The Critical Hope of Palestinian and Mizrahi Studies
Panel IX-20, 2021 Annual Meeting
On Friday, December 3 at 2:00 pm
Panel Description
Despite their shared origins within postcolonial critique, and their focus on forms of extraction within Palestine/Israel, Palestinian Studies and Mizrahi Studies have proceeded as virtually parallel fields, reflecting ongoing divides produced by nationalist methodologies, statist understandings of social difference, and the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Meanwhile, the few studies that do locate themselves at the intersection of the two fields tend to render Mizrahi-Palestinian relations through either “Zionism” or “anti-Zionism” as discreet political ideologies—thereby limiting our understanding of Mizrahi-Palestinian relations as either inherently oppositional or shallowly solidary.
This panel proposes new directions for methodologically linking Mizrahi studies and Palestinian studies. The papers presented take up Ella Shohat’s oft-deferred call to engage in Mizrahi studies “alongside and in relation to Palestinian studies.” They go beyond treating Palestinians and Mizrahim either as mutual “Others” of European-dominated Zionism or as intrinsic “opposites” within the Zionist/Palestinian rubric. Rather, they center concrete interactions, intersections, and antagonisms historically rooted in the 20th century in order to ask: How are Palestinians and Mizrahim differently implicated in the struggles against Zionism and the Israeli state? In what ways do Palestinian and Mizrahi histories diverge? And how might Palestinian-Mizrahi exchanges themselves constitute settler colonial relations?
The panel’s first paper interrogates how colonial and national discourses about age in British Mandate Palestine served to racialize Palestinians and Mizrahi Jews in intersecting ways. The second paper takes up questions of racism against Iraqi Jewish women in Israel’s immigration transit camps during the state’s first decades, and how such racialization engendered systemic discrimination. The third paper brings oral history interviews and the Hebrew and Arabic press in conversation with recent work in Settler Colonial and Holocaust Studies to argue for “complicit racialization” as a framework for understanding the migration of Mizrahim to Mandate Palestine and Israel in the 1940s and 1950s. The fourth and final paper asks why Palestinians affiliated with research institutes and publishing houses in the Arab world wrote about and translated Mizrahi authors in Israel and how they understood the Mizrahi struggle in relation to their own national cause.
This paper examines how age became a racialized category in British-mandate Palestine. It focuses on the case of Rachel Habshush (Ohevet Ami), a young Jewish woman of Yemeni and Moroccan descent who, while working for the Irgun Zionist paramilitary organization in 1939, disguised herself as an “Arab” and tried to plant a bomb amidst Palestinian visitors at a Jerusalem prison. Habshush’s presence at the prison aroused the suspicion of British and Arab police officers who searched Habshush, found the bomb, and put her on trial. Habshush was sentenced to life imprisonment, rather than to death, all because of one medical expert’s assessment of her young age. Although an X-Ray indicated that Habshush was nineteenth, the medical expert working for the defense claimed that Habshush was most likely only seventeen, since the X-Ray machine was made for “European” bones and not for “Oriental” bones. This paper explores a series of questions related to Habshush’s trial: What did it mean for a Jewish girl of Yemeni and Moroccan descent to dress up like an “Arab”? What roles did Mizrahi Jews play in Zionist terrorist operations against Palestinians? And more broadly, how might we understand age as a racialized category that both delineated and blurred the borders between Ashkenazim, Mizrahim, and Palestinians?
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.
Eschewing “anything but race” explanations (which tend to privilege ethnic belonging or cultural markers) of Iraqi Jewish discrimination in early state Israel, this paper uses a race analysis to reveal how early immigration sites like the transit camp (settlement sites within the new State of Israel where recently arrived immigrants were housed in harsh conditions), while purportedly meant to acclimate Iraqi Jews and other Mizrahim, actually acted as a crucible for their discrimination. Showing race as constructed via Iraqi Jewish women’s relationship with three kinds of social capital: socio-economic, medical, and educational, reveals the ways in which these women’s racial imaginations (based on their Iraqi upbringing) were not commensurate with the racial logics they came up against in Israel, which were more confining. Such analysis not only proves that it is worthwhile to think in terms of race and not just ethnicity in early state Israel, but also shows why it was so difficult for Jews to simply forget Iraq and belong in their new country. Additionally, what is at stake is the proof that experiences of belonging on the one hand and discrimination on the other were not ephemeral or singular, but systemic and deeply personal. To address Zionist racism against Iraqi Jews intersectionally, the paper uses women authored memoirs, state documents, and oral histories.
Looking at a number of texts from Palestinian research institutes and publishing houses in the Arab world from the 1960s to the 1980s, this paper details how Palestinian intellectuals in exile understood intra-Jewish conflict in Israel between Ashkenazim and Mizrahim. Through readings of the works of Ali Ibrahim Abdou, Khairieh Kasimieh, Hilda Shaʿban Sayegh, Fuʾad Jadid, and Arabic translations of Mizrahi writers, it asks: why and how have Palestinians written about the Mizrahi struggle in Israel? Most of the works examined are situated firmly within the Palestinian intellectual current of al-takhaṣuṣ fī shuʾūn al-ʿadū (competency in enemy affairs), a type of anti-colonial counter-knowledge production with the aim of responding to Zionist discourse. Despite their purported focus on “the enemy,” many of these works do translate and endorse the views of Mizrahi social movements; emphasize historic ties of Jewish communities with their co-citizens of other faiths in the Arab world; and elevate non-Zionist Jewish voices on the Palestinian Question. Indeed, all of the works in question argue that the stakes and impact of Mizrahi struggle are relevant, either as a part of or an obstacle to, the Palestinian struggle against Zionism. This paper will engage with important scholarship in intellectual history which brings attention to Jewish-Palestinian intellectual engagements, particularly those focused on Palestinian research institutions in the late 20th century. Unlike studies that view Mizrahim and Palestinians exclusively as common victims of Zionism and stop their analysis there, this paper centers the intellectual and political initiatives of these groups. It looks at how these groups wrote about their respective struggles in ways that linked them to broader Arab and global intellectual discourses.
