Culture Identity & Borders

Samia Dodin and Sami Shalom Chetrit

Samia Dodin, A Palestinian American, Interviews Israeli Poet and Author Sami Shalom Chetrit on Israel and Arab Jewish Identity


[A primer for the Gallery Talk on "Culture, Borders and Identity" With Sami Shalom Chetrit and Mahmood Ibrahim, Thurs. Dec. 2, 7:00 pm, Sherry Frumkin Gallery, Studio 21, 3026 Airport Avenue, Santa Monica Airport, Santa Monica, CA 90405. See Below...]


Samia Dodin was born in a village near Hebron, spent much of her childhood and adolescence in Amman, Jordan, and came to the States to study literature and accounting when she was 18. Sami Chetrit was born in 1960 in Morocco and relocated to Israel with his Arab-Jewish family in 1963.


SAMIA DODIN: When did you first experience racism/oppression in Israel as a Sephardic Jew?

Sami: As a kid, I didn’t feel anything until later on, because we grew up in a slum, an immigrant neighborhood. We didn’t see other Jews, other Israelis. There was no TV until ’68, so we had no idea what was going on. In school we were taught only the history of European Jews. Slowly my father started talking and I listened and objected to most of what he had to say, because he was very critical. The first time maybe was when the Black Panthers in Israel in 1971 started organizing and speaking out, and there was TV already, but I didn’t know what was going on. I heard my father talking; I was 11 years old and then I understood there was really something, there was another life outside of our neighborhood in Ashdod.

Samia: But did you in a really personal, visceral way encounter that kind of discrimination or racism, such as going for a job, or?

Sami: No, nobody will tell you we don’t like you because you are dark, but you can feel it…

Samia: Did you ever feel that you were denied access to housing, education, or in dating, was there any sense of discrimination?

Sami: When I was younger, as I said, it was difficult to put your finger on social discrimination. The cultures are very separate, very segregated, like blacks and whites here. The way they settled the Arab Jews when they brought them in the ‘50s was to settle them separately from the Ashkenazim. They built new towns in the desert, in the Galilee; they put us in Palestinian neighborhoods in the big cities—until it became valuable real estate, and then they took Arab Jews out and relocated them elsewhere…So we didn’t mix really, maybe in the army. It’s not the personal experience of discrimination. It’s only when you go back you realize it. For example I go back to school, I can tell you what I’ve been taught, in high school. As I said a moment ago, the history of Arab Jews wasn’t even mentioned in the history textbooks.

Samia: When in Israel did they begin teaching Mizrahi, Arab Jewish history?

Sami: Never, they never started. They teach what they call Zionist waves of immigration; they teach about European waves of immigration, not about the Jews who came from Arab/Muslim lands, or if they are mentioned at all, it amounts to only a few pages in textbooks that contain hundreds of pages. There is some mention of only the very last years of Jewish communities in Arab countries, which they refer to as the destruction or eradication years. There is a sense that this was a positive development, that these communities were leaving behind their history of oppression to come to Israel. So we learned through the educational system really nothing but the history of European Jews, anti-Semitism in Europe, persecution…

Samia: Where are the voices within Israel, whether artists or politicians, who challenge the status quo, who are raising the consciousness about this problem of Arab Jewish identity?

Sami: We do it all the time, but the establishment doesn’t care. You know of course what the Zionist position is toward Palestinians, and how stubborn it is, and how they won’t change anything; it’s exactly the same position toward Arab Jews. They’ll publish some nice poems about “my grandfather in Baghdad,” but nothing political or controversial. It’s nice, nostalgic Sephardic kitsch, nothing to rock the boat.

Samia: Cosmetic stuff…Is there a core group of people whose vision of Israel and Zionism is so bound up with European values and identity that they don’t want to alter that in any way?

Sami: They don’t want Jewish identity to have anything to do with Arab identity, with the Arab world or Arab history or Muslim history or Muslim culture, because that is the enemy, that is the inferior culture. You’re talking about the ultimate enemy. That’s why the establishment is so adamant about erasing that part of our identity.

Samia: What percentage of the Israeli Jewish population is Middle Eastern in origin, and am I confusing Sephardic with Mizrahi?

Sami: They are the same population, but Mizrahi is a political term, which we have used to reflect a taking back of the eastern or Middle Eastern part of our identities. This population is 50% of Israelis, or a little more.

Samia: So how can a country, can a culture, survive, when they’re in denial about half their population?

Sami: Because by and large that population that is Sephardic, Mizrahi, they cooperate. Most of us cooperate.

Samia: So the non-European Jewish population tends to take on this idea of the Israeli identity, agreeing to negate what is Arab or Middle Eastern about themselves?

Sami: Yes. They are very patriotic, and they’re happy with that, or they believe they’re happy—because often they’re not. The media cooperates. Before the Black Panthers, in the 1970s and 1980s, people were sometimes furious, just as you could go to any black ghetto in this country and every kid could tell you about a history of oppression. But after the Black Panthers got attention, the establishment understood that this Arab Jewish identity movement was dangerous, and so they started taking measures. For example, the government invested money in researching the folklore—nothing political—of these communities. At that time TV was entirely government run, and you would start to see faces of Mizrahim. Today, with commercial television, it’s very big; since the early ‘90s you’ve got cable TV and there are dozens of channels and you see Mizrahim everywhere—singers, dancers, comedians, actors, but no one serious or influential. This is part of Israeli entertainment, and hasn’t had any impact on national Israeli identity, which remains European to its core. There are many radio channels in Israel today that play only Mizrahi, Middle Eastern music, and this seems to pacify people for the most part. They can hear and see themselves and therefore they feel reflected and included in that way.

