Is Zionism a form of Orientalism?

The interests of the British Empire, as evidenced in Arthur Balfours 1919 letter to Lord Curzon: the Four Great Powers are committed to Zionism. And Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires or prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land

I will argue, must consider the negative consequences of Zionism not only for the Palestinian people but also for the Sephardi Jews who now form the majority of the Jewish population in Israel. For Zionism does not only undertake to speak for Palestine and the Palestinians, thus "blocking" all Palestinian self-representation, it also presumes to speak for Oriental Jews. The Zionist denial of the Arab-Moslem and Palestinian East, then, has as its corollary the denial of the Jewish "Mizrahim" (the "Eastern Ones") who, like the Palestinians, but by more subtle and less obviously brutal mechanisms, have also been stripped of the right of self-representation. 1 discourse, his genealogical critique of Orientalism as the discursive formation by which European culture was able to manage-and even produce-the Orient during the post-Enlightenment period.1 The Orientalist attitude posits the Orient as a constellation of traits, assigning generalized values to real or imaginary differences, largely to the advantage of the West and the disadvantage of the East, so as to justify the former's privileges and aggressions. Orientalism tends to maintain what Said calls a "flexible positional superiority," which puts the Westerner in a whole series of possible relations with the Oriental, but without the Westerner ever losing the relative upper hand. My essay concerns, then, the process by which one pole of the East/West dichotomy is produced and reproduced as rational, developed, superior and human, and the other as aberrant, underdeveloped and inferior, but in this case as it affects Oriental Jews. Zionists in this sense resemble Fanon's colonizer who always "makes history"; whose life is "an epoch", "an Odyssey" against which the natives form an "almost inorganic background." The gap between the "private" and the more public discourse regarding 'Arabs' is particularly striking in the case of These discriminatory processes, which were shaped in the earliest period of Zionism, are reproduced every day and on every level, reaching into the very interstices of the Israeli social system. The Ostjuden, perenially marginalized by Europe, realized their desire of becoming Europe, ironically, in the Middle East, this time on the back of their own "Ostjuden," the Eastern Jews. Having passed through their own "ordeal of civility," as the "blacks" of Europe, they now imposed their civilizing tests on their own "blacks." the Ashkenazi institutional apparatus has always claimed to represent the interests of all Jewish people, including Sephardim, as demonstrated by the proliferation of "Oriental Departments."
1

Ella Shohat, Sepharim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims, Social Text, no. No. 19/20 (Autumn 1988).

The idea of transfer was fundamental to the Zionist movement, which wanted the land without the people, and sought to negate the very notion of a native non-Jewish population living in Palestine.'4 Between 1947 and 1948, it destroyed over 450 Arab villages, expelled two thirds of the native Palestinians from their land, and put the remaining 200,000 Palestinians under military rule.
8. Although official Israeli scholars were often reluctant to admit the colonial basis of the Israeli Zionist project in Palestine, arguing that the Zionist endeavour did not seek to dominate the Palestinians but rather to ingather the Jews escaping persecution, the new Israeli historians and sociologists showed the contrary. The work of Ilan Pappe and Gershon Shafir, among others, has been particularly important in demonstrating that the non-colonialist motivations of Jewish immigration to Palestine does not free Zionism from its colonial essence, as exemplified in its aim to establish an exclusive Jewish State in a land already inhabited by others (see Ilan Pappe, The Making of the ArabIsraeli Conflict, 1947-1951 (London: I.B. Tauris, 1992); Gershon Shafir, Land, Labour and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict1 883-1914 (Cambridge: CambridgeU niversityP ress, 1989); and Gershon Shafir" Zionism and Colonialism: A Comparative Approach" in Ilan Pappe (ed), The Israel/Palestine Question (London: Routledge, 1999).

