Mizrahi Identity and the Myth of Return

Central to Zionist thinking was the concept of Kibbutz Galuiot—the “ingathering of the exiles.” Following two millennia of homelessness and living presumably “outside of history,” Jews could once again “enter history” as subjects, as “normal” actors on the world stage by returning to their ancient birth place, Eretz Israel. [ . . . ] The idea of Jewish return (which after the establishment of Israel was translated into legal language handing every Jew immediate access to Israeli citizenship) had been intertwined with the imaging of the empty land of Palestine. Its indigenous inhabitants could be bracketed or, alternately, portrayed as intruders deemed to “return” to their Arab land of origins (a discourse that was encoded in the various transfer plans).

A corollary of the notion of Jewish “return” and continuity in Israel was the idea of rupture and discontinuity with diasporic existence. In order to be transformed into “New Jews” (later Israelis), the “Diasporic Jews” had to abandon their diasporic culture, which, in the case of Arab Jews, meant abandoning Arabness and acquiescing in assimilationist modernization, for “their own good.” Within this Promethean rescue narrative, concepts of “ingathering” and “modernization” naturalized and glossed over the historical, psychic, and epistemological violence generated by the Zionist vision of the New Jew. This rescue narrative also elided Zionism’s own role in provoking ruptures, dislocations, and fragmentation for Palestinian lives, and—in a different way—for Middle Eastern and north African Jews. These ruptures were not only physical (the movement across borders) but also cultural (a rift in relation to previous cultural affiliations) as well as conceptual (in the very ways time and space, history, and geography were conceived). [ . . . ]

Displacement: Narratives of Cross-Border Movement

The question of naming is also problematic in relation to the unprecedented movement across borders of west Asian/north African Jews from the late 1940s to the 1960s. Nationalist paradigms cannot capture the complexity of this historical moment, particularly for Arab Jews. Perhaps due to the idiosyncrasies of the situation, for a community trapped between two nationalisms—Arab and Jewish—each term used to designate the displacement seems problematic. None of the terms—aliya (ascendancy), yetzia (exit), exodus, expulsion, immigration, emigration, exile, refugees, expatriates, and population exchange—seems adequate. In the case of the Palestinians, the forced mass exodus easily fits the term refugee, since they never wanted to leave Palestine and have maintained the desire to return. In the case of Arab Jews the question of will, desire, and agency remains highly ambivalent and ambiguous. The very proliferation of terms suggests that it is not only a matter of legal definition of citizenship that is at stake, but also the issue of mental maps of belonging within the context of rival nationalisms. Did Arab Jews want to stay? Did they want to leave? Did they exercise free will? Did they actually make a decision? Once in Israel, did they want to go back? Were they able to do so? And did they regret the impossibility of returning? Different answers to these questions imply distinct assumptions about questions of agency, memory, and space. [ . . . ]

The term aliya naturalizes both a negative and a positive pole: the will to escape persecution and the desire to go to the Jewish homeland. Yet this master narrative excludes narratives that relay moments of refusal, questioning, or ambivalence toward the immanent dislocations. The term aliya (literally, ascendancy) is borrowed from the realm of religion (aliya la’regel), which originally referred to the pilgrimage to the Temple, and later to the holy sites of the land of Zion. Yet, within Zionist discourse, the term aliya has been transferred to the realm of citizenship and national identity. In this discursive conflation, the olim, according to official ideology, benefited from spiritual and even material ascendancy, a view sharply contrasting with the multifaceted devastation, the social descent (yerida) experienced by most Jews from Muslim countries. [ . . . ]

At the same time, the dominant Arab nationalist discourse represented the mass exodus as an index of the Jewish betrayal of the Arab nation. Ironically, the Zionist view that Arabness and Jewishness were mutually exclusive gradually came to be shared by Arab nationalist discourse, placing Arab Jews on the horns of a terrible dilemma. [ . . . ]

Arab Jews, in my view, could never fully foresee what the impossibility of return to their countries of origin would mean. The permission to leave—as in the case of Iraqi Jews—did not allow for a possible return either of individuals or of the community. Therefore, even the term immigration does not account for that massive crossing of borders. Iraqi Jews, for example, had to give up their citizenship (al-tasqit), losing their right to return. Within Israel, for at least four decades, performing even a symbolic return within the public sphere—the expression of nostalgia for an Arab past—became taboo. The propagandistic description of the dislocation of Arab Jews as “population exchange,” which supposedly justifies the creation of Palestinian refugees, meanwhile, is also fundamentally problematic. It elides the simple fact that neither Arab Jews nor Palestinians were ever consulted about whether they would like to be exchanged. [ . . . ]

In sum, at the very core of the invention of Mizrahi identity, within the conceptual space of Zionism and within the physical space of Israel, lies an ambiguous relation to movement across the border. While for the Jews from the Muslim world the Land of Israel/Palestine was continuous with their cultural geography, the Eurocentric construct of the State of Israel on that land required discontinuity. The passage into the political space of Israel initiated Jews from Arab and Muslim lands into a new process within which they were transformed, almost overnight, into a new racialized ethnic identity. Therefore, a critical scholarship cannot afford to assume the Zionist master narrative of choice and desire; rather it needs to look into the deep anxious ambivalences generated by partition and the scars it left on the psyche of the displaced.