How Post-Zionists Falsify the History of Middle Eastern Jewry

Historian Rachel Shabi and a group of other post-Zionists have tried to use historical prejudice against Mizrahim—i.e., Jews of North African and Middle Eastern origin—to undermine Zionism. In her view, Mizrahi Jews are really “Jewish Arabs” who ought to make common cause with Palestinians against the state of Israel. Although ethnic prejudice and discriminatory policies have certainly existed in Israel, Shabi exaggerates them wildly, fails to understand then in their historical context, and idealizes Jewish-Muslim coexistence in the Arab world beyond all recognition. She also, writes Lyn Julius, ignores the fact that this prejudice is largely a thing of the past:

Although it was . . . a struggling developing country, Israel took in the stateless, the destitute, the sick, and the elderly—because they were Jews. . . . . Today Mizrahim are generals, doctors, property developers, bank managers, and have held every government post except prime minister. Most importantly—a hugely significant fact that Shabi simply glosses over—intermarriage [with Ashkenazi Jews] is running at 25 per cent, and the mixed Israeli family is fast becoming the norm. Soon there will be no such thing as Mizrahi or Ashkenazi in the Israeli melting pot.

Shabi’s nostalgia trip to a world before Zionism leads her up a blind alley. She confuses the interpersonal with the political: good neighborliness with the (unequal) power relationship between Jews and Arabs. An overlap of culture and language with Arabs over 14 centuries did not protect Mizrahim from pogroms, dispossession, and expulsion, to the point where fewer than 5,000 Jews live in Arab countries today, out of a 1948 population of one million. This is a lesson lost on some who eagerly espouse Arab-Israeli coexistence projects.

Read more at Fathom

More about: Arab anti-Semitism, Matti Friedman, Mizrahi Jewry, post-Zionism

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society