A perception distorted by Orientalism, in the pejorative sense of the term made famous by Edward Said that is the cultural essentialisation of the peoples of the East that reduces them to a stereotyped immutable being or mind can obscure the very deep divisions in the Arab world.2

Resistance to civic inclusionary nationalism is another symptom of Oreintalism All particularisms sterotype the others in a negation hence are forms of Orientalism Germany the most insidious - What was happening in Germany, especially during the 1930s, could be described as an extreme form of orientalism
It emphasizes the role of European state elites in "Orientalizing" both Mizrahi Jews and Palestinians, in using military might to subject one group and, not less effective, in using hegemonic mechanism of silencing and exclusion for the other.3

2
3

Gilbert Achcar, The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives, Saqi Books, 2 Jun 2011p.33

Yehouda Shenhav, The Jews of Iraq, Zionist Ideology, and The Property of the Palestinian Refugees of 1948: An Anomaly of National Accounting, International Journal of Middles East Studies. Vol. 31, No. 4 (Nov., 1999), pp. 605-630

In January 1952, about half a year after the official conclusion of the operation that brought Iraq's Jews to Israel, two Zionist activists, Yosef Basri and Shalom Salah, were hanged in Baghdad. They had been charged with possession of explosive ma-terials and throwing bombs in the city center. According to the account of Shlomo Hillel, a former Israeli cabinet minister and Zionist activist in Iraq, their last words, as they stood on the gallows, were "Long live the State of Israel."' It would have been only natural for Iraqi Jews in Israel to have reacted with outrage to news of the hang-ing. But on the contrary, the mourning assemblies organized by leaders of the com-munity in various Israeli cities failed to arouse widespread solidarity with the two Iraqi Zionists. Just the opposite: a classified document from Moshe Sasson, of the Foreign Ministry's Middle East Division, to Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett main-tained that many Iraqi immigrants, residents of the transit camps, greeted the hanging with the attitude: "That is God's revenge on the movement that brought us to such depths."2 The bitterness of that reaction attests to an acute degree of discontent among the newly arrived Iraqi Jews. It suggests that a good number of them did not view their immigration as the joyous return to Zion depicted by the community's Zionist activists. Rather, in addition to blaming the Iraqi government, they blamed the Zionist movement for bringing them to Israel for reasons that did not include the best interests of the immigrants themselves.3

Through its prism, Zionism viewed the Jewish communities around the world as inherently part of the Jewish national identity in Israel. Israeli encyclope-dias and textbooks describe what in the Zionist epos is known as "Operation Ezra and Nehemiah" (the bringing of Iraq's Jewish community to Israel in 1950-51) as a "rescue aliya" (aliya, literally "going up," is the standard Israeli term to denote im-migration) that saved harassed Jews who yearned to return to their ancient homeland after enduring ethnic suppression and discrimination.5

(raison d'etat). State political actors formed a common Zionist identity for Jews of very different backgrounds, and simultaneously formed common oppositional iden-tity for all "Arabs." The paper demonstrates that by symbolizing the property of each group as collective rather than individual, the state helped construct these national identity categories as antagonistic. the supplanting of the Ottoman Turks in the Middle East by the French and the English during World War I had engendered two significant developments in the region. First, a potent Iraqi nationalism sprang up as the Iraqis realized that the British had not come as liberators. The immediate result was an Iraqi uprising against the occu-pation in 1920. Iraq gained independence in 1932, and four years later the perpetra-tors of a military coup seized power in the country. Until 1941, when the revolt of Rashid Ali al-Kilani failed, Iraq was under the sway of a powerful nationalism that did not balk at forging ties with Nazi Germany in order to throw off British influence. Second, Zionist activity in the Middle East became more extensive, although in Iraq intensive activity did not begin until World War II. The interaction between these two social forcesZionist nationalism and Iraqi-Arab nationalism-shaped the life of Iraq's Jews and finally transformed it beyond recognition. In June 1941, following the flight of the pro-Nazi Rashid Ali and just before British forces re-entered Baghdad, the city's Jews were brutally attacked by Iraqi nationalists. The assault, known

as the farhud, left some 250-300 people, mostly Jews, dead or injured.T he Iraqi government, underN uri al-SaCid, did not shirkr esponsibility: eight of the assailants, among them army officers and policemen, were condemned to death. Following the 1941 attack, the Zionist leadership began contemplating means to "Zionize" Iraq's Jews and perhaps organize the immigration of part of the community to Israel.10

