tender issued by the Anglo-lranian Oil Company to build and maintain oil-refining facilities next to the city of Abadan on the Iranian side of the Shalt al-Arab waterway. The Solei Boneh personnel remained in the region for three years under the auspices of imperial Britain, and their stay involved more than economic reasons. In addi-

19

"Discovery" of the Arab Jews tion to British colonial interests (such as fuel production during World War II), the project reflected certain national and colonial interests of the Zionist enterprise itself. Some of these were known before the group set out, and others emerged and took shape in the course of the group's stay at Abadan, though not without internecine strife within it and between its members and

the Jewish leadership in Palestine. The labor battalion played a distinctive historical role: its members served as agents of the first concrete encounter between the Zionist movement and Arab Jews, at a time when the Jewish leadership was making serious plans and considerable effort to bring these Jews to Palestine. The presence of the Solei Boneh group in the region provided a cover for the illegal entry of Zionist emissaries into Baghdad~ Tehran~ Mosul, Khorramshahr, Basra, Kirkuk, and other cities where Jewish communities existed. 2 However, as mentioned, this should not be construed to mean that the group's activity was planned in advance or was known at the time Solei Boneh received the contract. Some of the Zionist activity among Iranian and Iraqi Jews was defined retroactively, in the wake of the group's arrival in the area. Moreover, most of the goals the Zionist movement may have set for the Abadan project existed within the context of a European orientation: to bring refugees from war-ravaged Europe to Palestine overland, or to encourage Iraqi Jews to immigrate to Palestine out of concern for the Jewish demographic balance there in light of the Holocaust (Shenhav 1999a). Thus, the Solei Boneh members were part of a large network oflaborers, soldiers, agents, and emissaries dispersed in the region, from Abadan to Baghdad, Tehran, and Damascus. Sociologically, it is hard to define a Zionist emissary. Nationalism is not a fact carved in stone. It is a sociological concept that is reified for analytical purposes and theoretical analyses. It is certainly not the case that we could identify those emissaries according to such labels, particularly prior to the consolidation of the Zionist ideology after World War II (Barkan 2000: 5). It is therefore sociologically safer to define Zionist nationalism through the networks they formed rather than assigning them a priori essentialist labels. Participation in such networks, and their evolving patterns, will be used to conceptualize nationalism rather than the other way around. As Mustafa Emirbayer and Jeff Goodwin (1994) putit, the point of departure in examin-

ing networks is their "anticategorical imperative." The idea of studying nationalism in the form of networks corresponds well to Rogers Brubaker's theoretical work on nationalism (Brubaker 1994, 1998, 2002; see also 1996). Brubaker identifies at least three epistemological problems in the sociology of nationalism. First, he argues against the essentialist 20

"Discovery" of the Arab Jews and primordialist assumptions embedded in the "return of the repressed" ("primordialist") model and against the reductionist nature of the "manipulating elites" (modernist) model. Both are oversimplifications of the political reality of nationalism. Second, he argues against the developmentalist nature of modem theories of nationalism. The canonical literature- including Gellner, Anderson, Smith, and Hobsbawm- is developmentalist in that it traces long-term changes that lead to the gradual emergence of nations (Brubaker 1994: 8). Third, he argues that national groups should not be conceived of as externally bounded and internally homogeneous blocs (Brubaker 1998: 274). According to Brubaker, the understanding of nations as real groups contradicts recent developments in sociological theory such as network theory, ethnomethodology, postrnodernism, and feminism. These developments show growing interest in network forms rather than in fixed entities; in groups as constructed, contingent, and fluchlating, rather than fixed, entities; in

fragmentary, ephemeral, and elusive boundaries, rather than in static categories (1998: 292). In essence, Brubaker suggests studying nations as events that emerge through situated networks (1994). Given its anticategorical imperative, the network approach has the potential to reject all varieties of essentialism or methodological individualism (Emirbayer and Goodwin 1994). In what follows, I examine a network of Jewish emissaries of (mainly) European origin who had encounters with Arab Jews throughout the first half of the twentieth century. These emissaries crossed, and at the same time transgressed, boundaries between West and East, between secularity and religion, and between modem and traditional societies. Thus, nationalism will be treated phenomenologically, more as the product of these networks than the other way around; the emissaries' everyday practice becomes the basis for the definition of nationalism. To be sure, the encounter in Abadan was not the first between European Zionist emissaries and Arab Jews. There had been earlier encounters with the Jews ofYemen (see, e.g., Shafir [1989]1996: 92-96), Iraq (e.g., Esther Meir 1993), Morocco (e.g., Tsur 2001), Tunisia (e.g., Sa'adon 1992), and other communities. However, there was a fundamental difference between those en-

counters and what transpired at Abadan in the early 194os, which enables us to define the latter as the historical terminus a quo, or starting point (what Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes call "degree zero"), of relations between the Zionist movement and the Arab Jews. The pre-Abadan encounters were largely random in character, little more than a series of episodes, in sharp contrast to the keen interest that the Zionist movement showed in 21

"Discovery" of the Arab Jews Middle Eastern Jewry beginning in 1941-42 and to the unfolding, systematic, intensive presence of the Solei Boneh personnel in and around Abadan. The Abadan case was the first systematic encounter between Zionist emis-

saries and Arab Jews following the formulation of the so-called millionperson plan (which should be read as "the million Jews plan") providing for the massive immigration of these Jews to Palestine. Even if the plan was not implemented immediately, and even if some of its provisions were unfeasible, it marked the start of a discourse and the initial spotlighting of the Arab Jews as potential candidates for immigration to Palestine. I argue that this was the first time all the Jews from the Islamic countries were subsumed under a single category identifying them as one homogeneous group subject to an immigration plan. This encounter was facilitated by British colonialism, under the auspices of which the Zionist emissaries operated in the region. The colonial state supplied both the physical conditions and the cover for residence, creating clear lines of demarcation between the different ethnic groups in the region (i.e., between European and non-European) on the basis of color and race. Zionist historiography shies away from addressing the importance of the colonial context within which the encounter between Zionism and Middle Eastern Jewry took place. The Abadan project sheds light on this missing factor. Besides being an important way station in creating the conditions for Jewish immigration to Palestine, Abadan was seen as playing a civilizing role with respect to the Arab Jews. The "civilizing mission" was made possible by the emissaries' geographical proximity to their target communities and the fact that the work of the Solei Boneh personnel kept them in the region for an extended period, during which they established a library, ordered materials from Jewish institutions in Palestine, and founded Zionist youth movements and organizations.' Two cardinal cultural categories were singled out with regard to the civilizing mission: "Arabs" and "Jews." As we shall see later, the emissaries would insist on the intersection~ disjunction, and signification

of the "difference" between the two categories as the basis for their cultural and political work. The emissaries' presence in the Abadan region, a "third space" that was

neither Diaspora nor Eretz Yisrael, also provides a comparative theoretical basis for identifying actors, practices, and identities unlike those found in what was known to Zionists as the Land of Israel, giving scope to voices that were unheard there. In particular, the encounter between nationalism and (Arab Jewish) ethnicity creates a divided consciousness, which was more sharply etched at Abadan than in Palestine. Thus, for example, Zionism 22

"Discovery" of the Arab Jews imagined itself through Judaism more explicitly and intensely in Abadan than in Palestine (see also Shenhav 2002b). Furthermore, Zionism found expression in binary categories -Jew and Arab, religious and secular- and did 4

not recognize the 'in-betweenness" that made for the ambivalent identity of

the Arab Jews. The Abadan terminus a quo was where we can perhaps recuperate ambivalent voices.

Because of the distance between Palestine and Abadan, the encounter between the emissaries and the Arab Jews is significant also in terms of the way in which it shaped and defined the identity of the emissaries themselves. As we know from other colonial projects, not only the objects of the perceived civilizing mission undergo a transformation in a process of this kind, but also

its agents - in this case, the Zionist emissaries themselves (see e.g., Mitchell 1988; Comaroff and Comaroff 1991; in the context of Jewish orientalism, see also Khazzoom 2003). The emissaries, some of whom had arrived in Palestine only weeks or months before being assigned to the Abadan project, were not a monolithic group. During their stay in Abadan, they tried to consolidate their fluid self-identity, and they addressed the question of the quality of the available "human material" not only with respect to the local Jews but with respect to themselves as well. They tried to define their national identity, ethnicity, and religion- vis-il-vis the British, on the one hand, and vis-A-vis the region's Arab Jews, on the other. From this point of view, the encounter with the Arab Jews became- in addition to a project that involved the local natives (i.e., Arab Jews)- a laboratory for the self-training of the Solei Boneh personnel, who reported back from the "mission region" to the Jewish metropolitan center. The third space plays an important methodological role by enabling the dislocation and relocation of those identities outside its ''nah.tral" context and making possible its examination according to new parameters. Reflecting the inherent duality, not only of the company, but also of the Zionist movement as a whole, Solei Boneh ventured into the Abadan region holding two different passports, so to speak. One of these identified it as a Zionist operation, symbolic of the success of the Jewish national project in Palestine; the other, as a business enterprise in the senrice of British colonialism. Solei Boneh operated by balancing the legitimization it was given by these sovereign sources (Zionism and European colonialism), while speaking in several voices simultaneously. Striking the necessary balance to operate in the region was no simple matter, because relations between Zionism and British colonialism did not always run smoothly, and also because the Jewish workers at Abadan were not a monolithic group.

"Discovery" of the Arab Jews Some members of the group were full-fledged workers and retained that identity throughout their stay in Abadan. Others discovered the Zionist potential of their mission and became active among the local Jews because they found themselves in Abadan, not vice versa. Yet others came to Abadan as impostors, bearing a fictional identity as Solei Boneh employees, in order to carry out a Zionist mission for the Mossad l'Aliyah Bet ("organization for illegal immigration"), established at the end of the 193os, which brought Jews clandestinely to Palestine. Some of the workers objected to this Zionist activity and tried to disrupt it. This multiplicity makes it possible to suggest a number of alternative logics to Jewish nationalism, to contest the teleological narrative of the ostensibly coherent Zionist voice, and to invite a postcolonial reading of this reality. Apart from a few superficial references, the story of this labor battalion remains untold. Even the historians ofSolel Boneh, such as Hillel Dan (1963), Eliahu Bieltsky (1974), Shlomo Shva (1976), and David Hacohen (1974), who were either managers in the company or were commissioned by it, barely mention this group or the circumstances of its mission, its methods of operation, and its encounter with the Arab Jews, particularly the Jews of Iraq, Syria, and Iran.' Nor did researchers of the Jews in the Islamic countries examine the strategies underlying the activity of the labor battalion in the region, and they even more flagrantly ignored the colonial context of the encounter with the Arab Jews. Informed by Zionist historiography, all the Jews were defined in this literature monolithically, although some were perceived as Europeans and others as being part of the Arab world (e.g., Meir 1993; Kazzaz 1991). Rich primary archival material exists about the labor battalion in Abadan. During their stay in the region, its members documented their activity, kept minutes of meetings, sent letters back home, and published impressions of their encounter with the local Jews. They also addressed intriguing questions, such as what constitutes colonialism, the meaning of exile, the essence of the

Jewish religion, the connections between religion and nationalism and between socialism and communism, and relations between East and West. 5 The next two chapters are organized around four central axes. The first is Jewish-Zionist nationalism. My aim is to place the Abadan project within the context of the history of the relations between the Zionist movement and the Jews of the Arab countries, to expand the framework of grounds that justifies its definition as the terminus a quo for the historiography of the Arab Jews, and to explain how this makes it possible to challenge the ostensibly coherent Zionist historiography. I also address the new insights that arise when the

"Discovery" of the Arab Jews center of gravity is shifted from a linear conception of Zionist historiography to a postcolonial analysis. The second axis is that of British and Zionist colonialism. The aim here is to place the Abadan project within the colonial context of the discovery of the Arab Jews and in particular to explain the critical role that was played by British colonialism in creating the conditions for Jewish nationalism in the region. I argue that the discovery of the Arab Jews and their ethnification within the Zionist enterprise can be understood only as a distinct product of the colonial paradigm. The third axis discusses the Abadan project within the context of what I call the "phenomenology of colonialism": that is, the interplay of the national paradigm, on the one hand, and the colonialist paradigm, on the other hand, in shaping the identity of the emissaries. The phenomenology of colonialism extends the colonial paradigm, which is basically an analytical and comparative historical tool, to the description and experience of the colonial reality by the Zionist emissaries themselves, and to the diverse modes by which it establishes the emissaries' identity in relation to both the British and the local Jews. The fourth axis, which is likewise based on the first two axes, refers to the way in which the national and colonial paradigms have shaped the identity of the Arab Jews themselves. This axis involves the modalities by which the colonial realitytwo elements of which are the British state and the emissaries (who, as noted, were also engaged in establishing their own identity)- shaped the identity of the Arab Jews in the course of honing the dialectic between their definition as Orientals within the colonial paradigm and as Jews within the national paradigm. The colonial paradigm creates them as others vis-a-vis Europe. The national paradigm imagines them as part of the homogeneous Jewish community and seeks to annul their othemess. The intersection between the two paradigms results in a constant ambivalence: they are part of the colonial world and at the same time part of the homogeneous Jewish nation. This ambivalence is expressed in what the emissaries themselves called the "difference," referring to the demarcation of the traits that differentiate between the Arabness and Jewishness of the Jews in the Arab countries. Together, the four axes organize the analytical discussion of the Abadan project and mark it as a singular historical site that constih.J.tes a terminus a quo at which national, ethnic, and religious identities are dismantled and reconstructed. It is important to reiterate that Abadan's status as terminus a quo is not entirely a function of historical uniqueness, given that there had been earlierand obviously were subsequent- encounters between the Zionist movement and Arab Jews. The importance of the Abadan project as terminus a quo is primarily methodological. I could have chosen other, equally valid starting

