How Israel’s Mizrahi Jews are “Making Israel Great Again”
Trump and Netanyahu mirror each other, but so do the electoral groups who support them.
Much has been written about how Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu are similar in their demeanour and their relationship with their electoral base.
S. Tobin, editor of the Jewish News Syndicate, summed it up nicely:
“Both men [Trump and Netanyahu] and their supporters view themselves as being locked in a war with their political foes in which no quarter can be given or received”.
Identity trumps religiosity
Both Trump and Netanyahu enjoy the support of deeply religious conservatives, even though they themselves are not that religious. For their supporters, however, this is not a problem, because in each case, the two leaders are willing to pay lip service to the respective religions, while — more importantly — turning that religious orientation into a cultural identity.
A conservative Netanyahu supporter explained:
“The question Netanyahu and all of us ask ourselves is: how do you define yourself? Are you first Jewish or first Israeli? If you define yourself firstly as Jewish, then we are in an identity story and not a religious one, and Netanyahu being religious or not doesn’t matter at all.”
Indeed, while Trump and Netanyahu may differ in some ways, their bases seem to be even more similar. If one looks at Trump’s base, the MAGA movement, it looks surprisingly like the base of Mizrahi Jews whose support has propelled Bibi Netanyahu to power.
Winning the support of the “poorly educated”
The Israeli populace can be divided broadly into two main cohorts: (1) the Ashkenazi, or European Jews, whose ancestors came from Eastern Europe, and (2) the Mizrahi Jews, who are descended from the Semitic peoples of the Middle East and North Africa.
As the Jewish Telegraphic Agency explains:
Historically, and to a significant extent still, Ashkenazi Jews have populated Israel’s upper class while Mizrahi Jews have been poorer as a whole, with discriminatory policies from Israel’s early years to blame for the inequality. This pattern maps onto Israel’s electoral landscape, shaping the country’s politics.
Starting to sound familiar? The divide between the Ashkenazi and Mizrahi mirrors the perceived gap that exists between the Democratic and Republican base in the US. Indeed, over the past 30 years, the Democrats have come to embrace the top 1%, the most highly educated, the most global elites. The Republican Party has, over that period, come to represent the working class, the more traditional, the more religious elements of American society.
A persecuted cohort with an axe to grind
Many if not most of the Mizrahi population in Israel are immigrants. According to the official Israeli hasbara narrative, the establishment of Israel in 1948 prompted many Muslim countries in the Middle East and North Africa to persecute and expel their Jewish populations, most of whom went to the newly formed Jewish State.
While the 1948 war of independence may have caused the Arab Muslim populations to view their Jewish fellow citizens with suspicion, the actual story is more sinister and cynical.
When the Jewish State was first established, it badly needed to attract a population. While the flow of Ashkenazi Jews from Europe was a steady stream due to the horrors they had witnessed in WWII, the Israeli leadership wanted to attract Mizrahi, or Arab Jews, from the surrounding Arab countries.
However, for the vast majority of Mizrahi living in the region, life among their Arab Muslim brethren was just fine: they were financially comfortable, living in large, cosmopolitan cities like Cairo, Damascus or Baghdad, where Jews made up fully 25% of the population.
Moreover, the League of Arab States had resolved to ban the emigration of Arab Jews to Israel.
To force the Mizrahi to leave their sophisticated surroundings to move to a backwater like Jerusalem or a farm on a kibbutz, the Israelis knew they had to convince the Mizrahi that their Arab neighbors hated them and wanted them out.
The Israelis thus set about organising a series of “false flag” operations to make the Mizrahi living in the surrounding Arab nations feel they were under attack, thus forcing them to “take refuge” in the new Jewish State.
In Iraq, for example, Yusef Basri, a Zionist intelligence operative in Iraq, was convicted by Iraqi authorities of having carried out bombings targeting Iraqi Jews. His targets had included attacks on a coffee shop, a car dealership and a synagogue, among other attacks on Jewish communities and businesses.
The Masuda Shemtov synagogue was also bombed, killing four Jews. It was subsequently discovered that the attack was carried out by a Muslim man of Syrian origin who had been hired, paid and provisioned by Israeli intelligence.
The bombing campaign eventually convinced the Iraqis to suspend the ban on emigration to Israel, and 150,000 Iraqi Jews were airlifted to Israel as part of Operation Ezra and Nehemiah.
In Yemen, the Israelis worked with the British and the Yemeni authorities directly to force around 50,000 Yemeni Jews to fly to Israel. Zionists even bribed local rulers, some of whom were reluctant to let the Jews go because it was the religious duty of Muslims to protect them. In fact, the Zionist emissary had to argue that it was a Jewish religious “commandment” for them to go to the “Land of Israel”.
