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- iHaveNet.com: Middle East
Intra-Jewish Discrimination in Israel (Photo: Matthew Powell / Flickr)
by Michael Quinones
In Israel, Ashkenazi women often marginalize Mizrahi women
Jews are the most privileged group of citizens in Israel. Jews of European descent, called Ashkenazim, form the top of a class hierarchy while Mizrahim -- Jews of African or Asian descent and Jewish immigrants from Muslim countries -- are often marginalized socially, economically and politically. This extends to the feminist establishment, which started out as a movement spawned and then dominated by middle to upper middle-class, educated Ashkenazi women who preached universal female solidarity in the face of the patriarchy. Feeling unrepresented, ignored and/or ostracized, many Mizrahi feminist activists broke away from what they viewed as an Ashkenazi women's movement unsympathetic to their own ideas of liberation, which were particular to their situations. Mizrahi women were critical of Ashkenazi insularity and discrimination -- some claiming experiences of racism -- but without political, social or economic capital, their voices have often been suppressed and kept from influential circles and media.
Mizrahi Feminist Activism Today (In English Media)
Ahoti and Democratic Mizrahi Rainbow were the main Israeli organizations with an English-language presence that I found. This 2009 article shows these groups in action (right).
A book by Smadar Lavie (who is quoted extensively below) called Wrapped in the Flag of Israel: Mizrahi Single Mothers and Bureaucratic Torture was published in April in English.
Scholarship
Excerpt from a 2003 letter from Ahoti (also spelled Achoti) to a panel titled ‘Legal Feminism in Theory, Education, Practice: The Location of Courts in the Feminist Struggle for Social Change'
Most Israeli women are Mizrahi ... . Most Israeli women capable of having access to the commodity called justice are Ashkenazi ... . [T]he almost complete absence of Mizrahi women's discourse from the legal sphere is also manifested in the invisibility of Mizrahi women in the halls of justice. Most Israeli women judges are Ashkenazi. All women law professors are Ashkenazi. Even in this feminist panel there ain't not even one Mizrahi speaker.
"Mizrahi Feminism and the Question of Palestine." Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, Vol. 7. 2011. By Smadar Lavie The Mizrahim (Orientals) ... constitute 50 percent of Israel's total population and about 63 percent of the Jewish population (Ducker 2005). Their parents immigrated to Israel mainly in the 1950s from the Arab and Muslim world, or from the former margins of the Ottoman Empire such as Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Iraq, or even Turkey, Iran, Bulgaria, and India (2005). Officially, the Israeli government terms them "descendants from Asia-Africa," or ‘Edot Hamizrah (Bands of the Orient) (Lavie 1992). "Mizrahim" is the coalitional term they use when advocating their rights before the ruling minority, the approximately 30 percent of Israeli citizenry called Ashkenazim (Ducker 2005).
"Tensions in Israeli Feminism: The Ashkenazi-Mizrahi Rift." Women's Studies International Forum, Vol. 24. 2001. By Henriette Dahan-Kalev
Although geographically Israel is
"Jewish and Jewish-Palestinian Feminist Organizations in Israel: Characteristics and Trends." Heinrich Boll Stiftung. 2008. By Dorit Abramovitch
A feminist reading of this
"Between Universal Feminism and Particular Nationalism: politics, religion and gender (in)equality in Israel." Third World Quarterly, Vol. 31. 2010. By Ruth Halperin-Kaddari and Yaacov Yadgar
Israel's ethnic democracy
"My Life? There Is Not Much to Tell": On Voice, Silence and Agency in Interviews With First-Generation Mizrahi Jewish Women Immigrants to Israel. Qualitative Inquiry. 2011. By Sigal Nagar-Ron and Pnina Motzafi-Haller
If the Ashkenazi Jewish
Lavie 2011
The emergence of Mizrahi
"Shlomit Lir on Mizrahi Jews in Israel." Center for Religious Tolerance. 2008. Interviewed by Andrea Blanch, PhD
Most Mizrahi Jews deny
Lavie 2011
Early Mizrahi feminists faced
Nagar-Ron and Motzafi-Haller 2011
Young Israeli-born Mizrahi women are still portrayed in Israeli popular discourse as inarticulate, vulgar, and oversexed. Critical feminist scholars (see Khazzoom, 2008; Motzafi-Haller, 2001) show that Mizrahi women continued to be portrayed as the "traditional" backward Other even in liberal Israeli feminist scholarship that came into being in Israel as far back as mid-1970s.
In a pattern familiar from other places (Mohanty, 1988), middle-class Ashkenazi Israeli feminists depicted themselves as the "saviors" of their "less fortunate" Mizrahi sisters, thus establishing their own position as enlightened Western liberal feminists. Yet after almost a decade of critical Mizrahi feminist thinking, there is still very little empirical research that documented the way Mizrahi women themselves had reacted to their representation as the ultimate denigrated Other of the Israeli self.