"Discovery" of the Arab Jews points that would lead to alternative analyses of history and historiographysuch as the migration of Jews from Yemen in the late nineteenth century or the early twentieth -along the lines proposed by Gershon Shafir (1986); or the establishment of the state of Israel, as did most mainstream sociologists and historians who study the Arab Jews (e.g., Hacohen 1994. 1998). However, the Abadan case is unique in that it was the first encounter that took place against the backdrop of a concrete immigration plan put forward by the (pre)state leadership and its bureaucratic apparatuses, the so-called million-person plan. This choice is further substantiated by my research strategy of examining the relationship between Zionism and the Arab Jews prior to their arrival in Israel. Once in Israel, the perspective for the analysis of the Arab Jews is subjected and subjugated to the state's epistemology, where they are primarily immigrants, integrated into its geography, educational system, the military, and the Zionist realms of memory. "There are Jews and there are Jews" David Ben-Gurion's announcement- in a speech delivered in November 1942 at the Institute for Economic Research in Rehovot- of his plan to bring a million Jews to Palestine immediately marked what was almost the beginning of a discourse focusing on the Arab Jews, hitherto the "present absentees" of Zionism. Jewish nationalism originated in Europe, and its political thought is distinctly European. All the thinkers and practitioners who are considered the precursors of the Jewish national movement- from Zvi Graetz, Moshe Hess, and Peretz Smolenskin to Theodor Herzl, Max Nordau, Abraham Menachem Ussishkin, Leo Pinsker, Nachum Sokolow, Dov Ber Borochov, A. D. Cordon, and Ahad Ha'am (Asher Zvi Ginzberg)were based in Europe. Shlomo Avineri, who traces the history of Zionist thought in his study of the intellectual sources of the Zionist movement, does not cite even one Arab Jew who exercised a formative influence on the move-

ment (Avineri 1981). The delegates to the First Zionist Congress were educated middle-class European Jews, nearly all from eastern Europe (Russia, Romania, Serbia, Bulgaria, Poland), central and northern Europe (Germany, Austria, Switzerland), or France, England, and the United States. Only one of the 246 delegates was from an Arab country (Algeria), and he, too, was of European origin.' David Vital, in his three-volume study of the Zionist movement's formative years, makes no mention of the Jews oflraq, Egypt, or North Africa (Vital1978, 1982, 1987). Furthermore, Jewish national historiography arose in mid-nineteenth-balist from there some years ago in Jerusalem. He made a very warm [naive?] impression." 36 Nevertheless, Yisraeli went on to reinforce some of Sereni's insights about the Jewish religion and its relationship to nationalism, discerning a link between religious observance and the hope of national redemption: The great majority of the worshippers in the synagogue could not read the book

and did not understand the meaning of the words they repeated after the cantor. ... The dominant spirit in the Baghdad community is signified by alienation toward nationalism and Zionism externally, and love of the nation and its hopes inwardly, in the heart. ... Sometimes, as a result of the habit of external alienation, the hope of redemption is emptied of all practical content and reaches a situation of total betrayal. 37

Knowing how to read the Bible and expressing Zionist sentiments are equated in this report. Sereni, for his part, was appeased somewhat by these remarks, but clung to his original thesis: The majority oflraq's Jews were, and remain to this day, observant Jews, although not among the strictest, in the way of the Sephardim. Nevertheless, there was no deep religious feeling and no religious "movement" (apart from a small number of kabbalists). Their knowledge of the Bible and of the Six Orders [Mishna and Talmud] is meager and not deep. In recent generations, there were no sages of influence or repute in the Jewish communities in Iraq, and Torah [study] ceased completely in the last generation. 38 102

How Did the Arab Jews Become Religious and Zionist? Avraham Brawer had observed earlier that: Religion among the masses is more of a mechanical matter than a deep feeling of

the heart, and therefore their prayer is hurried, there is no pouring forth of the soul as among Hasidim, and there is no pure prayer such as is found in Jerusalem among the members of the Eastern communities when they come to the Western Wall. The fear of death and concern for the fate of their deceased relatives is up-

permost in their religious feelings. They are constantly lighting eternal lamps for the everlasting bliss of their relatives' souls. And since a religious ruling has been issued in Baghdad that electricity is also kosher for an .. eternal lamp" (in Jerusalem, oil lamps are used), it is a good business for the electric corporation-

a lamp is lit for a full year. The superstitious atmosphere also affects people from elsewhere who reside in Baghdad for a lengthy period. (Brawer 1944' 163)

Brawer also noted: "I was only able to visit a few synagogues, and because the Babylonians [Iraqi Jews] arise for the early-morning prayer when it is still night, I arrived in the morning after the early prayer, in the midst of the Torah reading and in some cases for the musaf[ concluding] service. This is hurried prayer, a mechanical religion, but I was told that in the synagogue next to the yeshiva and the religious court, kabbalists pray with deliberation and intention" (ibid.: 165). He also subordinated religious practice to national logic: ''The hakafot [carrying the Torah scrolls around the synagogue] in Baghdad and the other cities in Babylon on Hoshana Raba and Shmini Atzeret and SimhatTorah [concluding the Sukkot- Tabernacles- feast] add up to seven times seven, which is undoubtedly symbolic, but display neither the festivity nor the popular rejoicing of the hakafot in the Land of Israel" (ibid.). And: The Jews of Baghdad are very sloppy about erecting their sukkot ["booths" set up outside the home during the week-long Sukkot festival]: meager thatch, bedsheets under bay leaves, and even they do not reach the thatch or the floor, and there is no shelter from the sun in the sukkah. When I asked one of the ..sages" about this, he tried to prove to me that everything was kosher. If only I could show him a handsome Jerusalem sukkah with all its charm and splendor, then he would understand that a sukkah is not erected only in order to fulfill one's obligation. (Brawer 1944: 165) And elsewhere, he observes: "I saw no special customs in the shaharit [morning] and musaf prayers, apart from ignorance: not all those who were called to the Torah knew the blessing. There is no use even asking about books or journals.... I am afraid that it will not be long before the Kurdistan Jews will be culturally inferior to their Kurdish neighbors" (ibid., 219). Brawer summed up his conclusions from the mission, in which he linked the absence of a religious foundation to the absence of a national instinct:

How Did the Arab Jews Become Religious and Zionist? For the time being Iraq does not have the type of human material that would devote itself enthusiastically to building the homeland. True, quite a few Iraqis were killed in rebellions against the British, but they are not yet capable of being killed

for building their land. A young Iraqi's ambition is for a government position, to receive the guaranteed income it provides openly and for the secret giving, without having to exert brawn or brain. These are ancient things, and who knows whether they will change, or when. (Brawer 1944: 191)

How are we to interpret the reaction of the emissaries to their experience among the Arab Jews? Their reporn show that their secularity was intertwined with a deep theological conception. Their agenda was dictated by a national program based on the sanctity of the Land of Israel and a passion for it; a primordial solidarity among Jewish communities and a perceived need to deliver them to Palestine. Their target audience, the Arab Jews, was expected to be purely religious Jews, and thus also potentially nationalist (i.e., proto-Zionist). Because of their own orientalism, however, the emissaries had

a hard time identifying the Jewishness of the Arab Jews, which was not infused with national sentiments. Furthermore, the more secular the Arab Jews were in the emissaries' perception, the more this blurred the distinction between them and the Arab space in which they existed, to the point of assimilation. The potent religious feelings that the emissaries hoped to find among the Arab Jews and to encourage among them were an extension of their own national-religious fervor, as well as an extension of their own view of Zionism as a Western, European project.

Hence the paradox presented at the outset. Emissaries who declared that they were secular (and even socialists), but who were imbued with a strong ethnic (national-religious) thrust, arrived on a mission to the Arab world via a hybrid network that was religious in origin (shadarut), found there communities that observed religious practices, yet reported back with disappointment about their lack of religion. Rather than accepting this reality, moreover, they aspired to infuse the Iraqi Jews with religious fervor. In sum, the emissaries projected religiosity onto the Iraqi Jews, imputing religious feelings and sentiments to them in a way that reflected their own desire both to erase the difference between themselves and the Arab Jews at the national level and to recreate it. Their remarks show how their "secularity" was intertwined with a deep political theology that was part and parcel of Zionist practice. Why couldn't the emissaries accommodate the ostensible secularism among Arab Jews? Why did they project piety onto them? First, in order to erase their Arabness, as an act of de-Arabization. Here, religion is a signifier of their orientalist and colonialist perspective. Second, in order to

104

How Did the Arab Jews Become Religious and Zionist? define them as Zionists. Here, religion is a signifier of ethnicity. According to Latour, this is a twofold discursive act. First, the emissaries used religion to define the Arab Jews as the "other." Religion became the ethnic marker of the Arab Jews. Second, they edited the Zionist ideological package and purified it- ostensibly- of its theological and ethnic roots. The outcome was 44

the presentation of Zionism as secular and ethnically free. The Zionist Sec-

ular" emissary could be secular, in fact, only if his interlocutor was religious. When he encountered the Arab Jews, who were ostensibly not Orthodox in their religious observances, the emissary began to fear for the status of the Jewish religion and nationalism. Shlomo Fischer (1988) thus proposes that these emissaries be viewed not as secular but as belonging to a different category, which can be called "Jewish heterodoxy," the product of the struggle with European Jewish Orthodoxy. The emissary expresses a Jewish "ethnic" viewpoint into which the national and the religious are infused and assimilated, and as such, the two modes of speech complement each other. Yet it was in this context that the phenomenon of national shadarut was challenged, and by none other than the Orthodox establishment, which stigmatized the modern emissaries as heretics and traitors to the religion of Israel. In December 1944, the "High Court of the Sephardic Community in Jerusalem" and the "Court of Justice of all the Ashkenazi Assemblies"- both rabbinical institutions- drew up a joint proclamation addressed to the heads of the Jewish community in Iran and Iraq. The rabbis wrote: 39 Dear Brothers, With great bitterness we have learned ... that young emissaries from the Land oflsrael who have cast off the Torah and the commandments have reached your city with the intention of inciting and leading astray the young Jews who are in Persia and teaching them also to cast off the burden of Torah and

proper behavior, and teaching them new doctrines, heaven forbid, which are heretical and blasphemous, and anyone who hears them and who learns from their behavior will have no part in the world to come. Therefore, dear brothers, spare your souls and the souls of your sons and beware of falling into their net. Rise up all of you as one person and cast out the evil from your midst and do not give them a foothold in your city, do not give them your children, because they have no religion and no Torah and they do not wor-

ship the God oflsrael. Therefore, dear brothers, watch them closely and you will find that what we say is correct, and in the Holy City of Jerusalem, they are well known and kept at a distance, but they came to you knowing you are na'ive Jews and that they can trick you, heaven forbid. Therefore open your eyes to this terrible thing and save your children and your souls, do not get close to them and do not read their books, because they are all filled with heresies, heaven forbid. Safeguard your Jewishness as

How Did the Arab Jews Become Religious and Zionist? you have done for thousands of years and to not place your trust in the things they say, because everything they say is lying and deceit. Protect and preserve your Jewishness.