In addition to Israel’s campaign of bribery and coercion, the Israeli Mossad also worked covertly to take adult Jews (or sometimes just Jewish children) from Arab countries and resettle them in Israel.
Believing (falsely) that their Arab “host” countries had attacked them and forcibly expelled them has left the Mizrahim Israelis with a deep-seated antipathy towards all Arabs, and a yearning desire to re-establish Eretz-Israel, or “Greater Israel” in the Middle East.
MIGA and MAGA — two sides of the same coin?
A conservative Mizrahi woman explained the appeal of Netanyahu and his Likud Party:
“Living in Israel is for us, coming from Arab countries, the continuation of our Jewish identity. Whereas the programme presented by the left is cosmopolitan — in which nationalism is overcome — we, Mizrahi Jews, do not relate at all to this discourse, in which human and civil rights come before our Jewish identity”.
In other words, the Mizrahi MIGA supporters are like their American MAGA counterparts — they reject the “woke culture” of the Left.
For Ashkenazi Zionists, Israel was founded because the Jews needed to have their own “homeland” where they could be safe. Indeed, this need for safety is a central tenet of Zionism, which asserts that anti-Semitism — especially in Europe — is a pervasive and persistent deadly threat to Jews, and the only solution is a Jewish nation state.
Moreover, for the Ashkenazi European Zionists, that Jewish homeland did not necessarily need to be in Palestine. The modern Zionist movement started in the mid 1800’s, but the Zionists did not settle on Palestine until the 1900’s, after having considered other alternatives, including Madagascar, British Uganda, Italian East Africa, Japan, the USSR and even the United States.
It was not until the post-Holocaust period after WWII, however, that there was enough unified impetus in Europe to settle the (Ashkenazi) Jewish refugees in the British Mandate of Palestine.
For the Mizrahi, however, Israel is not just a nation state, a political project to give Jews a safe homeland. Rather, Israel is a spiritual place, a God-given land that they need to reclaim and reconquer “by the sword”. This land, which they call Eretz-Israel, or “Greater Israel”, encompasses all of the current are of Israel-Palestine and much of the surrounding territories of Jordan, Syria, Egypt and Iraq.
For the Mizrahi, then, the Holocaust plays a much smaller role in their identity as Jews and as Israelis.
“You have to understand that for us, the natives of the Arab countries, the state of Israel was not created because of the Shoah [Holocaust], but because we wanted to realise a millennial dream.”
For example, Yair Lapid, head of the centrist Yesh Atid party and an Ashkenazi Jew whose family came from Yugoslavia, visited Israel’s Holocaust memorial when he became prime minister.
This Likudnik is highly critical of Lapid’s visit to the memorial:
“He says that Israel was created because of the Shoah. But when Netanyahu is elected, he goes to the Kotel [the Western Wall]: it’s a Jewish declaration that fits us. The attachment to our traditions remains very strong across generations.”
MIGA and MAGA: aspirational movements based on a mythical past
In the US, the Trumpist MAGA movement hearkens back to a Norman Rockwell vision of America: white, Christian and communitarian — a society based on shared identity, shared values and a shared consciousness.
So too is the MIGA movement in Israel based on the Mizrahi idealistic premise of a “chosen people” who have a right to the land that was granted them by God, fuelled by an idyllic vision of an Eretz-Israel (Greater Israel) that encompasses much of the present day Middle East.
How everything changed — for the Mizrahi and for the Palestinians
For the first 30 years of its existence, Israel was governed by an elite class of Labor Zionists who were mostly secular and moderate. These elites were mostly Ashkenazi Jews from Europe who had come to Israel after WWII and whose orientation was in many ways Marxist and non-religious, if not outright atheist (as were the original Zionists themselves).
These Labor Zionists viewed the Mizrahi Jewish population with suspicion and even a certain amount of contempt. In fact, according to Haaretz, the Shin Bet (Israel’s version of the FBI) spied on Mizrahi Jews in the 1950’s following a revolt by members of the Mizrahi community against the establishment and against the rule by Mapai (the Land of Israel Workers’ Party), the precursor of today’s Labor Party. Haaretz states that the disturbances were “led by [Jewish] immigrants from North Africa protesting against deprivation and discrimination on the basis of ethnicity”.
The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) also did a study showing that Mizrahi Jews were discriminated against. The report concluded:
“A cursory examination of the social structure in Israel shows that for economic and other reasons, this group [Mizrahi] is underprivileged. This applies to ‘old inhabitants’ as well as new immigrants, as a glance at lists of senior officers and officials, etc., will demonstrate…it is evident that there is a country-wide trend to treat Oriental Jews with contempt; less frequently, among German and other Central European Jews, there is also a feeling of superiority vis-à-vis ‘blacks‘.”
