Formative discussions of Zionism in Iraq (Meir-Glitzenstein 2004, Bashkin 2012) focus on how the Zionist establishment in Palestine (specifically its emissaries) and Iraqi authorities shaped Zionist authority among Iraqi Jews. These studies are at times deeply descriptive of Iraqi Jewish action and feeling vis-à-vis Zionism, but with their focus on emissaries and authorities, they also produce a curiosity about what animated those individuals who became Zionist Jews in Iraq. At this juncture, my paper asks, " What do the emotions of love, intimacy and disappointment expressed within letter writing among Hahalutz ("the Pioneer Movement") Jewish women in 1940s Iraq reveal about Zionism's authority?" Love, intimacy and disappointment show themselves to be illustrative through their prevalence in the letters of Hahalutz women. By theorizing these emotions, the paper will show that criticisms of Zionist activities and expressions of intimate bonds among Hahalutz members were defining features for engendering Zionist authority in Iraq. Containing the subjects of my paper to women is done because the production of a binary gender in these letters is of a piece of Zionist authority making. Based on the influence of the Zionist movement in Palestine, and Iraqi Jews at their first Zionist conference calling the movement, "A socialist pioneering movement (Bashkin, 203)," Zionism is defined in this paper as a movement to establish a Jewish majority, autonomous homeland in Palestine, characterized by a socialist ideology. At its height in 1948, the movement had no more than 2,000 members (Meir-Glitzenstein, 264). Roughly one-third of these members were women (Mei-Glitzenstein 116). Many of its sympathizers were from the educated, lower-middle class (Meir-Glitzenstein 88). While relatively few Iraqis were Zionists and many Iraqi Jews found expression in Iraqi nationalism, Pan-Arabism and Communism, specifying the relationship between individuals and the Movement does less to exceptionalize Zionism than it does to further refine emotions toward this movement. In working with emotions, this paper draws from Sara Ahmed's "The Cultural Politics of Emotion," which explores the shaping of bodies by emotions in relation to nation-state movements. How exactly movements can be coercive through love is fleshed out with Elizabeth A. Povinelli's "The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy, and Carnality." Within these perimeters, authority is not necessarily engendered negatively, emotions such as disappointment are just as noteworthy as love, and intimacy among HaHalutz members demonstrates the deepest attachments the Zionist movement encouraged in Iraq.

A neighborhood in the south of Tel-Aviv today, Kfar-Shalem used to be the village of Salame in Jaffa until depopulated of its Arab-Palestinian residents and repopulated by Middle Eastern, mostly Arab Jewish residents, in 1948. A Jaffan Jew born in Salame, Margalit, had lived through these changes until evicted by the Tel-Aviv municipality that sold her Kfar-Shalem home to colonial gentrifying realtors in 2008. Foregrounding Margalit and her struggle to remain at home, Effi Banai’s documentary Longing (2009) serves as a constructive point of departure to excavating some of the effects of the ongoing spatialization of Palestine/Israel on the lives of Arab Jews. Specifically, it assists in exploring the physical, experiential, affective, and performative aspects of inhabiting a constantly shifting and shaken liminal and hyphenated identitarian terrain of Arab/Jewish and Palestine/Israel. To provide a glimpse into this contested and resistant terrain, this presentation embarks on a close reading of one of the key scenes of Longing. The scene portrays Margalit as she recounts and reenacts her encounter with Menahem Begin, then chief of the Zionist militant brigade, the “Irgun”, in 1947, as he tried to recruit her as a spy to facilitate the deportation of the Palestinian Arabs from Jaffa. Having lived through the gradual attempt to remake and unmake of Palestine into Israel, Margalit is constantly burdened by the racializing mechanisms of the state of Israel. From a Palestinian Arab Jew and native speaker of Arabic and Hebrew, she was supposed to become an Oriental Jew and speaker of Modern Hebrew exclusively. Yet Margalit resists the Arab/Jewish, Hebrew/Arabic, Palestinian/Israeli divides, by retaining her presence and fluency in the linguistic, spoken space of Arabized Hebrew, and by performing her identity in her own accented dialect in front of the cameras. Margalit’s audio-visualized, cinematized, and performed reenactment of her encounter with Begin sheds essential light on how the Zionist attempts to racialize Arab Jews as Orientals look on their skins, and sounds in their voices. First, the scene discusses the Zionist eviction of non-Jewish Arab Palestinians and the resettling of Middle Eastern Jewish immigrants in these stolen homes at the new state’s frontiers. Furthermore, the scene demonstrates how Arab Jews embody, speak about and against, and resist, the Zionist attempts to eliminate and delegitimize Arab Jews’ usage of their native Arabic language in Palestine-turned-Israel.