Please read this proclamation in the city's synagogues.4{)

This document signifies both the ambivalence and the paradox of the message, which, as Ussishkin foresaw, warns against the consolidation of the religious praxis within the national praxis. The emissaries, who had arrived in a religious capacity and assumed they were engaged in a sacred mission, were accused by the rabbis of "inciting and leading astray'' the local Jews and of teaching doctrine that was "heretical and blasphemous, and anyone who hears them and who learns from their behavior will have no part in the world to come."41 The national emissaries, being truly modem, invoked, hybridized, and then purified the old, prenational religious mechanisms, and the rabbinical leaders, who were not at all modem, naturally objected to this. In these three case studies, which are diachronically ordered, I show that the relations between nationalism and religion were different in the three historical periods described above. The first case study represents the earliest attempt to orchestrate an immigration of non-European Jews to Palestine. As a young movement-it was then at most fifteen years old-Zionism had neither ready-made practices for mobilization nor much experience in coordinating its various bodies. The encounter between the secular Zionist leadership and the religious establishment was mainly on a trial-and-error basis. Yavne'eli received enormous help from the religious authorities in his mission, yet he perceived it as a secular one in disguise. The hybrid nature of the mission generated tension with the secular identity of his assignment. Next, following Ussishkin's major reorganization of the network of emissaries, the tension was resolved. By the 1940s, the Zionist movement already possessed an institutionalized hybrid model of a Zionist emissary. Emissaries experienced no conflict between their secular identity and its religious and theological justifications. It was germane to the national practice and its rhetoric. Thus Zionism could hybridize its practices and at the same time deny its religious underpinning. Concluding Remarks Are the findings about the hybridization and purification of nationalism and religion peculiar to the Zionist case only? To what extent are they applicable to a broader spectrum of nations? On the one hand, I have stressed the idiosyncratic features of Zionism. Zionism is overwhelmingly Jewish,42 and

106

How Did the Arab Jews Become Religious and Zionist? Judaism is an ambiguous construct with multiple meanings. Yet the Zionist case provides a useful prism and heuristic device for looking at the intersection of religion and nationalism, because it pushes the two principles of modernity (hybridization and purification) to their limit, and because it transcends the Western/non-Western divide. It is important to keep in mind that the nexus between nationalism and religion tends to be emphasized in studies of non-Western societies and deemphasized in studies of the West. I believe that a more balanced approach is needed, one that admits that Western nationalism is not completely secular and that non-Western nationalism is not completely religious. At the risk of oversimplification, let us briefly compare two, admittedly very different, models: Iran and the United States. As far as the Iranian regime is concerned~ it would be simplistic to dismiss it as merely religious. Scholars of the Iranian Revolution have argued that the '979 revolution was not merely Islamic; rather, it was first and foremost a nationalist revolution nurtured on Islamic symbols and images cast in a new mold (Dabashi 1993; Haggai Ram 2oooa, 2ooob ). For example, Haggai Ram shows how Islam became an indispensable part of contemporary Iranian nationalism in the postrevolutionary Iranian state, arguing that the guardians of the Islamic Revolution are no less stem nationalists than Islamicists, and that their Islam served as a nationalistic, unifying emblem against foreign encroachments. Likewise, Hamid Dabashi (1993) traces "crypto-secular" elements in the ideology of the Islamic Revolution, thus showing the symbiotic relationship between religion and secularism in modern Iranian identity. Concerning Arab nationalism, James Gelvin (1999) shows that because many area experts studying the Arab Middle East commonly hold that nationalism and religion are antagonistic, they end up asserting that nationalist sentiment in the region has declined or has capitulated to Islamicist ideologies. However, as Gelvin shows, popular forms of nationalism not only have strong roots in the region but have been continually reinforced over time. As a result, the current support for lslamicism in the Arab world cannot be taken as a sign that nationalism is on the decline, particularly in light of the fact that Islamic movements in the Arab world share a number of significant attributes with nationalism. From the perspective of the current chapter, Iranian and Arab nationalism are hybrid packages that do not aspire to be purified. In the United States, on the other hand, religion plays a more central role in national life than one is ready to admit. It has already been shown that U.S. foreign policy since 1945 is suffused with biblical justifications and reli-

How Did the Arab Jews Become Religious and Zionist? gious symbols (McAlister 2001). Also, religion is a strong factor in U.S internal politics and the public sphere at large. As the political commentator 4

Michael Barone has noted, 'Americans increasingly vote as

they pray, or

don't pray" (quoted in Sullivan 2003: 2). In fact, Republican and Democratic candidates in the United States feel a strong obligation to address religious audiences during primary season. It is telling, for example, that Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, the only Democratic nominees to have won the White House since 19fi4, went out of their way to discuss issues of faith and to speak before congregations early during their respective campaigns. When politicians address the American people as a constitutive category, there is often a thin layer of (inclusive) religious reference that serves as a substitute for the notion of the public good. The phrase "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance is an acknowledgement of this layer, analogous to "In God We Trust" on coins and bills. President Eisenhower summarized it succinctly: "Our government makes no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious belief" (Sifton 2004). This religious layer becomes increasingly wider when Americans face external threats that require reaffirmation of their national identity (September 11 might be a useful example). In such critical moments, national identity and questions of who we are solidifY and emerge most clearly. It is exactly in these instances that the conflation between American nationalism and religion becomes more visible and discernible. In the weeks following September 11, 2001, Americans flooded into churches and congregations. A poll released on September 19 by the Pew Research Center found that 69 percent of Americans reported that they were praying more in the wake of the attacks (Pew Research Center 2002). Furthermore, 78 percent of the American public said that the influence of religion on American life was increasing. Many religious leaders issued statements that supported the war in Mghanistan based on theology and the notion of "just wars" (ibid.). These moments are not restricted to "national security" only. Public debates about immigration, for example, are an arena in which one can find national soul-searching about "who we are" or ''who are we going to

be," a phenomenon that has been called ''American new nationalism" (Dittgen 1997). The role of the religious establishments in setting immigration laws and policies, as well as in forming public opinion about it, cannot be underestimated. In the year 2000, for example, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a resolution calling upon federal policymakers to reexamine immigration policies and reforms. It is true that the domain of religion is distinguished from the state in the modern secular American constitution. But formal constitutions -like all formal institutions- never give

108

How Did the Arab Jews Become Religious and Zionist? the whole sociological story. My point is that it would be simplistic to describe American nationalism merely as secular. The picture is much more complicated, and I believe that a Latourian analysis may shed some sociological light on the phenomenon. For example, how do practices of purification work in the U.S. school system? How are they used in the political system both in practice and rhetoric? These examples do not imply that the hybridization and purification of nationalism and religion is identical across these nations. On the contrary, they are very different. At the individual level, for example, many more Americans, compared with Israelis, claim to believe in God or to attend religious congregations (see Guttman 2002). At the public level, however, religion and state are more separated in the United States than in Israel, let alone Iran. Specific analysis can also show that religion becomes public under different philosophies and constitutional traditions and can flow in many unexpected directions (Casanova 1994). Both in Israel and in the United States, religious challenges promote public debates around liberal issues and thereby enhance secular values. Rather than suggesting that the results of the analysis provided in this book be generalized, therefore, I suggest that they be viewed heuristically as a model for more closely examining the relationship between nationalism, the public sphere, and religion in societies traditionally defined as secular.

CHAPTER

4

What Do the Arab Jews and the Palestinians Have in Common? Population Exchange, the Right of Return, and the Politics of Reparations

An account already exists between us and the Arab world: the account of the compensation that accrues to the Arabs who left the territory of Israel and abandoned their property.... The act that has now been perpetrated by the kingdom of Iraq ... forces us to link the two accounts . ... We shall take into account the value of the Jewish property that

has been frozen in Iraq when calculating the compensation that we have undertaken to pay

the Arabs who abandoned property in Israel. -Israel's Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett, March 1951

In July 2000, the president of the United States, Bill Clinton, announced that an agreement had been reached at the Camp David second summit meeting to recognize the Arab Jews as "refugees"; and that an international fund would be established to provide compensation for the property they had left behind when they immigrated to Israel during the 195os. 1 The immediate political significance of this declaration was to help Israel's prime minister at the time, Ehud Barak, to mobilize Shas Party voters (the majority of whom are Jews of Arab descent) in support of the so called "peace process." However, the underlying logic of the announcement-defining the Arab Jews as refugees -responded to a deeper political theory that was developed in Israel in the 1950s to counterbalance the collective rights of the Palestinian refugees. It is not surprising, therefore, that Palestinians around the world reacted with rage to this announcement. In its contemporary garb, the 110

What Do the Arab Jews and the Palestinians Have in Common? theory- known as the "population exchange" theory- was proposed with the aim of denying Israel's responsibility for the expulsion of Palestinians from Palestine in 1948 and 1967, to alleviate demands to compensate the Palestinian refugees, 2 and to serve as a bargaining chip against the so-called right of return. For all practical purposes, the population exchange initiative was used to legitimize Israel's wrongdoing with regard to the mass exodus (not to say expulsion) of the Palestinian refugees in 1948. In the following two chapters, I lay out the political history of the population exchange theory, focus on the alleged nexus between the Palestinian refugees and the Arab Jews, and challenge the validity of the theory by critically examining its logic, historical ramifications, and moral standing in contemporary Israeli political culture. I argue that while the state of Israel has put together a clear theory of exchange regarding the property of Arab Jews and Palestinian refugees, its position regarding the adoption of the population-exchange theory was, at least until July 2ooo, rather ambiguous' Whereas the government endorsed the idea in practice, it formed an official position that can be described as "constructed ambiguity."' The Israeli government was fearful of opening a Pandora's Box and decided neither to consolidate nor to formulate an explicit policy on the subject. To be sure, population management and the "need" to achieve a Jewish majority in Israel were the highest priorities of the state under construction, and the outcome was highly unpredictable. Whether Jewish leaders assumed responsibility for the expulsion or not, the majority of them were relieved to learn about the exodus of the Palestinian population in 1948. At this point, however, nobody could reliably have predicted the arrival of hundred of thousands of Arab Jews to offset the Palestinian mass exodus.' It was only with the immigration of Arab Jews from Iraq in the 1950s that the Israeli government partially entertained the use of the population exchange theory to further its national accounting strategy. However, for reasons specified below, the state of Israel never admitted, or explicated, its raison d'etat. As with its nuclear policy, it remained vague about its position on the population exchange question. The Jews of Iraq were the first to arrive en masse after the establishment of the state of Israel. I start with two historical anecdotes that challenge the Zionist narrative regarding this immigration and show how they were manipulated by the state oflsrael. I then show how the state of Israel seized the moment and used this immigration to counterbalance the claims of the Palestinian refugees. In January 1952, about half a year after the official conclusion of the operation that brought Iraq's Jews to Israel, two Zionist activists, Yosef Basri and lll

What Do the Arab Jews and the Palestinians Have in Common? Shalom Salah, were hanged in Baghdad. They had been charged with possession of explosive materials and throwing bombs in the city center. According to the account of Shlomo Hillel, a former Israeli cabinet minister and Zionist activist in Iraq, their last words as they stood on the gallows were "Long live the state oflsrael" (Hillel1985: 342). It would have only been natural for Iraqi Jews in Israel to have reacted with outrage to news of the hangings. But on the contrary, the mourning assemblies organized by leaders of the community in various Israeli cities failed to arouse widespread solidarity with the two Iraqi Zionists. Just the opposite; a classified communication from Moshe Sasson of the Foreign Ministry's Middle East Division to the then Foreign Minister Moshe Share!! said that many Iraqi immigrants, residents of the transit camps, had greeted the hanging with the attitude: 'That is God's revenge on the movement that brought us to such depths."' This bitter reaction attests to an acute degree of discontent among the newly arrived Iraqi Jews. It suggests that a good number of them did not view their immigration as the joyous return to Zion depicted by the community's Zionist activists. Rather, in addition to blaming the Iraqi government, they blamed the Zionist movement for bringing them to Israel for reasons that did not include the best interests of the immigrants themselves.' Three years later, in May 1955, an urgent meeting was called at the Israeli Foreign Ministry. Among the participants were the office's general manager and the head of Mossad, Isser Hare!. Those at the meeting were concerned with the fact that Jews who were arrested in Iraq in the late '94'" for membership in the Communist Party (and who did not make it into the mass immigration of Iraqi Jews to Israel in 1950-51) had now been released from prison and sent via Cyprus to Israel. The meeting's minutes, classified as "top secret," stated that Israel would notify the Iraqi government that it was not ready to accept every Jew from Iraq automatically, "unless we receive individual information beforehand, and we consider each potential candidate separately."' In other words, it was a decision to employ the Law of Return selectively. As these two anecdotes suggest, the story of how Iraq's Jews were brought to the newly established state of Israel affords an opportunity to reexamine Zionist historiography's theory about the relationship between the Arab Jews and the Palestinian refugees who were expelled or who fled in 1948. Certainly, these anecdotes challenge the official immigration narrative and attest to the biases associated with Zionist historiography, which describes the Iraqi immigration- which is known in the Zionist epos as "Operation Ezra and Nehemiah"- as a "rescue aliyah" (aliyah, literally, "going up;' is the 112