13 The first Zionist emissaries (after thefarhud) arrived in Iraq in 1942. They immedi-ately began to organize the Halutz (Pioneer) movement and Hashura (The Column), an organization for Jewish defense. Zionist activity in Iraq owed its success to collab-orationw ith the British and in general to the British presence there.14T he first Zionist emissaries operated as soldiers of the British Army and as representatives of Solel Boneh, a construction company owned by the Histadrut federation of labor in the Yishuv, which had won public tenders in Iran and Iraq. Iraq. When the leaders of the Yishuv grasped the scale of the Holocaust and realized that European Jewry was cut off, a second reason for taking an interest in Iraqi Jewry presented itself: to improve the Jewish demographic balance in Palestine.16 Like the other Jews from Islamic countries, the Jews of Iraq were considered a key population reservoir which could tilt the demographic balance in Palestine in the Jews' favor. At a meeting in July 1943 of the Central Committee of Mapai,t he dominantp artyi n the Yishuv (andf orerunnero f the LaborP arty),o ne speaker put it this way: "we can define our role with regard to this Jewry in one sentence: Zionist conquest of these diaspora communities in order to liquidate them and transfer them to the Land of Israel.... We do not know how many Jews will remain in Europe following the campaign of annihilation [being waged by the Nazis] against them. In like fashion, the first meeting of Yishuv emis-saries with the Jewish community in Iraq, in 1942, showed how wide was the gulf that separatedI raq'sJ ews from the idea of political Zionism.E nzo Sireni,f rom KibbutzG ivat Brenner, who arrived in Iraq under cover of a Solel Boneh construction worker, but whose real mission was to organize the activity of the emissaries sent by the Mossad l'Aliya Bet (the Yishuv unit that handled illegal Jewish immigration to Palestine), said of Iraq's Jews, "They lack Zionist political awareness. Even those young people who have organized for Jewish defense 'have national and human dignity but lack a Zionist outlook and even a Zionist instinct.'. .. Hardly any of them possess Zionist political awareness."21

A report in the same spirit was conveyed by Aryeh (Shiel) Eshel, who was also sent to Iraq as a worker of Solel Boneh: "I was told that they are Zionists . . . and are ready to make aliya .... [But] all this is neither Zionism nor yearning for the
Land of Israel nor readiness for aliya.... [It is] dreadful hypocrisy, the height of Levantism."22

The possibility that Iraq's Jews could remain in their native land-the so-called Iraqi option26-was rendered unfeasible by two not unconnected reasons. One reason that the Jews were compelled to leave was the surging of the PanArabic and Iraqi nationalist movements.27

The second reason that the Jews were compelled to leave was the activity of the Zionist movement in Iraq and the establishment of the State of Israel, as a result of which Jews were identified irrevocably with Zionism As the Zionist narrative tells it, Iraq's Jews were a community under virtual siege, and their transfer to Israel was a "rescue aliya."

Thus, the bringing of Jews to Palestine has no connection with an ancient yearning for Zion among Jewish communities in the various diaspora communities. Jews, rather, came to Palestine due to the activity of Zionist functionaries and intellectuals who engaged in the "engineering of nationalism" and also "invented" the tradition of the past by overlaying it in na-tional colors

19th century. Zionism, it should be borne in mind, was meant as a response to the distinctive conditions and problems of Eastern European Jews, not to the situation of the Jews in the Arab lands. The Zionist elite was always European, and its idiosyncratic outlook subsequently gave rise to the Jewish national ideology in Palestine. The Jewish community of Iraq preserved all the ethnic symbols across generations of existential continuity. Indeed, the Jews in Iraq expressed a primeval, albeit abstract, yearning for Zion, but they were as remote from political Zionism as east is from west. The majority refused to view themselves as Zionists and opposed the Zionist movement, which began to penetrate Iraq beginning in the 1930s for its own social, economic, and political purposes. Police Minister Behor Shitrit was the first, in March 1949, to raise the question of the "situation of Iraq's Jews" in the cabinet.42 Shitrit said he was worried about the con-dition of the Jews in Iraq after Zionism had been outlawed; at one stage he proposed that the property of Israeli Arabs be held hostage for the Jewish property in Iraq, but this idea was rejected out of hand by the Israeli Foreign Ministry.43A t the end of that month (30 March 1949), the Knesset held a debate on the situation of the Jews in the Arab countries. Eliahu Eliachar, from the Sephardi list, asserted that in addressing the refugee issue the government must take into account the transfer to Israel of Jews who would want to make that move: "this bargaining chip was given to our govern-ment by Divine Providence so that we can take preventive measures."44 In September 1949, Shitrit again raised in the cabinet what he called "the problem of the Jews in the Arab lands."
DISCUSSIONS OF THE ISRAELI GOVERNMENT REGARDING IRAQI JEWRY