From 1942 onwards, Rabbi Elmer Berger served as one of America’s most vocal Jewish critics of Zionism, first as executive director of the American Council for Judaism (ACJ) and later as leader of American Jewish Alternatives to Zionism (AJAZ). Berger and his colleagues in ACJ and AJAZ developed and expressed comprehensive ideological critiques of Zionism from an American Jewish perspective. A careful study of this Jewish anti-Zionist discourse reveals several recurring concepts relating to crisis, victimization, and prophesy. Yet over the course of decades, from the 1940s through the 1970s, the specific “crises” prophesied and “victims” cited varied and shifted in telling ways. This paper uses these concepts to trace the evolution of Jewish anti-Zionist thought in America. Though Berger is at the center of the anti-Zionist network in question, this study also refers to the works of his Jewish colleagues such as Norton Mezvinsky, Moshe Menuhin, Alfred Lilienthal, Israel Shahak, Uri Davis and the Arab activists, writers, and officials who influenced their thought. The anti-Zionism of Berger and the ACJ initially stemmed from the Reform Jewish tradition, their understanding of Jewish and American identity, and their concerns about protecting Jews and Judaism. However, in large part due to exposure and intellectual engagement with Arabs in the Middle East and in the United States, American Jewish anti-Zionism evolved, emphasizing Zionism’s impact on Palestinians. While Jews – American and Israelis – were first posited as potential victims of Zionism, Berger and others increasingly emphasized Palestinians, Arabs, and to a lesser extent, “Arab Jews” as Zionism’s victims. The anti-Zionism of Berger and his allies also consistently expressed premonitions of coming “crisis” that would be caused by Zionist action. Specifics of the “crisis” changed over the years but in less linear ways, shifting in reaction to major events like wars and the 1973-1974 oil crisis, an event which appeared to vindicate their concerns. Lastly is the concept of “prophets” – while sometimes used to refer to Judaism’s moral callings, the term was also invoked to refer to Berger, Judah Magnes, and other Jewish figures who they believed aimed to prevent the crises and victimizations caused by Zionism.

My paper examines Arab American activism regarding the Arab-Israeli dispute during the 1970s. In this decade, Arab American activists were far more visible and engaged than in previous years, and they gained a modicum of influence within American discourse on the Arab-Israeli conflict. Key to this achievement was a growing moderation within Arab American ranks, reflecting, in turn, a political transformation occurring in the Arab world itself. Over the course of the 1970s, and especially following the Arab-Israeli war of 1973, the center of gravity of both Arab and Arab American politics shifted--away from a complete rejection of Israel's existence and toward acceptance of a two-state settlement of the Israel-Palestine dispute. The emergence of this pragmatic position made it easier for U.S. opinion leaders, including some within the Jewish community, to recognize that Palestinian national claims lay at the heart of the dispute and to concede that no diplomatic settlement would be viable if it failed to address those claims. Ironically, simultaneous developments in U.S. foreign policy set forces in motion that sharply diminished the likelihood that Palestinian claims ever would be satisfied. After the 1973 war, U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger urged Egypt and Israel to enter into a bilateral peace process whose ultimate aim was a separate peace agreement between those countries--an objective accomplished when President Jimmy Carter brokered the Camp David Accords of 1978 and the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty of 1979. In exchange for recovering the Sinai Peninsula, Egypt became the first Arab nation to recognize and make peace with Israel. The removal of Egyptian military pressure made it possible for Israel to consolidate its hold over the remaining Arab territories it had occupied in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, including the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. In subsequent decades, Israel was able to alter the demographic and territorial configuration of the Palestinian areas in ways that reduced their viability as a future Palestinian state. Thus, by the start of the 1980s, a strange pattern had emerged whereby the centrality of the Palestinian issue was increasingly recognized within American political discourse while the means of addressing that issue drifted ever further out of reach.