What Do the Arab Jews and the Palestinians Have in Common? standard Israeli term to denote immigration) that saved harassed Jews yearning to return to their ancient homeland after enduring ethnic suppression and discrimination. 9

The Zionist historiographical bias can also be discerned through the analysis of the population exchange theory. I start with its ramifications to the compensation and reparation issue. In 1948-51, the Israeli government was

faced with two intersecting claims: the demand of the United Nations and the governments of the United States and Britain that Israel compensate the 1948 Palestinian refugees for property impounded by Israel's Custodian General of Absentee Property, and the former Iraqi Jews' expectation that they be compensated for their property frozen by the Iraqi government in 1951 (see also Shenhav 1999, zooo). I shall draw on archival sources to show that the Israeli government turned this dilemma into a system akin to doubleentry bookkeeping with regard to the two sets of property- that of the 1948 Palestinian refugees and that of the Iraqi Jews - and thereby neutralized the claims of both. The government of Israel cited the injustice that the Iraqi government had done the Jews oflraq to explain its refusal to compensate the Palestinians but told the Iraqi Jews in Israel to apply to that same Iraqi government for restitution. This accounting logic was propounded by exploiting circumstances; it was not necessarily a deliberate scheme. However, when treated as a raison d'etat, it enabled the Israeli governmentto absolve itself "legitimately'' of responsibility for compensating the Palestinian refugees. 10 Moreover, Israel's

appropriation of the identity and property oflraq's Jews in the relentless drive to articulate Jewish nationalism served as a bargaining policy with which to deny Palestinian claims regarding the "right of return." The Jews of Iraq, as this chapter shows, became an instrument in a decision-making process from which they were excluded, and that rested on basic assumptions they did not necessarily share. 11 First, some historical background. Historical Background for the Immigration of Iraqi Jews In the period from 1949 to 1951- when the drama described in this chapter was played out-about 130,000 Jews lived in Iraq, constituting 3 percent of the country's population. The largest community was in Baghdad, followed by that of Basra; together these two cities accounted for some 75 percent of the Jews in lraq. 12 Three decades earlier, the supplanting of the Ottomans in the Middle East by the French and the British after World War I had engendered two significant developments in the region. First, a potent Iraqi na-

113

What Do the Arab Jews and the Palestinians Have in Common? tionalism sprang up when the Iraqis realized that the British had not come as liberators. The immediate result was an Iraqi uprising against the occupation in 1920. Iraq gained qualified independence in 1932. Until1941, when the revolt of Rashid Ali al-Kilani failed, Iraq was under the sway of a powerful nationalism that did not balk at forging ties with Nazi Germany in order to throw off British influence. Second, Zionist activity in the Middle East became more extensive, although intensive activity did not begin in Iraq until World War II. The interaction between these two social forces -Zionist nationalism and Iraqi Arab nationalism- particularly over the question of Palestine shaped the life of Iraq's Jews and finally transformed it beyond recognition (see Kedourie 1989 for discussion). In June 1941, following the flight of Rashid Ali and just before British forces reentered Baghdad, the city's Jews were brutally attacked by Iraqi nationalists. The assault, known as the farhud, left some 250 people, mostly Jews, dead or injured. Prime Minister Nuri es-Said's government did not shirk responsibility: eight of the assailants, among them army officers and policemen, were condemned to death. Following the 1941 attack, the Zionist leadership began contemplating means to "Zionize" Iraq's Jews and perhaps organize the immigration of part of the community to Israel." The Va'ad Leumi (National Council) of the pre-otate Jewish community in Palestine disseminated an exaggerated and distorted account of the farhud, describing it as a massacre (see Chapter 5). The assessment of Jewish leaders was that the impact of the farhud would be to intensify Zionist feelings among Iraq's Jews and that the momentum should be exploited to bring the community to Palestine. Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, later Israel's second president, said at the time: "The sense of agitation being experienced by the Jews oflraq should be exploited to transfer the young people and train them for productive work in Palestine, where they will serve as the pioneering vanguard for all the Jews of Babylon [lraq]." 14 In a meeting with David Ben-Gurion, the leader of the Jewish community in Palestine, in July 1941, Nuri es-Said did not deny the severity of the riots. However, he claimed that the root of the troubles was "the problem of Palestine" and added that he would not accept Jewish immigration to Palestine as a solution (Tsimhoni 1989). The first Zionist emissaries (after the farhud) arrived in Iraq in 1942. They immediately began to organize the Halutz (Pioneer) movement and Hashura (The Column), an organization for Jewish defense. As I described in Chapters 1 and 2, Zionist activity in Iraq owed its success to collaboration with the British and in general to the British presence there (Shiblak 1986). The first Zionist emissaries operated as soldiers of the British Army and as

"4

What Do the Arab Jews and the Palestinians Have in Common? representatives of Solei Boneh, the construction company owned by the General Federation ofLabor, which had won public tenders in Iran and Iraq. Although the Zionist movement's immediate interest in Iraqi Jewry was triggered by the farhud, it had other causes as well, which were not nece!r sarily related to the well-being of the community. Iraq was an important station in the overland transfer of Jewish refugees from eastern Europe who had reached the Soviet-Iranian border. To get them to Palestine, it was essential to have permanent assistance along a route that ran through Iraq and Iran (Yosef Meir 1973). The Zionist movement in Europe maintained that it was essential to establish a Zionist center in Iraq. When the Jewish leadership grasped the scale of the Holocaust, a second reason for taking an interest in Iraqi Jewry presented itself: to improve the Jewish demographic balance in Palestine (see Chapter 1). Like the other Arab Jews, the Jews of Iraq were considered a key population reservoir that could help tilt the demographic balance in Palestine in the Jews' favor. At a meeting in July 1943 of the Central Committee of Mapai, the dominant Jewish party (and forerunner of the Labor Party), one speaker put it this way: ''We can define our role with regard to this Jewry in one sentence: Zionist conquest of these Diaspora communities in order to liquidate them and transfer them to the Land oflsrael. ... We do not know how many Jews will remain in Europe following the campaigo of annihilation [being waged by the Nazis] against them." The geographical proximity between Iraq and Palestine was considered an exploitable advantage: "It is easier [for us] to get there ... and for them too it is easier to reach the Land oflsrael." 15 Representatives of the Labor movement in the Zionist leadership believed it was urgent to infiltrate Iraq and establish a united Zionist movement there - not least to preempt attempts by the Revisionist movement or the Iraqi Communist Party to gain a foothold among Iraq's Jews (Tsimhoni 1989). The Zionist activists who set up the Halutz movement in Iraq were 7

7

ruthless in their efforts to oust emissaries who were not under the control of

the Jewish Labor movement. Note that there was no local Zionist movement in Iraq to serve as a foundation on which the emissaries could build. 16 The Jews oflraq did not experience a Zionist "awakening'' and did not consider Palestine an attractive option. As early as '94'· Eliahu Epstein (Elath) of the Jewish Agency's Political Department met with a group of affluent Iraqi Jews who had fled to Tehran. However, he was unable to persuade them to settle in Palestine and invest their capital there. Some of them told him bluntly that they did not believe in Zionism (ibid.). They explained that they had no intention of displacing the Arabs of Palestine, and that migration to Palestine

"5

What Do the Arab Jews and the Palestinians Have in Common? was feasible only for Jews who were indigent or had relatives there. In like fashion, the first meeting of Zionist emissaries with the Jewish community in Iraq in 1942 showed how wide the gulf was that separated Iraq's Jews from the idea of political Zionism. Enzo Sereni, from Kibbutz Givat Brenner, who, as may be recalled from the previous chapters, arrived in Iraq in the guise of a Solei Boneh construction worker, but whose real mission was to organize the activity of the emissaries sent by the Mossad l'Aliyah Bet (the unit that handled illegal Jewish immigration to Palestine), said oflraq's Jews that "they do not think like Zionists or even have a Zionist instinct." 17 A report in the same spirit was conveyed by Aryeh (Shiel) Eshel, who was also sent to Iraq as a Solei Boneh worker: "I was told that they are Zionists ... and are ready to make aliyah . ... [But1all this is neither Zionism nor yearning for the Land of Israel nor readiness for aliyah. . . . [It is1 dreadful hypocrisy, the height of Levantism." 18 Even in 1950, two Quaker emissaries who visited Iraq reported that "the Jews we spoke to do not consider presentday Israel the realization of the biblical prophecy.... We understood that they do not believe in political Zionism" (Esther Meir 1997= 37). The Jewish Agency representatives in Iraq were also cogoizant of the disparity between the socialist ideology and the way of life of the local Jews. In internal meetings of the Jewish Agency, disappointment was voiced at the "unproductive" character of the Iraqi Jews who had settled in Palestine, as contrasted with the Jews of Yemen, who were considered productive and useful (Tsimhoni 1989). Among Iraq's Jews there was a strong sympathy toward the local Communist Party, and many of the community's young people were members of the party or of the Aoti-Zionist League (AZL). For the most part consisting of well-to-do families, the Jews of Iraq understood the damage affiliation with Zionism could wreak on their social, economic, and political status; they drew a distinction between their Jewish identity and a Zionist identity. Those Jews who did leave Iraq settled mainly in Europe and North America, not Palestine. Aoother difficulty faced by the emissaries of the Halutz movement in Iraq, in addition to the reluctance of the local Jews to cooperate, was that they received little assistance from their home base. In 1950, for example, a request by a key Zionist emissary, Mordechai Ben Porat, that the government organize illegal flights from Iraq was rejected (Tsimhoni 1991). Since no comprehensive, authoritative plan of action had been worked out with the Israeli government, the emissaries and the local activists often operated

on their own initiative, without precise guidelines. It was unfeasible for Iraq's Jews to remain in their native land-the so-

n6

What Do the Arab Jews and the Palestinians Have in Common? called Iraqi orientation (Kazzaz 1991)- for two interrelated reasons. One reason was surging Arab and Iraqi nationalism (Shiblaki986). The situation was aggravated by Prime Minister Nuri e..Said 's eo-option to the government of the right-wing nationalist party lstiqlal. The Iraqi Foreign Ministry informed the State Department in Washington that the government of Iraq was concerned about the inroads being made by Communism and Zionism among the Jews (ibid.: 70). The other reason that the Jews were compelled to leave was the activity of the Halutz movement in Iraq, which caused many local Jews to be perceived as Zionists and hence as fifth columnists. The establishment of the state of Israel in May 1948 was a boost for Iraqi nationalists, and Jews were identified irrevocably with Zionism, which was outlawed in Iraq in July 1948. Jews in the civil service were dismissed, and the entire Jewish community was placed under surveillance. The actions of the Zionist movement in Iraq thus forged a reality that retroactively seemed to justify its presence there. As Ben-Tzion Yisraeli, an emissary of the Jewish Agency in Iraq, had foreseen in 1943, 'They [the Iraqi Jews] are liable to be among the first to pay the price for our enterprise in the Land of Israel" 19 Shortly after his government assumed power in January 1949, N uri es-Said toyed with the idea of deporting the Iraqi Jews to Israel. However, the British ambassador in Palestine warned him that this might have serious unanticipated repercussions. Israel, the ambassador explained, would welcome the arrival of cheap Jewish labor and would demand that in return the Arab states assimilate Palestinian refugees (Tsimhoni 1991). In February 1949, the Foreign Office instructed the British ambassador in Baghdad, Sir Henry Mack, to caution N uri es-Said against expelling the Jews, on grounds that it would adversely affect the position of the Arab states (Shiblak 1986). In March 1950, Iraq enacted a denaturalization law- valid for one yearthat enabled the Jews to leave the country after renouncing their citizenship. All told, more than wo,ooo Jews were brought to Israel from Iraq in the period between May 1950 and June 1951, all of them by air. 20 Some 6o,ooo of them were brought to Israel in the last three months of the operation, between March and June 1951, but only after their property had been impounded by the Iraqi government. Thus was an entire community uprooted and its right- and the right of individuals within it- to decide its own fate appropriated (Swirski 1995). Moreover, the community was deprived of its economic rights and of the right to decide where to live and what nation to be a part of. More acutely, perhaps, the memory of a community was appropriated and transplanted into a different narrative -the Zionist narrative which the Iraqi Jews had had little share in creating (see Chapter 5). 21