Sharett: ... What does an exchange mean-we cannot solve the problem of the Arab refugees on the basis of an exchange, we do not have enough Jews to match the number of the Arab refugees.... Iraq.... The Jewish property in Iraq is estimated to be worth 156 million pounds.

Agreeing to this would mean, in my opinion, our agreement to have the property of Iraq's Jews confiscated by the Iraqi treasury in return for the Arab property we have confiscated here, and then we assume respon-sibility for compensating the Jews of Iraq on the account of the Arabs' property, as against the Jews' property there. That would create a dangerous precedent with regard to Egypt and other countries. It could also be construed to mean that every Arab country undertakes to accept ref-ugees only to the extent that it has Jews would create a "dangerous" precedent.64 In the government's es-timate, there were three times as many Palestinian refugees as there were Jews in the Arab states: there were thought to be no more than 200,000 Jews (the possibility of bringing the Maghrib Jews to Israel had not yet arisen).65 inside Iraq because of the activity of the Zionist underground, the 1948 war, Israel's establishment, and the rise of Iraqi nationalism.

The agitation over the possibility of a population exchange faded only in March 1950, with the enactment of the denaturalization law in Iraq, enabling Jews to leave Iraq after renouncing their citizenship. Pressure for the law's enactment was exerted by Prime Minister Tawfiq al-Suwaidi, a graduate of the FrenchJewish Alliance net-work of schools. His many Jewish friends included the leader of the community, Yeskail Shemtob, and the Zionist emissary Mordechai Ben Porat, who were also in-strumental in getting the law passed. In addition to giving up their Iraqi nationality, those who left under the law waived the right to return to Iraq ever again. The law was to remain in force for one year; it said nothing about property.60H owever, the passage of the law itself did not induce Jews to register for emigration. Indeed, the question of what motivated the Jewish population to leave en masse remains unre-solved.69 We do know that on 8 April 1950, a fragmentation grenade exploded near a Jewish cafe in Baghdad, that in the wake of that incident there was a huge rise in the number of candidates for emigration, from 150 to about 23,000. Over the next year or so, until June 1951, four similar explosions occurred at sites associated with Jews.

By March 1951, a year after Iraq's Jews had been given the opportunity to leave, about 105,000 Jews had registered to emigrate, though only 35,000 had actually left. The rest, having renounced their citizenship, were waiting. On 10 March, Prime Min-ister Nuri alSacid submitted a bill to Parliament and to the Senate to impound and freeze the property of the Jews, the richest in the Middle East.81 The value of the frozen deposits of Arabs in Israel is estimated at five and a half

million pounds, whereas the value of the frozen deposits of the Jews in Iraq is at least twenty million and perhaps even thirty to forty million."9 Yaron Tzur, in his discussion of Zionism as "diaspora nationalism" or a "nationalism of disper-sions," maintains that this form of nationalism generates more acute internal conflicts and rifts than is the case among national movements that are based on a territorial model This analysis casts doubt on the historiographic version of events, which portrays the emigration of Iraq's Jews as a voluntary act caused by local enmity and casts the Zion-ist movement as the community's savior Arab sources put it at about $2.5 billion.115 In a secret cabinet meeting held in November 1951, Sharett disclosed that the U.N. Palestine Conciliation