Lavie 2011
Ashkenazi feminists have
Dahan-Kalev 2001
The Ashkenazi leadership of the Israeli feminist movement tended to reflect the same patronizing, oppressive attitude towards the Mizrahi women as that displayed by Ashkenazim to Mizrahim in Israeli society at large -- an attitude never discussed until the emergence of the Mizrahi feminist movement in the mid-1990s.
Lavie 2011
The major event of Israel's feminist non-governmental organizations (NGOs) since the late 1970s has been the Annual Feminist Convention. Until 1991, almost all the speakers and workshop leaders were Ashkenazi women, with the inclusion of a single token Mizrahi and a single token Palestinian-Israeli (Shadmi 2001). The Tel Aviv Women's Group used to joke, in the Audre Lorde (1993/4) tradition of "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House," that Mizrahi women cleaned house and babysat for the Ashkenazi gvarot so that the gvarot could devote time to feminism.
Dahan-Kalev 2001
After many failed attempts to raise Mizrahi issues at feminist gatherings as part of the conference agenda, a few Mizrahi activists decided to disrupt the 1994 annual conference by raising the issue (Hila News, June 1994: 4). They chose the most well attended plenary session of the conference to do so. Speaking from the floor, surrounded by Ashkenazi women, they spoke of the racism they had experienced throughout their lives -- from their childhood through adolescence to the present, even after becoming feminist activists.
When members of the audience attempted to bring the session to order, a few Mizrahi women took to the stage, expressing themselves with rage and hostility. They spoke from the heart since their emotions had been bottled up for so long. The catalyst of their outburst was the seeming indifference to their existence their so called feminist sisters. ... As one woman put it, "The social norms according to which class relationships are organized made us believe that we should demand of our mothers that they stop speaking Arabic, Iranian, Turkish, Indian; we begged them to try to lose their Moroccan, Yemenite, Iraqi accents. We wanted them to start behaving like Israelis, for God's sake -- that is, to be like an Ashkenazi!" (Hila Bulletines, July 1994: 4).
I believe there are at least four aspects of the Mizrahi feminist challenge which the Ashkenazi feminist elite found threatening. First, to respond to the Mizrahi women's accusations would mean that they themselves would have to consider their own responsibility for the ethnic divide. Second, accepting responsibility would entail them acknowledging their own hegemonic control of the Israeli feminist movement. Third, any more equitable redistribution of resources and influence would mean that those who were presently enjoying these would enjoy them less in the future. Fourth, accepting responsibility would make the members of the Israeli feminist elite recognize that they had used certain Mizrahi women as tokens and that the movement represented only one segment of Israeli women ... .
Ashkenazi women are not only subordinated to the patriarchal order as passive objects, they are also, as far as Mizrahi and Arab women are concerned, active subjects who partake, benefit, and perpetuate that order. It is, therefore, not surprising that, when asked to accept responsibility and seek new directions in resolving the ethnic issue, the great majority of Ashkenazi feminists failed to do so.
Abramovitch 2008
[Mizrahi feminists] suggested
Dahan Kalev at Jewish Women's Archive
The Mizrahi agenda has two foci: 1) An attack on what it regards as the misrepresentation of Israeli society as solely a western society -- a representation which continues to deny that its Mizrahi immigrants and citizens have been oppressed and subordinated and which refuses to grant the Mizrahi stories of oppression in their countries of origin equal status in the narrative of the founding fathers and the nation building alongside those of people who experienced the Holocaust and the pogroms of Eastern Europe; and 2) a multicultural approach that takes into account the effect of globalization in Israel, which has deepened the poverty and sense of hopelessness among women of Mizrahi origins.
Analysis:
Mizrahi/Ashkenazi feminist issues both underscore and cannot be separated from the idea that Israel is a security state run for and by Ashkenazi Jews and against an Arab enemy, which purposefully or not perpetuates an ethnic-based class division between those with European and non-European origins.
It is useful to compare the claims of Mizrahi feminists to those of black feminists in the United States, or any feminist or LGBTQ group who claims they are not represented by a white, (upper) middle class, academic feminist establishment whose social, political and economic status allows them an inherent intimacy with the ruling patriarchy. At the same time, Israeli Ashkenazi collective consciousness cannot be compared to that of America's upper classes in any meaningful way, and not just for geographic and demographic reasons. Israel's national narrative is almost infinitely more historically epic (Moses, the Temples) and intensely recent (Zionism, the Holocaust) -- cemented by actual existential tragedies and potential existential threats. Though that potentiality has been vastly reduced, due to Israel's military strength and relationship with the US, the threats are still perceived as very real, mainly due to government propaganda. If America has been ruled by a white Protestant elite for 200-plus years, a much younger, far tinier Israel is run by a group of interconnected Ashkenazi families (who can count on the US Jewish and religious elite for support). So with Israel's legally built-in religious divide, its people's existential fear of diversity perpetuated by certain elites -- with the help of rocket and suicide-bomber attacks -- and consequent heightened military posture, the sociopolitical mind-set of Israeli Ashkenazim lends itself to institutionalized discrimination, primarily through an Ashkenazi-dominated discourse.
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