"7

What Do the Arab Jews and the Palestinians Have in Common? The Israeli Government and the Jews oflraq Police Minister Behor Shitrit was the first, in March 1949, to raise the question of the "situation of Iraq's Jews" in the Israeli cabinet." Shitrit said he was worried about the condition of the Jews in Iraq after Zionism had been outlawed; at one stage he proposed that the property of Israeli Arabs be held hostage for the Jewish property in Iraq, butthis idea was rejected out of hand by the Israeli Foreign Ministry (Segev 19!4: 96). 23 At the end of that month (March 30, 1949), the Knesset (the Israeli parliament) held a debate on the situation of the Jews in the Arab countries. Eliahu Eliachar, from the Sephardi List, asserted that in addressing the refugee issue, the government must take into account the transfer to Israel of Jews who would want to make that move: '"This bargaining chip was given to our government

by Divine

Providence so that we can take preventive measures" (Tsimhoni 1991: 94). In July 1949, the British, in an attempt to boost their declining influence in the Middle East, put forward a proposal for a population transfer and tried to persuade Nuri es-Said to settle 1oo,ooo Palestinian refugees in Iraq. A letter sent by the British Foreign Office to it> legations in the Middle East spoke of an "arrangement whereby Iraqi Jews moved into Israel, received compensation for their property from the Israeli government, while the Arab refugees were installed with the property in Iraq" (Shiblak 1986: 83). The British Foreign Office believed that "the Israeli government would find it hard to resist an opportunity of bringing a substantial number of Jews to Israel" (ibid.). In return, Nuri es-Said demanded that half the Palestinian refugees be settled in the territory of Palestine and the rest in the Arab states. If the refugee arrangement were indeed fair, he said, the Iraqi government would permit a voluntary move by Iraqi Jews to Palestine. Under the terms of the plan, an international committee was to assess the value of the property left behind by the Palestinian refugees who would be settled in Iraq, and they would receive restitution drawn from the property of the Iraqi Jews who would be sent to Palestine (Tsimhoni 1991). Although Zionist circles at the time accepted ideas involving "population exchange" as a solution to the conflict, the pro-

posal did not generate an Israeli response-" In September 1949, Shitrit again raised what he called "the problem of the Jews in the Arab countries" in the cabinet. He asked whether the Foreign Ministry had taken steps to assist them, saying: "I would like to know if there is any way to abet their rescue; ... if it is possible to arrive at some agreement on a 'transfer' in terms of both property and people, and to take up the matter with the U.N. institutions and inform the world .... They are our broth-

n8

What Do the Arab Jews and the Palestinians Have in Common? ers, and it is our duty to rescue them." To which Foreign Minister Sharett retorted brusquely: ''This is actually a query and not a subject being put forward for discussion. . . . If Mr. Shitrit takes an interest in matters of immigration ... there is a special institution for it, and ... they will explain to you why it is impossible to bring Jews from Iraq at this time." In this discussion, Sharett for the first time spoke about the Jewish property in the Arab countries. He cited the absence of a peace treaty with Iraq as the reason for his negative attitude toward possible cooperation with the government in Baghdad, saying: "To address at this time the question of transferring the property of the Jews to Israel- that would be naive. We are talking about an agreement, about establishing peace, and we are not budging- are we suddenly going to succeed in ... getting the Arab states to accept an agreement regarding the Jews who reside in those countries? I am not blessed with that kind of diplomatic skill! Such thinking is quixotic."" For the sake of balance, Sharett did not forget to point out that hundreds of families had arrived in Israel from Egypt and were being provided with housing by the government. It was apparently not by chance that Sharett linked these new arrivals with the Palestinian property in Israel: "I met one of these families that had already settled in one of the abandoned villagespeople who had come from Egypt just a day or two before." This remark, however, elicited no reaction, because Prime Minister Ben-Curion stopped the discussion to show the cabinet a souvenir that been sent to him, inter-

jecting: "Permit me to interrupt you for a minute. I would like to show you the work of a young soldier from the Engineering Corps. This little tank is hand-made, and he did it with his own hands. It is used as a lighter." The discussion ended without the prime minister and the foreign minister having to address Shitrit's question about a transfer. However, Sharett's linkage of Jewish property and Arab property, here presented only in passing and associatively, would in time become the official policy not only of the Israeli government but of several Mizrahi organizations operating in Israel (see Chapter 5). In October 1949, the world and Israeli press reported the Iraqi-British plan for a population exchange (see, e.g., Davar, October 16, 1949). The publicity embarrassed the other Arab leaders and caused a stir in the refugee camps of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. In a message to the Foreign Office, Sir Henry Mack, the British ambassador to Iraq, said that the Palestinian refugees would not agree to settle in Iraq (Shiblak 1986). The Iraqi delegate to the United Nations, Fadil al-Jamali, also lost no time denying that Iraq had agreed to take in 1oo,ooo refugees; he claimed Zionist sources were behind

"9

What Do the Arab Jews and the Palestinians Have in Common? the reports." Even though internal documents show clearly that the plan was known to various levels of the Israeli administration,27 Israel immediately rejected it out of hand. At a meeting, the ministers pressed for information." "What does an exchange mean?'' Foreign Minister Share!! responded. ''We cannot solve the problem of the Arab refugees on the basis of an exchange. We do not have enough Jews to match the number of the Arab refugees." "In my eyes," Ben-Gurion said, "all the talk about an exchange is strange. Clearly, if the Iraqi Jews are able to leave, we'll receive them and not ask questions about an exchange or no exchange; about property or absence of property."" Israeli sources further claimed that "Iraq is casting an eye on the Jewish property," and that Baghdad had floated the transfer idea as a trial balloon.30 Nevertheless, Behor Shitrit now found it opportune to reiterate his transfer proposal. In response to various rumors, he wrote explicitly to the finance minister: "If an official proposal is made to our government about a population exchange, we should accept the offer."ll Ignoring such signals, Ben-Gurion and Sharett formulated a policy based on refusal, notwithstanding the government's apparent interest in bringing the Iraqi Jewish community to Israel. They understood the "heavy price" Israel would have to pay if it entered into concrete agreements regarding the Palestinians: allowing the return of the 11)48 Palestinian refugees and/or compensating them for their property. Sharett told the British ambassador that Israel would agree to take in the Iraqi Jews, just as it would any other Jewish community, but would not agree to receive them as displaced refugees (Tsimhoni 1991). The ambassador reported that a population exchange was acceptable to Israel in principle, but that the idea of exchanging 1oo,ooo homeless Palestinian refugees for 1oo,ooo Jewish refugees who would leave their assets behind was read in Israel as mere extortion (ibid.)." At the end of October 1949, the cabinet held a special meeting on the situation oflraq's Jews, apparently under pressure from Behor Shitrit." Briefing his cabinet colleagues on the demonstration held by the Iraqi community in protest against the government's failure to truly address the plight of the Jews in Iraq, even though it was the government that had brought about their tenuous sihlation~ the minister of police said:

by the government. They know that it was only recently that Jews were sent from here to accelerate the possibility of bringing the Jews of Iraq to Israel, if possible. But they are asking themselves whether the proposal by Nuri es-Said for a population exchange is a concrete offer or only an attempt to throw sand in our eyes . ... The Iraqis want to dispossess the These people are aware of the steps taken

Jews of the commercial and financial enterprises they own . ... 120

They constantly

What Do the Arab Jews and the Palestinians Have in Common? blame the spread of Communism on the Jews and view them as the bearers of the Communist message in Iraq .... The Jewish property in Iraq is estimated to be

worth £156 million. Foreign Minister Sharett observed: On the question of a population exchange, it was reported in the press, purport-

edly citing the spokesman of the Survey Group, that the prime minister of Iraq has allegedly made such an offer. We asked the Survey Group about the truth of this report. We received an official reply that in the course of a conversation, Nuri es-

Said had "thrown out" an idea along the lines of a possible exchange oflraq's Jews for the Arab refugees . ... Agreeing to this would mean, in my opinion, our agreement to have the property oflraq's Jews confiscated by the Iraqi Treasury in return

for the Arab property we have confiscated here, and then we assume responsibility for compensating the Jews of Iraq on account of the Arabs' property, as against the Jews' property there. That would create a dangerous precedent with regard to Egypt and other countries. It could also be construed to mean that every Arab counby undertakes to accept refugees only to the estent that it has Jews.

Sharett's concern was over a possible future claim of compensation by Iraq's Jews should the Israeli government agree to a transfer deal. The possibility of extricating the Iraqi Jews together with their property was lost in the accounting logic that he developed: 'This would be a dangerous precedent visa-vis other countries. We'll be confronted by tens of thousands of people who will arrive, naked and destitute, demanding that we give them property. This

could entangle us in an inextricable impasse." In the meantime, at the rumors of population exchange, excitement and expectation ran high within the Iraqi community in Israel (approximately 3,000 Jews who had immigrated prior to the establishment of the state of Israel). A large demonstration oflraqi Jews held in Tel Aviv demanded aid for their brethren in Iraq. Shitrit admonished the activists of the Iraqi commu-

nity in Israel "not to seek the intervention of foreign elements on their own," because this fell within the exclusive purview of the government." The community acceded to his request to leave such initiatives to the government. The Iraqi Jews in Israel were assured that the government was doing its utmost to extricate the Jewish property from Iraq and accelerate the departure of the Jews from that country. The transfer idea, it should be noted, was not alien to Zionist thinking; it was manifested in both praxis and ideology before and after the Iraqi Jews were brought to Israel." Thus, it can be said that the Israeli government's disregard of the transfer offers was motivated by a strategy of" constructive ambiguity." It kept its position vague, since it believed that officially agreeing to

121

What Do the Arab Jews and the Palestinians Have in Common? a transfer- despite the opportunity it presented to bring the Jews of Iraq to Israel-would create a "dangerous" precedent." In the government's estimate~ there were three times as many Palestinian refugees as there were Jews

in the Arab states: there were thought to be no more than 2oo,ooo Jews (the possibility of bringing the Maghreb Jews to Israel had not yet arisen)'' The Israeli government feared that by agreeing to a population exchange on a numerical basis, Israel might have to repatriate the "surplus refugees." Indeed, the Morton plan under the auspices of the United Nations called for the settlement of thousands of such "surplus" refugees in an internationalized Jerusalem." This possibility, combined with the information that Egypt was refusing to take in Palestinian refugees, deterred the Israeli government. The Foreign Ministry maintained that only if Iraq agreed to absorb 3oo,ooo to 400,000 Palestinian refugees in return for the Iraqi Jews could Israel contemplate accepting the transfer agreement. 39 However, that possibility was deemed far-fetched."" Fearful of having to cope with a "surplus" of Palestinian refugees, the Israeli government preferred to forgo an agreement for the departure of Jews who found themselves threatened in Iraq because of the activity of the Zionist underground, the 1948 war, Israel's establishment, and the rise oflraqi and Arab nationalism. At the same time, by spurning the transfer, Israel gained economically. The Palestinians' abandoned property remained in the hands of the state's Custodian General, while Iraq's freeze of Jewish property could be invoked as a "successful" excuse to justify the confiscation of Palestinian assets. The property of the Iraqi Jews, if brought to Israel in exchange for Palestinian property, would have remained in the possession of its individual owners and would not have been taken over by the government as "national capital." The agitation over the possibility of a population exchange faded only in March 1950, with the enactment of the denaturalization law in Iraq, enabling Jews to leave Iraq after renouncing their citizenship. Pressure for the law's enactment was exerted by Prime Minister Tawfiq al-Suwaidi, a graduate of the French-Jewish Alliance network of schools. His many Jewish friends included the leader of the community, Yeskail Shemtob, and the Zionist emissary Mordechai Ben Porat, who were also instrumental in get-

ting the law passed. In addition to giving up their Iraqi nationality, those who left under the law waived the right to return to Iraq ever again. The law was to remain in force for one year; it said nothing about property.41 However, the passage of the law itself did not induce Jews to register for emigration. Indeed, the question of what motivated the Jewish population to leave en masse remains unresolved. 12 We do know that on April 8, 122

1950,

a

What Do the Arab Jews and the Palestinians Have in Common? fragmentation grenade exploded near a Jewish caf~ in Baghdad, and that in the wake of that incident, there was a huge rise in the number of candidates for emigration, from 150 to about 23,ooo. Over the next year or so, until June 1951, four similar explosions occurred at sites associated with Jews. The proZionist version of events holds that the bombs were thrown by Iraqi nationalists (see, e.g., Esther Meir 1997). A different account finds a direct connection between the five bombings in Baghdad and the rate of registration by Jews to leave the country from March 1950 to June 1951. According to this view, we cannot rule out the possibility that the Zionist emissaries made use of the incidents to frighten hesitant Jews and prod them to register (Shiblak 1986). A third version finds a reasonable possibility that the bombings were a local initiative by the Zionist underground, unbeknownst to the leadership in Israel. According to this account of events (which is unsupported by documentation), the emissaries and the local activisb wanted to bring pressure

to bear on the Israeli government, which was delaying the removal of the Jews from Iraq because of priorities given to immigration of Jews from Romania and Poland. To date we do not have clear evidence that would support any of these versions. The rate at which the emigrants were brought to Israel fluctuated from month to month in accordance with guidelines issued by the Israeli government and the Jewish Agency's immigration department. The quotas were generally low, owing to the arrival in Israel, at the same time, of Jews from eastern Europe, leaving the anxious Jews of Iraq waiting their turn in a kind of limbo, having renounced their citizenship and, afterward, having also been stripped of their property. In Israel, there were protests at the mere trickle of arrivals from Iraq. In November 1950, officials reported to the foreign minister that the Iraqi community in Israel was "complaining at the discrimination against the Mizrahi communities in the immigration quotas to Israel."" Three stormy demonstrations against the government in Israel led to a promise to raise the figure from 5,ooo to 6,500 Iraqi immigrants per month. In Iraq itself, local Zionist activists had seized control of the community after the leadership lost control of events. The young militants, enthralled by Zionist nationalism, were highly critical of the community's leadership, which found their approach wrongheaded. They branded the leader of the community, Rabbi Sasson Kedourie, a "traitor and a collaborator" with the Iraqi authorities, and according to some reports, he was beaten up and boycotted (Esther Meir 1993: 205). Under this pressure, Rabbi Kedourie and the entire community council resigned; the new leader, Heskail Shemtob, was willing to cooperate with the activists (ibid.; Shiblak 1986). Having taken over

