During the 1948 War in Palestine/Israel, Jews who originated from Arab counties (“Mizrahi Jews”) were a major source of concern for both Zionist and Arab leaders. The leadership of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) became convinced that many Mizrahi Jews were in fact Palestinians masquerading as Jews, and trying to sabotage the Jewish fight for independence from within. The nascent IDF’s field security department was instructed to follow these men, determine if they were “genuine” Arabs, and if so arrest them immediately. The command of the Arab Liberation Army (ALA), a volunteer army that fought alongside Palestinians in the early stages of war, had similar fears about Mizrahi Jews. A memo circulating to all ALA units warned that three Iraqi Jews, Ezra Nissim Eliyahu, Naim Dawud Cohen and Edward Shaul, all in their 20s, may have already infiltrated the ALA, disguised as Arabs. Their unique background, ALA officers were warned, allowed them “to cover their tracks..and roam freely,” and there was risk that they were disclosing secrets about the fight to free Palestine to their Zionist patrons. How far fetched were these concerns? Were there Jews disguising and Arabs, and Arabs disguising as Jews, trying to dupe unsuspecting comrades while sending valuable intelligence to their handlers? This paper argues that the initial concerns of Zionist and Arab leaders may have been warranted, but perhaps not for the reasons they cited. Through the life-story of Abdallah Dawud, an Iraqi Jew from the city of ‘Anah who volunteered in the Iraqi brigade of the ALA and actually fought against fellow Jews, and through several other stories of similar nature, the paper challenges the oft-repeated claim that religious bonds took precedence over other forms of connection in the fighting over Palestine in 1948. It also unearths the anxieties of the ruling elites at the time, concerned about Jews and Arabs not playing the parts accorded to them in the conflict.

In 1975, Saddam Hussein called upon all Iraqi Jews, provided that they were not Zionists, to return to their Iraqi homeland. Morocco and Egypt followed suit and called upon Mizrahi Jewry to return from their exile in Israel back to their Arab homelands. While few actually repatriated, those who did so invariably used the act of migration as a means to publicly protest discrimination and prejudice they faced in Israel. This paper examines those instances of transgressive migration of Mizrahi Israelis who repatriated, or publicly threatened to do so, to a homeland outside of Israel. Thus, I specifically focus on the process of out-migration from Israel, then seen as the ultimate form of betrayal to Israeli Jewish society, as a significant form of protest. This paper not only complicates our understanding of the binary categories of “aliyah” and “yeridah” (immigration/emigration to and from Israel); it also opens up the question of the meaning of the Jewish diaspora and homeland. Is the place of Mizrahim the moledet, or spiritual Jewish homeland of Israel, or the watan, the moribund Pan-Arabist ideal of an Arab homeland stretching from the Maghreb to the Mashriq? How do the notions of homeland, transnational migration, and diasporic politics complicate perceptions of Israeli Jewish identity? In asking the question of what constitutes the ‘homeland’ for Mizrahi Jews, I acknowledge that it is somewhat problematic. The question presupposes the same type of exclusionary binaries as ‘Arab or Jewish’, which the term Arab Jew, however flawed, seeks to rectify. However, rather than maintaining that this is a question of ‘either/or’, I contend that the ‘homeland’, like ethnicity, is fluid and inextricably tied to feelings of exile. Whether that exile is as an Iraqi or Tunisian in Israel, or as a Jew living in a millennium-long exile from Israel.

In 2012, at the “Justice for Jewish Refugees from Arab Countries and Iran” conference held in Jerusalem, Meir Kahalon, the Director General of the Central Organization for Jews from Arab Countries and Iran, lamented the lack of recognition for Middle Eastern Jews. Unlike some of the other conference speakers, his concerns were not rooted in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Rather, his speech focused on the parallels between the “Shoah” [Holocaust] in Europe, and the “Shoah” of North Africa. His frustration with the lack of formal commemoration for North African Jewry in World War II invites us to consider the role that Holocaust commemoration serves in Middle Eastern Jewish efforts for recognition. In the past decade, organizations like Justice for Jews from Arab Countries, and Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa, as well as the Israeli government, have advocated recognizing Middle Eastern Jews as “refugees.” In tandem with these controversial claims, however, less well known are—as seen from Kahalon’s remarks—Middle Eastern Jewish demands for recognition as “Holocaust survivors.” These demands appear strange on two fronts: first, because within and outside of Israel, there has been a longstanding view that Middle Eastern Jews were untouched by the Holocaust, and were, in fact, insensitive to the Zionist establishment’s preoccupation with it; and second, because Middle Eastern Jewish demands for refugee recognition and Holocaust survivor status renders the government of Israel as both an ally and opponent, respectively. Having recently enlisted the support of the government in pursuing refugee claims, why would Middle Eastern Jews jeopardize this support by demanding to be recognized as Holocaust survivors? And what are the political effects of these demands? In answering this question, I offer a framework for understanding how Jews displaced from Arab countries, now living in Israel and the United States, have come to situate their own experiences of displacement and discrimination in their countries of origin, and then again in the nascent state of Israel, against the backdrop of the Holocaust and European Jewish experiences of persecution. Drawing upon newspaper archives, literary works, and oral history projects, I examine the effects of Middle Eastern Jews' invocation of the Holocaust and appropriation of Holocaust commemorative practices. I argue that while these practices demonstrate an appeal for inclusion in Israeli national memory, they ultimately challenge Zionist hegemony.

Sephardi-Arab joint resistance to European- Zionism: Reality and Hope 1908-1948 While many members of the Sephardi / Mizrahi / Mughrabi communities in Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine saw no alternative but to acknowledge the hegemony of the European Zionist movement and others preferred not to be involved in public affairs, there were some (rare) cases in which individuals from these communities opted to distance themselves from what they experienced as Zionist- European aggression, and in some cases to cooperate with Arab nationalists against Zionism. In my presentation I will map the political attitudes of Mizrahi Jews in Palestine towards Zionism, then focus on two types of Mizrahi attitude (and activity): the one is pro-Zionist-pro-Arab attitude, whose basic assumption was the possibility to create win-win situation for Zionists and Arabs in Palestine; the other is the anti-Zionist pro-Arab approach, which was more marginal than the former, but received more cover in the contemporary Arab press. Reading both archival sources and the press regarding these activities reveals not only the marginality of this group, but also the desperate hope of the Palestinian Arabs to find allies among the Palestinian Jews.