The rise of Likud
In 1948, Menachem Begin formed Herut, which was the political wing of the Irgun, the Zionist terrorist organisation that chased the British out of Palestine through a bloody campaign of bombings and assassinations. The Irgun were also responsible for massacres of Arabs during the Nakba.
Albert Einstein, along with other Jewish luminaries, including Hannah Arendt, published a letter in the New York Times on December 4, 1948, condemning Begin’s new political party:
“Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the “Freedom Party” (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties. It was formed out of the membership and following of the former Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist, right-wing, chauvinist organization in Palestine”.
Herut grew, and eventually merged with other right wing parties to form Likud in 1973. The new party’s platform was based on expanding Israel’s borders, reconquering Jordan, and creating Eretz-Israel “from the river to the sea”.
Likud first took power in Israel in the elections of 1977. According to Wikipedia, Likud’s landslide victory “was a major turning point in the country’s political history, marking the first time the left had lost power”. The party has ruled Israel on and off ever since, thanks primarily to the staunch support of Mizrahi Jews.
“Voting against their own interests”
The Likud Party is a right wing conservative party much like the US GOP. They oppose the social welfare state and redistribution of wealth and any government actions to alleviate discrimination and inequality. And yet the Mizrahi, who face discrimination and income and wealth inequality, vote for the Likud in droves.
Sound familiar?
Likud’s popularity among Mizrahi is not based on societal factors, but rather is based on Likud’s unapologetic Zionist drive to expand Israel’s borders and run roughshod over the local and foreign Arab populations. The Mizrahim have been “a crucial pillar” of the Likud party since its formation in the 1970s, when Menachem Begin galvanized them as a political force that drove the party’s rise to power.
As a New York Times article sums up:
Having fled or been expelled from Arab countries, many [Mizrahi] readily took to the party’s hard line against Israel’s Arab adversaries and its embrace of Jewish nationalism.
Today the Mizrahi are “no longer victims”
It is obvious to any observer that what we are witnessing in the current wave of genocide, murder and violence in Palestine today is wholly unprecedented.
This extreme violence can only be explained by the unprecedented rise to power of the Mizrahi Likudniks and the prevalence of their “fascist” anti-Arab fanaticism and their maximalist attitude towards expansion of the Israeli state and the expulsion and/or “Nazi” style extermination of the Arab Muslim population within “Greater Israel”.
Moreover, over the recent years, the Mizrahi identity “has become dominant” in Israeli society, according to sociologist Guy Abutbul-Selinger:
“The discourse remains stuck on an image of Mizrahim as victims,” Abutbul-Selinger says. “There is still a perception of significant inequality and of the Mizrahim as objects of discrimination, like three and four decades ago. Except that a completely new ethnic reality has developed. That [out-of-date perception] does a great wrong to the Mizrahim, who are actually a group that in a relatively short period — five or six decades after arriving in the Israeli space — is already highly mobile, strong and dominant.”
Indeed, Abutbul-Selinger asserts that “we are no longer in the same ethnic reality that we were familiar with in the 1950s and 1960s” and that the Mizrahi identity has become “hegemonic” in Israeli life. Meanwhile, he says, the Ashkenazi identity has been relegated to dominate only in “academia and the labor market”.
Sound familiar?
“The Mizrahim today are not victims, they are a dominant group, and through voting for Likud they have been in control in Israel during the past four decades”.
Settler Colonialism is no longer the issue
Many modern critiques of Israel are based on the concept of “settler colonialism”. I myself have written that this concept of expelling indigenous people from a land in order to establish a “superior” white, European society is a fundamental concept that unites the ruling elites in both the United States and Israel.
However, the damning accusation of settler colonialism no longer applies to Israel — at least not an Israel that is ruled by Mizrahi Israelis who themselves can be considered “indigenous”.
The idea of settler colonialism no longer applies to the Israel of today.
The difference between Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Jews regarding Arabs
The socialist Ashkenazi Jews who first established the Kibbutzim in Israel recognised that they were — to a certain degree — “interlopers” who were establishing their own nation state at the expense of indigenous people. Indeed, various DNA studies have proven that Ashkenazi Jews are not even “Semitic”: their ancestors were of European origin.
Any negative Ashkenazi views toward Arabs are, therefore, racist in nature, and probably not altogether different from their racist views of the “black” Mizrahi Jews that the IDF study found.