What Do the Arab Jews and the Palestinians Have in Common? the local leadership, the young Zionists also tried to gain control of registration for emigration. In April1950, following the enactroent of the denaturalization law, attempts were made on behalf of the state of Israel to extract the Jewish property in Iraq unilaterally. Ezra Danin, an adviser to the Foreign Ministry's Middle East Division, reported that he had been requested by the prime minister to trade the property oflsraeli Palestinians listed as "presen~' and "non-absentees;' who "will want to leave" because "they have not been able to adapt to the Jewish state," for the property of the Jews in Iraq. "I have been asked ... to try to examine whether the possibility exists to exchange property of non-absentee [emphasis in the original] Israeli Arabs for property of Jews in Iraq," Danin wrote to the finance minister. "It was emphasized that the examination will be carried out with regard to Iraq and not the other Arab states, and that no attempt should be made to involve property of absentee Arabs in this matter."44 Danin, it should be noted, was a member of the transfer committee BenGurion had set up (Benziman and Mansour 1992). The proposal put forward by Ben-Gurion and Sharett constituted a program for the planned transfer of "present" Israeli Arabs. Z. Lief, an adviser on land and borders in the Prime Minister's Office, and an ardent activist in the efforts to organize a transfer of Israel's Palestinians, had already moved to implement the proposal." In a note to the prime minister, the foreign minister, and the finance minister, Lief wrote: "As a first means, I would advise instructing our representative in

Persia to contact Jewish circles in Iraq and have them desist from the wholesale liquidation of assets at depressed prices and hint to them that the prospect exists that they will be able to liquidate their property at better terms

on an exchange basis."46 Nothing was done about Liefs request, but Danin persisted in his efforts and was able to work out an arrangement with a number of Palestinian families to leave Israel. Emissaries went to Iran on his behalf in order to organize a property exchange from there, but their efforts fell through because the proposals sounded suspicious to the Iraqi Jews. Reports about difficulties, discrimination, and bureaucratic obstacles in Israel deterred them from invest-

ing in the country or transferring capital there (Benziman and Mansour 1992). Still, it is not clear whether the attempts at a unilateral extraction of property were serious. In September 1950, after the organized departure of Jews from Iraq had begun, and with the Israeli government no longer feeling threatened by an explicit transfer agreement, Sharett acknowledged publicly that the Iraqi proposal had been a genuine diplomatic option.47

What Do the Arab Jews and the Palestinians Have in Common? From here, we move to the heart and soul of the human and political drama surrounding the Jewish and the Palestinian property, and the false connection between them. Jewish Property, Palestinian Property, and Raison d'Etat By March 1951, a year after Iraq's Jews had been given the opportunity to leave, about 105,000 Jews had registered to emigrate, though only 35,000 had actually left. The rest, having renounced their citizenship, were waiting. On March 10, Prime Minister Nuri es-Said submitted a bill to impound and freeze the property of the Jews, the richest in the Middle East.48 To prevent transactions being carried out in the period between the bill's enactment into law and its implementation, the Finance Ministry shut down the country's banks for three days and the police moved to ensure that the legislation was carried out. Stores owned by Jews were sealed, vehicles and other items were confiscated, and the homes of merchants and jewelers were searched (Cat 1989; Rejwan 1995). The law freezing Jewish assets came as a gift from the gods to the Israeli government, which was relieved by it of the need to make a formal declaration of support for a population exchange, with all that this entailed; henceforth it would be possible to refer to any such exchange of property and people as a spontaneous occurrence. Sharett briefed the cabinet on the law and its implications: 'The question that arises is what we can do. Approaches to England and France are possible, of course, but ... they could say: You took the property of the Arabs who left Palestine and entrusted it to a custodian; they are doing the same."49 Sharett continued to develop the government's approach, but the implication regarding the Palestinian property was still indecisive and inchoate: 'There is tremendous excitement within the Baghdad community [in Israel]. I shall probably receive a delegation from them today. They will undoubtedly advise that we confiscate the property of all the Arabs in Israel, and that we give these people the property of the Arabs that is in the possession of the state. I do not have to explain to you -you understand the problem this gives rise to." Neither Sharett nor Ben-Curion viewed this as a realistic option. In its place a double-entry bookkeeping logic was formulated: SHARE TT:

"There is another possibility: a declaration on our part that all this

will be taken into account in the payment of compensation in a final settlement, etc. Let us say that if for the time being we have not abandoned the principle of

payment of compensation, we declare that we shall deduct the value of this property."

What Do the Arab Jews and the Palestinians Have in Common? [Finance Minister] ELIEZER KAPLAN: "I would not approach the United Nations, I do not see what the point of such appeals is, but I would announceboth here and to the U.N.- that in the light of the plunder there [in Iraq], we shall take it into account in every reckoning that we submit." nov

"There is some danger in that."

JOSEPH:

"But it is the buth, because if we ever get something and make a just accounting ... whether for individual compensation or group compensation, we shall enter it into the account and announce it immediately" KAPLAN:

"The Iraqi Jews [in Israel] ... are planning to go to the Foreign

B. SHITRIT:

Ministry, and the foreign minister will have to receive them. I do not think we can make do with vague words; there is no doubt that their demand regarding the property of the Arabs in Israel is well-founded. We cannot simply say that we had a windfall. Their [the Iraqi Jews'] situation is due to the creation of Israel, and we must think of a way to compensate them- compensation drawn from the property of the Arabs. Otherwise they can argue, with justification: jlf it were not for the

state oflsrael, after all, [we would not have been obliged to leave Iraq;] we lived there for hundreds of years as free people, we engaged in commerce and crafts, we accumulated riches and propert:f; and if we tell them that is irrelevant, we shall only be fanning the flames." "I propose that we submit a bill to the Knessetto create a fund for the absorption of Iraqi Jews who were dispossessed by the Iraqi government DAVID REMEZ:

when they left." D. JOSE PH:

"What we all understand-thatthere is a difference between what

we did and what they did- the gentiles do not understand. The world knows that people left this country and are not being allowed to return, and on that basis we took their property. It is not so straightforward for the gentiles, it is not as straightforward to them as it is to us." "First as regards what Minister Remez said: I think that the passage of any such resolution by the Knesset would be an unmitigated disaster, because we would be stating a priori that whenever money is plundered from Jews, E. KAPLAN:

it will be paid [back] to them by the government of Israel. That is a very strange form of protest. If someone does a wrong, he should pay the consequences. If Minister Remez is saying that we should help them, we are helping all new immigrants by spending millions of pounds to settle them in this country."

Kaplan's contention that vast amounts of money were being expended to bring the Iraqi Jews to Israel was groundless. Even after its assets were impounded, the Iraqi Jewish community was the only one that bore the brunt of the costs of its migration from its own resources (Yosef Meir 1973: 313).

u6

What Do the Arab Jews and the Palestinians Have in Common? Later in the discussion, Kaplan cautioned Shitrit against creating the impression that the Israeli government had wronged the Iraqi Jews: To Minister Shitrit I would say that he should be wary of stating: "Actually, these Jews could have stayed quietly in Iraq, but Israel forced them to leave their country," as though they are merely victims of the state of Israel. ... If we accept Minister Shitrit's remarks, then ... one could go further and say that the state of Israel owes compensation to each and every person who comes here. In Poland, too, and not only in Iraq, the money of Jews who immigrate to Israel is taken from them.

On March 19, Sharett apprised the Knesset of the government's reaction to the decision by the Iraqi parliament to freeze Jewish property. In his statement, Sharett officially and unequivocally fused the two accounts into a single equation, as he had already proposed to the cabinet: The government of Israel ... views this episode of plunder in the spirit of the law as the continuation of the malicious regime of dispossession that has always pre-

vailed in Iraq vis-a-vis defenseless and helpless minorities. ... By freezing the assets of tens of thousands of Jews who are immigrating to Israel- today stateless but citizens of Israel immediately upon their immigration- the government of Iraq has opened an account between it and the government of Israel. We already have an account with the Arab world, namely, the account of the compensation that accrues to the Arabs who left the territory oflsrael and abandoned their property. ... The act now committed by the kingdom of Iraq ... forces us to link the two ac-

counts .... We shall take into account the value of the Jewish property that has been frozen in Iraq with respect to the compensation we have undertaken to pay the Arabs who abandoned property in Israel. 50

With this decision -which in one fell swoop turned the private capital of Iraq's Jews into "national capital"- the Israeli government nullified any poosible alternative for their independent compensation 51 The Foreign Ministry informed the Palestine Conciliation Commission that the Israeli government was committed to contributing to a resolution of the refugee problem, but added: "It will be unable to horror that commitment if in addition to its other commitments to absorb new immigrants, it finds itself having to undertake the rehabilitation of 10o,ooo Iraqi Jews." 52 In the debate that followed Sharett's statement to the Knesset, the Iraqi government's moves drew wall-te>-wall condemnation. Tawfiq Toubi of the 44

Israeli Communist Party termed the property freeze reactionary," '"racist," 44 and fascist." Some speakers drew an analogy with '"Nazi plunder." Meir

Argov (Mapai) noted that the Israeli government had intended to help resolve the refugee problem, "but now, after the plunder of the Iraqi Jews, we

What Do the Arab Jews and the Palestinians Have in Common? shall be exempt from that obligation." Although Baghdad was universally criticized, only three Knesset members had harsh words for the Israeli government. Eliahu Eliachar (Sephardi List) questioned the government's slow pace in bringing the Iraqi Jews to Israel. Castigating the "quota" system, he revealed that Sharett had rejected a request he had made together with Behor Shitrit to speed up the rate of emigration. Right-wing MKs directly assailed the absurd logic and terminology of the double-entry bookkeeping approach. Israel Rokach (General Zionists) said: "We cannot accept ... that it is possible to immediately open a system of accounting and thereby 'cover up' the plunder and taking of property.... It is inconceivable ... that we should make do with entering from the other side of the ledger a debit against the robbery." Also protesting Sharetfs use of the term "account" was

Ya'akov Meridor (Herut), who insisted that the Arab states owed Israel compensation of "hundreds of millions of pounds sterling," rather than the reverse. Consequently, there was nothing to be gained by threatening to deduct the value of the Jewish assets in Iraq "from a sum that we are under no obligation whatsoever to pay." 53 Sharett's statement, which linked the frozen Jewish assets in Iraq with the Palestinians' property and seemed to hold out the promise of compensation for the Iraqi Jews, was aimed at both the Iraqi Jews and the international community. It was necessary to send a message to the Iraqi Jews, who had assailed the Zionist activists for doing nothing to salvage the community's property. The statement- whose implications Sharett would later disavow- assuaged the concerns of the Iraqi Jews, as intended, but also generated high expectations among them. They were now convinced that they would receive restitution from the Israeli government for the property they were leaving behind. According to a cable from the Zionist emissaries in Iraq, Sharett's statement in the Knesset generated a very positive response among both the Jews and the Arabs. The Jews believed that they now had something to rely on, and this went a long way to relieving their state of depression . ... Jews whose property has been frozen are asking us whether it will be necessary to present documents in Israel proving their ownership of the frozen property, and if so how to forward these documents. 54