Commission had appraised the worth of the abandoned property of the 600,000 Palestinian refugees at approximately $1 billion. Rather, it emphasizes the role of European state elites in "Orientalizing" both Mizrahi Jews and Palestinians, in using military might to subject one group and, not less effective, in using hegemonic mechanism of silencing and exclusion for the other the author exposes the Orientalist bias of the traditional Israeli historiography of Palestine by focusing on three of its common contentions: that there was no distinct Palestinian nationalism, that Palestinian society was primitive and backward, and that the speed of the Palestinian collapse in 1948 was a function of inherent flaws in the society.4 Aziza Khazum has shown how the history of the Jewish people in modern times can fruitfully be described as a continuous series of Orientalizations, that is, an elite trying to block the advance of an upcoming minority group by dubbing it oriental, meaning devoid of real culture and hence not worthy of equal treatment 5 where the Arab is depicted as a brutal and cultureless creature whose objection to Zionism lacks rational grounding. the real starting point of this study is Benny Morriss analysis of the reasons for the Palestinian disaster of 1948.6 This discourse is replete with terms evoking primitiveness and social retardation, which are thrown out in all directions. No group in the society is spared, though the notables take much of the blame for their divisiveness, regionalism, and narrow self-interest. The peasants, too, are blamed. Thus, the rural majority and its agricultural economy remained largely primitive and inefficient, though under British and Jewish influences there were beginnings of innovation and modernization. 7 Similarly, Palestinian rural society was largely apolitical and uninvolved in national affairs.8 What Morris calls the fatal weakness of Palestinian Arab society is attributed to the societys lack of governing institutions, norms and traditions. 9 Morriss viewsonthePalestiniansduringthe formative Mandatory period are acontinuationof earlier Israeli historians. Yaacov Shimonis book on the Arabs of Palestine, for example, is largely are hearsal of Zionist ideas on the Palestinians during the British Mandate. Unable to conceive of the possibility that the indigenous population could have feelings of genuine nationalism, Shimoni sees every opposition to Zionism as extremism or a result of incitement.12 Left to themselves, the Arab masses would have embraced Zionism and recognized its total beneficence to them. Characteristically, there is no hint of what this beneficence would consist ofgiven that the Zionists demanded the whole of Palestine. But in Shimonis version, what prevented the Arab masses from seeing the light was that British officials in Palestine poisoned their minds.13 a left-wing researcher like Y. Vaschitz much different. In his account, the fellah is not an individual but a sociological type, cunning, prone to cheating, stubbornall traits developed over generations of crushing oppression. Neither the characteristics nor their causes are empirically verified. To revert to Morris, one aspect of his Orientalism is that he feels no need to demonstrate, however cursorily, the origins of the societal characteristics he describes. For him they are givens, the natural characteristics of a primitive society, just as the high degree of development in Jewish society was entirely natural in his eyes, in need of no historicizing whatsoever.
4
5

Haim Gerber, Zionism, Orientalism, and the Palestinians : Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 33, No. 1 (Fall 2003), pp. 23-41

Aziza Khazum, Western Culture, Ethnic Stigmatization and Social Segregation: The Origins of the Ethnic Inequality in Israel, Israeli Sociology 1 (1999), pp.385428.

The problem is that the modernists in a Middle Eastern context join forces with Orientalists, who castigate Islam for not having created a European-type society, and with Zionist historians, who claim that the Palestinians, if left to themselves, never would have dreamed of a Palestinian identity. A second problematic feature of Zionist representations of Palestinian history is the depiction of traditional Palestinian society as primitive and retrograde. We shall divide the discussion of this topic between the earlier Ottoman period and the nineteenth century. Studies by more recent generations change considerably the old image of Ottoman Palestine as a wilderness interspersed with some swamps. One of the new studies, by Wolf-Dieter Hutteroth and Kamal Abdulfattah, shows that only the heart of the Esdraelon valley and portions of the coastal Sharon plain were empty in Ottoman times.42 The rest of the country was settled, and not at all sparsely. though he believed the Palestinians right to their land was unshakable,

The steady influx of Jews to Palestine caused fear and anger among the Arab majority. In 1902, Albert Antebi, the Jewish Colonization Association representative in Jerusalem, reported to the association that 'rancour' against the Jews was spreading in the Ottoman administration, in the law courts and among government officials. Antebi went on to state that the ill-will of the local population coincides with the creation of Zionism. Martin Gilbert referring to above Antebi, stated that, 'it was an ill-will, however, that predated Zionism by many centuries. The emergence of Zionism provided it with an excuse and a spur, a label on which to attach age old animosities.' 6

Martin Gilbert, In Ishmaels House: A History of Jews in Muslim Land s (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010), 140.