For the Mizrahim, however, Arabs are mortal enemies, people with whom they have been at war for generations; oppressors who have forced them off their land, driven them into a diaspora throughout the Middle East, persecuted and expelled them from their homes both centuries ago and as recently as 70 years ago.
For the Mizrahi, the idea that “there is no such thing as a Palestinian” rings true. There are no Palestinians; there are no Jordanians; there are no Syrians. They are all Arabs.
And they are all enemies.
The Mizrahi Jews in Israel see themselves locked in a Manichaean struggle in which either they, or the Arabs, will prevail, and the Arabs who live in Gaza and the West Bank are simply part of that struggle; simply one cohort of the greater enemy that must be vanquished in order for Jews to survive, to claim their rightful lands as they were bequeathed to them by God.
MIGA: What Mizrahi control of Israel means
The grotesque tragedy that is unfolding in Israel-Palestine today is perhaps the inevitable result of this “hegemonic” Mizrahi control of the Israeli political sphere.
As Abutbul-Selinger points out:
When the Mizrahi population encounters questions dealing with, say, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the contention that Arabs are equal to Jews is taken as an offense to the Jewish people.
And in today’s Israel, “most of the cabinet ministers are Mizrahim, most of the mayors are Mizrahim”.
There is no doubt that Likud is a Mizrahi party, both in terms of its voters and in terms of MKs and ministers. In the municipal realm, as early as a decade ago, there was a study showing that the proportion of mayors and local council heads of Mizrahi origin exceeded 60 percent — and since then this trend has only intensified.
The “Nazi” and “Fascist” tendencies that Albert Einstein and his cohorts warned about in their 1948 letter about Menachem Begin’s Herut Party have now reached their full potential under the helm of Herut’s successor, Likud, and its cynical, power-hungry leader, Benjamin Netanyahu.
This means that, under the maximalist Mizrahi ideology that Netanyahu has so cynically embraced, the genocide will continue; the atrocities will continue; the outrageous flouting of all international laws and norms will continue.
MIGA: How Zionism created a Golem
I used to argue with people who dismissed the Israel-Palestine conflict as an insoluble problem, because “they have been fighting for thousands of years”.
“No”, I would say, “this problem only dates back to 1948”.
I was wrong.
Yes, as long as the Ashkenazi European Jews were running the show in Israel, it was a question of settler colonialism and a problem of Israel refusing to abide by United Nations resolutions. That problem, to me, seemed soluble, either through international pressure, boycotts, or direct influence by Israel’s greatest benefactor, the United States.
If only we had courageous leadership in Washington, I thought, Israel could be reined in, as it had been in the past.
Alas, this is no longer the case. The ruling elite in Israel are no longer susceptible to Western influence. They are not, in reality, “Western” anymore. They are Mizrahi. They are Middle Eastern. And asking Israel to stop slaughtering Palestinians is like asking Saudi Arabia to stop slaughtering Yemenis: pointless.
A perfect storm
The European Ashkenazi Jews who created the State of Israel saw themselves as essentially modern, an “oasis” of civilisation amid a desert of backward, violent primitives.
As such, countries like the United States rushed to recognise the new “democracy” in the Middle East, and were generous in their support of this bastion of modernism and liberalness as a bulwark against the violent, autocratic and cruel regimes of the region.
Now, 75 years on, Israel is a modern state in terms of its technology, its military and its awesome capabilities to rain down destruction and mayhem on its enemies.
What we did not foresee, however, is how the Zionist project, this “modern” society with its awesome technological might, could be hijacked by utterly base, disgusting, violent and destructive forces that have their origins in the Old Testament.
Through our support for Zionist Israel, we in the West have created a Golem, a rampaging MIGA monster that is beyond our control, determined to kill everyone it perceives to be in the way of the re-establishment of Eretz-Israel, lost in its maniacal drive to Make Israel Great Again.
I fear that Gaza is just the beginning.
#End
Thank you for sharing your vast knowledge on this area. I don't think I realized the subtle differences between the two group of Jewish settlers in modern Israel. I still see them both as "settlers", but one group is more "Western/European" and one is made up of settlers from other parts of the Arab world.
"... under the maximalist Mizrahi ideology that Netanyahu has so cynically embraced, the genocide will continue; the atrocities will continue; the outrageous flouting of all international laws and norms will continue."
I certainly hope not, but you do paint a rather bleak picture here. If the US and other Western/NATO powers had never allowed Israel to gain so many weapons and encouraged them to use them on their neighbors (such as in the 1967 War), perhaps Israel would have been more agreeable to follow the UN protocols set up in 1948. But they feel they're above all cooperation with other nations and they are "ubermensch" or superior to all others who live in "their" land and perhaps the rest of the world. Trouble in the making!