Yitzhak Raphael, the head of the Jewish Agency's Aliyah Department, who was also a recipient of the cable, noted with satisfaction in his diary that Sharett's statement had mitigated the sense of discrimination among the Iraqi Jews 55 S. Kahane of the Foreign Ministry's Middle East Division cautioned Sharett that "we have to take into account that the registration of claims may

u8

What Do the Arab Jews and the Palestinians Have in Common? generate illusions among the new immigrants, and they are liable to demand that the government of Israel pay them compensation from the funds of the [Arabs'] abandoned property." 56 The chairperson of the "Movement of the Jews of Iraq and the East in Israel" insisted that the government pay compensation immediately to the Iraqi immigrants, using the Arab property in Israel that was managed by the Custodian General 57 In a bland reply, the Foreign Ministry assured him of "the government of Israel's consistent concern for the fate of the property of the Jews in Iraq." 58 At the same time, however, the ministry sent an internal memorandum to the director-general of the Prime Minister's Office explaining that the registration of property claims had the sole purpose of creating a bargaining chip on the Palestinian issue. The memorandum added that it was crucial to uphold the principle of group compensation and not individual payments, as many of the refugees were demanding. "We shall not, then;' the author of the document noted, "be able to take the opposite approach with the Iraqi immigrants without opening the gates to a flood of private claims from tens of thousands of Arab refugees who once owned any property in the Land of Israel." In short, the Foreign Ministry's proposal- which was put into practice- was to make the Iraqi immigrants hostages of the Israeli government. 59 As noted, Sharett's Knesset statement was also intended as a message to the great powers. Although in the past he had vehemently opposed the transfer option, the frozen property in Iraq afforded him a golden opportunity to lock the skeleton of the Palestinians' rights into a closet. Even though Sharett himself knew that the Palestinian property that had been plundered was vastly more valuable than the estimated worth of the Jewish property in Iraq, he nonetheless allowed the Foreign Ministry to "release" exaggerated appraisals of the respective worth of the two accounts. In a cable to the Israeli legation in Paris, Waiter Eytan noted: 'The mutual release of frozen deposits should include Iraq .... The value of the frozen deposits of Arabs in Israel is estimated at five and a half million pounds, whereas the value of the frozen deposits of the Jews in Iraq is at least twenty million and perhaps even thirty to forty million."60 On March 27, 1951, Sharett met with U.S. Undersecretary of State George C. McGhee, in the presence of the U.S. ambassador to Israel'' Sharett reasserted the Israeli government's promise and enlisted the German reparations to Israel as a possible source for enabling its implementation. On May 1, 1951, the United States announced that if the Israeli government took positive action to accelerate the transfer of the frozen property of the Palestinian refugees, it would be possible to approach Baghdad with a similar request.62

What Do the Arab Jews and the Palestinians Have in Common? In its reply, the Israeli government rejected the comparison but reiterated its readiness to pay restitution for the "abandoned property" as part of a peace agreement." Britain, too, maintained that the Iraqis' impounding of Jewish property was not an original idea: Israel had set the precedent. No attempt to effect a settlement would be useful, the British believed, unless Israel either unfroze the refugees' property or paid compensation (Gat 1989; Kedourie 1989). The Israeli government's creation of the linked property account was a singular act- something of a historic milepost- that constructed a zero-sum equation between the Jews of the Arab countries and the Palestinians in Israel. The political theory that underlay the Israeli government's construction of that equation rested on a system of moral 1 diplomatic 1 and economic assumptions that resulted in a practice of nationalization and naturalization

that was riddled with contradictions. The government oflsrael automatically assumed that the Jewish ethnicity of the Iraqi Jews meant that they harbored a Zionist orientation. It "endowed" them de facto with that particular form of national identity before they had any intention of immigrating to Israel, and certainly without having obtained their consent. The Foreign Ministry was aware that the Iraqi Jews could not be considered refugees, still less citizens of Israel. 64 The process of nationalizing and naturalizing the Iraqi Jewswhile they were still in Iraq- was collective rather than individual. The parties in question were not consulted. As Sharett put it, "I said that we shall not rely on the free choice of the refugees, but that this is a question of an agreement between states."65 On the basis of this naturalization, the Israeli government "appropriated" the property of all of Iraq's Jews in order to utilize it- rhetorically, symbolically, and judicially- as state property in every respect. Files in the State Archive containing the correspondence of the Foreign Ministry on the property of Iraq's Jews bear the telltale heading "Protection oflsraeli Property."" As soon as the immigration of Iraqi Jews was concluded, the Israeli government turned its back on the new arrivals. The Foreign Ministry objected to the establishment of a special ministry to register their claims deriving from their frozen property. Sharett maintained that his statement in the Knesset had not been a commitment to compensate the Iraqi Jews. What he had meant, he explained, was that "the value of the Jewish property that was frozen in Iraq will be taken into account when the time comes to discuss compensation. That time has not yet come, there is no knowing when it will come, and the entire matter will be worked out in due course" (Gat 1989: 137). Sharett's declaration that the question of the Jewish property would be

What Do the Arab Jews and the Palestinians Have in Common? taken into account in the future was put to an empirical test three times: in 1951, in the mid 1950s, and in the 1970s, during the negotiations on the peace treaty with Egypt. In 1951, a government commission was established to document Jewish property left in Iraq. The documentation was done while the immigrants were still in transit camps. Archival documents show that the commission was not created out of concern for the Iraqi Jews' property; its re-

port was to be used as a buffer by the Israeli government in the face of future claims for compensation resulting from the nationalization of Palestinian property by the Custodian General. Thus, the officials who drew up the document establishing the commission, seeking to conceal the manipulation, wrote: "It is proposed not to announce, at least for the time being, that registration of the personal claims is being carried out with the aim of deducting the value of the Jewish property frozen in Iraq from the payment of compensation for the abandoned Arab property."" In 1955, public pressure forced the establishment of another commission

to register the Iraqi immigrants' claims once again. The commission sent a report, dated December 17, 1956, to the Foreign Ministry, where it was ignored {Gat 1989: 221). The officials suggested that the registration should be done by an extragovemmental body in order to avert a situation in which the government would have to assume responsibility vis-il-vis the Iraqi Jews. On the eve of the commission's establishment in October 1955, the prime minister ordered that Iraqi immigrants presenting their claims not be asked about movables they had left behind, since "their registration is liable to conflict with our policy of restitution to the Arab refugees, which is confined solely to immovables."" MK Shlomo Hillel, who had been one of the leading Zionist activists in Iraq, was involved in making this decision, which was one of the most cynical acts of the government in its treatment of the Iraqi community in Israel. In 1975, the newly established government-financed pressure group known as the World Organization of Jews from Arab Countries (WOJAC) argued that Palestinian refugees should not be allowed back into Israel, since an involuntary population exchange had already taken place in the Middle East. Led by Mordechai Ben Porat, a former Zionist leader in Iraq, member of Moshe Dayan's Rafi party, and cabinet minister, the organization adopted a resolution casting responsibility on the Arab governments. Speaking at the General Assembly of the United Nations in December 1977, Ben Porat stated that "the problem of the Arab and Jewish refugees in the Middle East can find its practical solution only within the framework of de facto exchanges of population, which have already taken place." WOJAC too held the same at131

What Do the Arab Jews and the Palestinians Have in Common? titude as the state toward the property claims of the Iraqi Jews, maintaining that they should be used to enhance the bargaining power of the Israeli government, not to support individual claims. The government oflsrael has capitalized on the population exchange argument to deny the rights of the Palestinians to rerum to Palestine or to claim compensation for their '"lost"'

property (see Chapter 5 for an examination of these claims). The principle of the trade-off equation adduced by the government of Israel was put to a third empirical test in the negotiations on the peace treaty with Egypt. When Shlomo Hillel, speaking in the Knesset in 1979, raised the question of the connection between the peace treaty and the Jewish property in Arab countries, Prime Minister Menachem Begin gave a noncommittal response:

The problem of the Jewish property that was plundered in the Arab states, not just in one country, has been and will be raised in all the discussions. It has also been

raised and will be raised in our talks with Egypt, because we have agreed to the establishment of a claims committee in which each side will put forward its claims. When the day comes, we shall submit our claim for the rehlm of the illegally

taken property. (Hillel•985: 325) The government of Israel had created the equation but ignored its practical implications. Shlomo Hillel, too, grasped the great fraud of the property equation, even with respect to the Palestinians: If the day comes when the Arab refugees consent to accept compensation from Israel for their abandoned property, we shall not be able to tell them that in fact matters between us and Iraq have already "been worked out'' - in other words,

that Iraq plundered the property of the Jews who lived there and the former Iraqi Jews received in return the property of the Arabs who left the state of Israel For Iraq is among the Arab states that did not take in refugees, and it is very doubtful

that the refugees will view it as a party to any sort of deal. (Hillel•985: 324)

Population Exchange and the Palestinian "Right of Return" The Jews of Iraq became hostages of- and a fig leaffor- the Israeli government in its efforts to divest itself of responsibility for compensating the Palestinian refugees. The conceptual model that guided the Zionist leadership vis-it-vis the Jews of Iraq, as with other communities, held that Jewish identity and Zionist identity were one and the same. The national leadership assumed a monopoly over the community and its property, even though neither the one nor the other was located in its territorial domain. The working

What Do the Arab Jews and the Palestinians Have in Common? of the same model is discernible in the case of the reparations received by the government oflsrael from Germany after World War 11 (Barkan 2000). A condition of the trade-off equation was that the Palestinians' national identity be annulled, and that they be regarded as part of a "united Arab nation" that included Iraq. That approach forged one of the most pungent illusions harbored by Israel in its brief history ("There is no Palestinian people," as Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir used to say) 69 The trade-off equation cynically constructed the interests of Arab Jews and Palestinian as conflicting a priori. During the 1948 war, much Palestinian property was abandoned and plundered in the territory of British Mandate Palestine. Estimates of the value of the Palestinian property managed by the Custodian General vary. Arab sources put it at about $2.5 billion. 70 In a secret cabinet meeting held in November 1951, Sharett disclosed that the U.N.'s Palestine Conciliation Commission had appraised the worth of the abandoned property of the 6oo,ooo Palestinian refugees at approximately $1 billion-" The government of Israel did not compensate the 1~ refugees. Its argument was that the Jews from the Arab countries were also refugees. Yet at the same time, the Israeli government was drawing up its claims for reparations and restitution from Germany (Zweig 1993). As argued throughout the chapter, the linkage that was created between the Arab refugees of 1~ and the Arab Jews was used also to block any Palestinian claim for the right of return. Approximately 7oo,ooo Palestinians were expelled from or fled Palestine in 1948-" It is yet to be determined to what extent this was the outcome of a planned and systematic expulsion or a combination of other factors, including uncoordinated assaults oflocal Jewish commanders (Morris 1986a, 1986b, 1987; Pappe 1999). It is uncontested, however, that the war resulted in the destruction of approximately 400 Palestinian villages and a huge refugee problem, which amounts today to more than 4 million people,73 most of whom are scattered in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Egypt, and the West Bank and Gaza (Said 2001). With the consolidation of the Palestinian national struggle in the past three decades, the displaced Palestinian refugees became a living symbol of the 1948 catastrophe known as al-Nakba, and the "right of return" its quintessential emblem. "The issue in the by now notorious peace process finally has come down to one issue, which has been at the core of the Palestinian depredations since 1948: the fate of the refugees who were displaced in 1948, again in 1967 and again in 1982 by naked Israeli ethnic cleansing," as Edward Said put it (2001: 1). 74 Said denounced the attempt to forget the "question of 1948," in which the 1 33

What Do the Arab Jews and the Palestinians Have in Common? right of return is most salient: "That is a sentiment that I can neither share nor, I hasten to add, easily forgive" (ibid.). Likewise, a statement issued by the Popular Organizations of the Refugee Camps in the West Bank anticipating the Camp David meeting stated unequivocally that the negotiators should not bother to return unless they brought back the right of return. "We are going home -home to Palestine. Our olive trees and oranges await us. We will not accept anything less no matter who signs the next ... agreements" (News from Within, September 2000, 20). Naturally, no one can determine the extent to which the refugees' "right of return" would be realized if the opportunity were given them. Some Palestinian scholars argue that the claim is much more of symbolic than realistic value." Furthermore, it is also not completely clear what the term "right of return" means. Does it mean that refugees are entitled to go back to their places of origin~ irrespective of who lives there now? Does it mean the building of new Palestinian cities within historical Palestine? Does it apply to a limited number of people of the first generation or to all refugees? One way or another, the issue of the Palestinian refugees cannot be swept away without an open discussion, not to speak of a serious solution. To Israeli Jews, however, the "right of return" is considered a deadly threat to Israel's existence as a Jewish state. Irrespective of their political position within the Zionist fold, whether Right or Left, Israelis treat "the right of return" as a black box, a sealed-ff package, and are unwilling to consider the many ways in which it might be discussed, interpreted, negotiated, and perhaps solved. This was manifested clearly in Ehud Barak's negotiation strategy in Camp David in July 2000, where he and his underlings refused to conduct any serious discussions about the return or repatriation of refugees." However, Jewish refusal to engage in political dialogue regarding the "right of return" is not uniform and can be roughly separated into three categories. These categories are neither exhaustive nor mutually exclusive but capture most discursive strategies used in Israel today. First~ there is the mainstream response that denies any Israeli responsibility for the refugee problem. Zionist historiography gives ample example of this response, insofar as it attributes the Palestinians' mass exodus notto Jewish atrocities hullo orders ostensibly issued by Arab leaders calling on the Palestinians to flee their homes and villages (see Morris 1986a and 1987 for extensive discussion). Second, there are those (mainly on the Zionist Left) who acknowledge Israel's partial moral and political responsibility for the refugee problem but reject the "right of return," arguing that it will put an end to Israel's existence as a Jewish state. Third, there are those who brush off Israel's responsibility and

