Yemeni Jews arrived in Palestine as early as 1881. But while their initial migration to Palestine was mainly motivated by a religious and spiritual “longing to Zion,” their racialization by the Zionist institutions in Palestine turned them into a cheap labor force and subjected them to harsh, oppressive and exclusionary policies. Decades of oppression, marginalization and abuse resulted in multiple whitewashed narratives that are still contested by the state or altogether absent from the official history. This paper traces the connecting threads among these narratives and deconstructs the commonly used portrayals of Yemeni Jews as “obedient” and “nice.” These depictions, I argue, were deliberate and part of an ideological power structure employed first by the Zionist institutions in Palestine, and later by the Israeli state, in order to exclude, weaken and marginalize them. Following Stuart Hall’s seminal work on “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” (1997), this paper focuses on the link between contested histories and identity formation. I argue that decades of mainstream media representation manipulated, distorted, and often vilified the Arabness of Yemeni Jews perpetually ignoring and erasing their many attempts to protest and challenge Jewish institutions before and after 1948. In the process of co-opting and molding these histories to fit the Zionist political agenda, most of these accounts remain glossed over and ignored by historical records. This paper also emphasizes the return to Arabness by the second and third generation Arab-Jews utilizing social media and the global stage as a means to bypass the state and reclaim their families’ narratives and their cultural identity.