In 1971, the first “Israeli Black Panthers” analogized Mizrahi struggles for equality in Ashkenazi society to African Americans’ in white society. Since then, Mizrahi scholar-activists have rightly insisted on linking the quest for Mizrahi liberation with that for Palestinian emancipation. But in contravention of the postcolonial arithmetic of solidarity, struggles for Mizrahi belonging in Israel have proven to be far from emancipatory for Palestinians. Indeed, while Ella Shohat sought to link Mizrahi Studies to its Palestinian counterpart, the silence between the two fields seems to reflect, instead, what Orit Bashkin calls the likelihood of Mizrahim in Israel today to “ignore [Palestinians’] segregation while battling against the discrimination they still face in the state.” The central contention of this paper is that a more robust theorization of complicity is necessary if we are to resolve the latent aporia between Palestinian and Mizrahi Studies. Drawing from Asian Americanist critique, and resurrecting Shohat’s lesser-known engagement with American Ethnic Studies more broadly, it argues for “complicit racialization”—rather than the metaphors of blackness or indigeneity—as a more epistemically and politically adequate way to describe the nature of “Sephardi” or “Mizrahi” racialization and its relationship to other forms of extraction in the modern world, particularly that of Palestinians. To do so, it re-examines claims about and by Mizrahi “natives” and “migrants” in the Hebrew- and Arabic-language press of Mandate Palestine alongside contemporary oral history interviews from Mizrahi subjects whose families migrated to (pre-state) Israel and the United States in the 1940s and 1950s.