134

What Do the Arab Jews and the Palestinians Have in Common? invoke the "population exchange" argument, suggesting that there was a de facto population transfer, in which the Palestinian refugees "fled" Palestine and Jews "fled" Arab countriesJ7 My intention in this discussion is not to offer a solution to the "right of return." I rather seek to expose the fallacies associated with this third discursive strategy. As I have shown, the "population exchange" theory remained dormant until the mid 197os, when the Palestinian Liberation Organization was established. It was then conjured up and used again in the political discourse, mainly by WOJAC. 78 For all practical purposes, the Israeli Foreign Ministry contracted out its discursive practices regarding "population exchange" to WOJAC. However, as I show in the next chapter, WOJAC never succeeded to reach a sound conclusion about the usefulness and the astuteness of the theory. The Israeli Foreign Ministry was fearful that such claim would provoke the Palestinians to intensify their talk of return, encourage Jews to file individual claims against their former Arab countries, and in turn lead Palestinian refugees to file individual claims against the state of Israel. Furthermore, the population exchange theory, which necessitated the definition of Arab Jews as refugees, ran counter to the official Zionist history and required considerable changes in its epos. As a result, the Israeli Foreign Ministry called on WOJAC to halt all activities and tried to redraw the boundaries between itself and that organization. The analyses put together highlight the inconsistency, contradictions, and disruptions that the population exchange initiative generated before it resurfaced during the Camp David meeting in July 2000.

1

35

CHAPTER

5

The Arab Jews and Zionist Historical Memory

The previous chapters, which deal mainly with Zionist hegemonism, allow Arab Jews little opportunity to express themselves. In this chapter, therefore, I endeavor to listen to Arab Jewish voices, treating them not as passive objects of Middle Eastern history but rather as subjects who speak and act within that history. In other words, this is an attempt to read history through those who have been forgotten or suppressed from collective Israeli memory and to animate the silences in the discourse. Let us consider the history of the World Organization of Jews from Arab Countries (WOJAC), an advocacy group established in 1974. which I define for purposes of analysis as a "community of memory." To what extent did WOJAC challenge Zionist and Israeli historical memory? The question may seem paradoxical, because WOJAC was established to integrate the memory of the Arab Jews into Israeli-Zionist historical memory, not to contest it. It was financed by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Aflairs and the Jewish Agency, and many of its members were politicians, senior officials, and academics with close ties to the ruling establishment. Yet it is precisely here, at the nexus of an attempt to incorporate the Arab Jews into the Zionist project, rather than excluding them from it, that !locate the anomaly that derives from their "othemess" in the history of the Zionist idea and within

Israeli society. In addition to invoking the WOJAC test case, I shall adduce a number of general historical arguments. First, I shall show that a community of memory generates a diversity of voices and is not committed to one coherent memory. This multiplicity of voices will demonstrate that many concepts that the hegemonic discourse uses, such as "Mizrahim," 4'Zionism," "migration," and "territory," are fluid categories with fluctuating meanings and continuously evolving content. Second, I shall show that the historical and structural place of the Mizrahim within the Zionist experience makes possible the contestation of national and state discourse and invites new interpretations thereof. I

The Arab Jews and Zionist Historical Memory shall show that the members of WOJAC, like other Mizrahi organizations, functioned like builders and stonemasons of Zionist historical memory, yet at the same time, unintentionally, their work dismantled the foundations of the site they seem to have wanted to construct. As will be seen, the Israeli establishment identified this unintended deconstruction of the national and state discourse as subversive and reacted by attempting to silence the threatening voices, on the grounds that they were "ethnic," meaning that they were subverting the homogeneous national identity. This analysis will also make possible a fresh look at the conventional distinction in Israeli discourse between nationalism and ethnicity. The public and academic discourse perceives the "ethnic rift" as an intra-Jewish phenomenon that has nothing to do with the national conflict between the Jews and the Palestinians, in which the Jewish nation is seen as monolithic. The discussion of the relations between Mizrahim and Ashkenazim is thus separated from the discussion of the relations between Jews and Palestinians, and the lines of confrontation are viewed and described as though stretching between two parallel planes that never converge. WOJAC seemingly operated according to the same model. It was a player in the national arena that endeavored to delegitirnize the "ethnic" discourse and instead shape an ethnically transparent discourse resting exclusively on Jewish national foundations. What happened, however, was that the WOJAC-fomented discourse deconstructed the homogeneous intra-Jewish discourse, signposted its inherent contradictions, and exposed the teleological logic in the imagined Israeli nationalism. What WOJAC intended as a journey into state Zionism would, to the great chagrin of its members, be perceived by the Israeli establishment as liable "to release the ethnic genie from the bottle." Arab Jews do not espouse a single fixed point of view. Indeed, there are many Arab Jewish viewpoints, though this fact was obscured by the very manner in which "Mizrahiness" was constituted and invented in Israeli collective memory. In this chapter1 I treat Mizrahiness not as a permanent, unequivocal category that is posited as the opposite of ".Ashkenaziness," but as a site

with broad margins that gives rise to a number of different viewpoints. Finally, this multiplicity will also make it possible to reexamine the conventional distinction between establishment voices and voices that are subversive and critical. I argue that subversion and collaboration are epistemological categories dependent on context and historical situation, not a priori categories (see also Latour 2005). First, though, I shall briefly discuss the place of the Mizrahim in the collective national memory.

1

37

The Arab Jews and Zionist Historical Memory Communities of Memory The construction of collective memory is not necessarily a modem phenomenon. Ancient as well as modem cultures produced texts~ built monuments, or collected items for display in order to create or remember their pasts (Geary 1994, 2002; Katriel 1997). However, mnemonic practices became institutionalized and explicit as part of the project of modernity owing in particular to a number of developments: the invention of modem print in the seventeenth century (see Anderson 1999); the composition of the French Encyclopedie to document the enlightened aspects of humanity (see Wilson 1957); the rise of the national movements; the rise of the modem nation-state, and the development of "history" as an independent discipline during the nineteenth century. Anthony Smith notes the secularization process undergone by collective memory and the Gordian knot that was formed between nationalism, histOI}\ and memory: "One sign of the formation of the nation

out of the protonation is the shifting of the center of collective memory from the temple and its priesthood to the university and its scholarly community" (Smith 1986). The only way to remember is to engage in representation, to invent, to constitute what we cannot experience in a different way. Memory is now a product of explicit signs and signified texts, not of submerged social meanings or a multiplicity of memories. In nation-states, historiography became a national project and, as such, also a locus of battles for representation

and interpretation (Keith Wilson 1996; Schwartz 1996). Professional historians began to furnish political legitimation for national memory and for ethnic struggles over identity and self-ment of Nationalism in Western Eurf>e. Providence, R.l.: Berg. Luckman, Thomas. 1967. The Invisible REligion. New York: Macmillan. - - . 1990. "Shrinking Transcendence, Expanding Religion?" Sociological Analysis 50, 2: 127-38. Lustick, S. Jan. 1993. Unsettled States, Disputed Lands. Ithaca, N.Y: Comell University Press. - - . 1999· "Israel as a Non-Arab State: The Political implications of Mass Immigration ofNon-Jews." Middle East Journal 53, 3' 417-33· Marx, Anthony W. 2003. Faith in Nation: Exclusionary Origins of Nationalism. New York: Oxford University Press. Marx, Emanuel. 1992. "Palestinian Refugee Camps in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip." Middle Eastern Studies 28,2:281-94. - - . 2001. "Refugee Compensation: Why the Parties Have Been Unable to Agree and Why It Is Important to Compensate Refugees for Losses." In The Palestinian Refugees: Old Probkm- New Solutions, ed. J. Ginat and E. T. Perkins, 102-8. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. McAlister~ Melan. 2.001. Epic Encounter: Culture~ Media~ and U.S. Interests in the Middle East, 1945-2000. Berkeley: University of California Press. Meir, Esther. 1993- The Zionist Movement and the Jews oflraq, 1941-1950. Tel Aviv: Am Oved. In Hebrew. - - . 1996. "Conflicting Worlds: The Encounter Between Zionist Emissaries and the Jews oflraq During the 1940s and Early 195os." In Israel in the Great Wave of Immigration, 1948-1953, ed. Dalia Ofer. Jerusalem: Yad Ben Zvi. In Hebrew. Meir, Yosef. 1973. Beyond the Desert: Underground Activities in Iraq. Tel Aviv: Ma'arakhot. In Hebrew. - - . 1983. Zionist Movement and the fews ofYemen. Tel Aviv: Afikim. In Hebrew. - - . 19B9. Social and Cultural Development of the Jews of Iraq. Tel Aviv: Naharayim Center for the Diffusion oflraqi Jewish Culhire. In Hebrew. Meir-Glitzenstein, Esther. 1997· 'The Riddle of the Mass Immigration from Iraq: Causes~ Circumstances and Consequences." Pe'amim 71: 25-53- In Hebrew. - - . 2.001. "From Eastern Europe to the Middle East: The Reversal in Zionist Policy vi&-A-vis the Jews oflslamic Countries.'' foumal of Israeli History 20, 1: 24-48.

Select Bibliography - - . 2002.

"Our Dowry: Identity and Memory Among Iraqi Immigrants in Israel."

Micldle Eastern Studies 38: 165-86. Melamed, Shoham.

2.002.

"The Janus Face of the 'Demographic Threat': Gender,

Ethnicity, Nationalism, and the Politics of Fertility in Israel in the 195os." MA thesis, Department of Sociology, Tel Aviv University. In Hebrew. - - . 2005. "Motherhood, Fertility and the Construction of the 'Demographic Threaf in the Marital Age Law." Theory and Criticism 25: 69-96. In Hebrew. Memmi, Albert. 1975. "What Is an Arab Jew?" In Jews and Arabs, ed. id., 19-29. Translated by Eleanor Levieux. Chicago: J. Philip O'Hara. Meron, Ya'akov. 1992. 'The Expulsion of the Jews from Arab Countries and the Attihldes of the Palestinians Toward It." State, Government and International Relations 36: 27-56. In Hebrew. Migdal, Allaron. 19~- The Journey a{the Children to the Promised Land. Tel Aviv: Am Oved. In Hebrew. Milbank, John. 1990. Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason. Osford: Blackwell. Mitchell, Timothy. 1988. Colonising Egypt. Berkeley: University of California Press. - - . 1991. ''The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics." American Political Science Review 85: 77-

187, 216n3o; property of, m,113, 118-19, 1.20-21, 122,% 125-35· 165, 171, 200, 2191123, 221nfi48,51, 227n7o; relations with Israeli state, no-12, n8-35, 165; relations with Zionist emissaries, 20, 21, z.t., 27, 2830, 41· ¥-~.50-51, 72-73· 74-75· 81, 91, 93, 99-106,1J4-16, 123, J40, 157, 18788, 198, 216n3o, 218m6, .2.2.1IJ48; religion among, 78, 198; in transit camps, 112, 159, 177, 229n115 Iraqi National Congress, 200 Irish: Catholicism of, l4; Irish-Americans, &), '93 Islam and nationalism, 85, 107, 214fl5 Israeli, Raphael, .2.2.51126 Israeli anthropology, n, 193 Israeli Left, 7-8, 134-> Communist Party, 127 Israel Institute for Democracy, 196 Israeli state: Custodian General of Absentee Properly, 113, 122, 125, 133, J..44, 165, 198, 2211148; de-Arabization policies, 57, J40, 152,154-55, 192-93• 194. 197-98; establishment of, 26, no, 14J-, 218n5; Finance Ministry, .2.2.11148; Foreign Ministry, no,

Index 11.2., 119, 12.0, 1.2.1, J.2.4, 1.2.5-26, 127, 1.2.8-31, 133· 135· 136, 142.-44.145-46, 159· 171-72, 174. 17fi-8o, 199, 2.191127, 220n37, 221004B,51, 227fl70; intelligence service, 1-6; Justice Ministry, 156-57, 166, 17879, 2.00, J.2.4116; Law of Return, 11.2.; Legal Dept., 166; national identity, 10, 35, 137, 167-72, 181, 196; 1