Samia: Do you see many Mizrahi academics or talking heads on TV talk shows, giving their views?

Sami: No, it’s very rare. I mean they will ask someone like me to come, to be the clown. They’re all Ashkenazi and they have one of us on the show to be the comic foil, really. I learned that trick a long time ago. They need someone to look stupid, because everybody is in consensus. And they sometimes will have another Mizrahi guest who is very Zionist and supports the status quo, while you represent the radical view and get boos from the audience. I learned how to play them. I think I’ve been on almost every talk show, and what I do is use and quote only Ashkenazi sources, and only data from official Israeli sources. That is how I wrote my most recent book, Mizrahi Struggle in Israel, 1948-2003 (Am Oved 2004), which has 1,000 footnotes and references, 90% of them Ashkenazi sources, Ben Gurion and others, and they can’t argue. Sometimes you’ll hear an outraged response, and I’ll say, “I’m just quoting Ben Gurion…” What they want is that you should get angry and go crazy. I’ve had friends who called me after a show and said, “How can you be so calm? Are you nuts? Do you take drugs or what? I would have just killed the guy.” And that’s what they want you to do, be the crazy Moroccan Jew.

Samia: So why isn’t there any kind of militant component or struggle to re-enforce Mizrahi identity and force the government to come to terms with it?

Sami: Well, to listen to Israeli politicians today, they will tell you they made mistakes in the past, but they’ve fixed all these social problems and inequalities and you won’t see anyone complaining.

Samia: Beyond the curriculum, what other examples of repression does one see?

Sami: Again, there is a striking similarity between Mizrahi history in Israel and the history of blacks in this country. Blacks were so-called “liberated” from the oppression of social discrimination with new civil rights, and then often found themselves in poor communities where there were few opportunities for advancement, thus the cycle of poverty was hard to break. The infrastructure in both cases has been the trap.

Mizrahim were brought from Arab/Muslim lands and settled in those communities in the desert, in border towns, or in remote areas, often on confiscated Palestinian land, and usually they were confronted by Palestinians because they were on the borders. Meanwhile, 70% of the Ashkenazim who arrived in the ‘50s were settled in Tel Aviv, so later when their children inherited property in Tel Aviv, an apartment or a house might be valued at $300,000 while a property in a Mizrahi community might be valued at $30,000.

Economically, the third generation of Ashkenazim is much stronger than the first generation; conversely, the third generation of Mizrahim is much weaker than the first generation of Mizrahim. Today their communities are all collapsing. I have for example a cousin in a town in the remote Negev, who once owned a restaurant and a gas station, because people used to spend time there, on their way to Eilat or the Dead Sea. Tourist buses would pass through and people spent money in his town. But since the last Intifada, everything started to shut down, because no one was on the road anymore. He’s 50 years old and he and his kids just moved in with his mother. I hear stories like this every week from my family and you can just multiply these stories across the Mizrahi population. Everything is collapsing. The second generation of Mizrahim is collapsing, and the third generation is lost. They don’t know what to do and most of them have no higher education.

Samia: Is there any possibility at all that those people would turn around and ally with the Palestinians, because of the social oppression they have in common?

Sami: That’s what we hope, all the time, me and a handful of others—there are perhaps one to two thousand progressives in Israel who are working on these issues. That’s why I always vote only for Arab political parties; I never vote for Jews.

Samia: You’re not a typical Israeli, then?

Sami: No, not at all, neither a typical Israeli nor a typical Mizrahi. Of course not. To answer your question, Samia: It’s going to take a lot more oppression before this underclass of Mizrahi Israelis rise up and take matters into their own hands. The first thing is losing their loyalty to the regime, and rejecting their token status.

What’s ironic, though, is that after 20 years of hard work by Mizrahi activists, they are all proud today of their Mizrahi identity and their cultural roots; yet at the same time, the government, through the education system, after 50 years of indoctrination, has whitewashed their Arab or Persian or other Middle Eastern identities right out of them. When you learn that Jewish history is European Jewish history and that the Arab culture is inferior or bad and there’s nothing to learn from the Arabs, and there’s nothing in Jewish history where you see a positive benefit from Arab/Muslim experience, and the strident idea is that, “Thank God, we got you all out of there,” there is very little left for Mizrahim to experience something positive from their Arab/Muslim historical roots, even though we are talking about a 1,000 years or more that Jews had important communities in Morocco or Iraq or Egypt or Iran.

You grow up and you know that to be an Israeli is not to be an Arab, because an Arab is the enemy. It’s not only what they teach you, it’s the way they treat Arabs.

You look at the Arab and actually you’re looking the mirror, and you’ve been taught that the reflection in the mirror is actually bad, negative, low, enemy, so you start spitting in the mirror. It’s hard to spit in the mirror everyday, because you go crazy. It’s hard to live with self-hatred, you get sick, so what do you do? You channel everything to the Arab? It’s very simple social psychology. That is how we all became Arab haters, because if we don’t hate them, we’re going to hate ourselves.

That’s the trap, it’s why they keep the Occupation going and why they’ll never end the Occupation, unless it comes to an end by force majeure or by outside forces—never because the Israeli establishment will voluntarily cede the territories. They won’t back down because if they do, they will lose their Ashkenazi, Zionist hegemony—I say that because today, many Mizrahim are Zionist you know. When I say Ashkenazi Zionist, that includes many Mizrahi Jews. Once they give up the territories and let the Palestinians get on with their lives, and deal with the whole issue of the refugees, and Jerusalem, and will have a generation of a relatively peaceful life, everything in the Mizrahi identity will be channeled inside Israel, whether it’s poverty or oppression or the need for educational reform. Right now, in my view, everything is collapsing but no one complains because “we are at war,” and they, the Palestinians, are at war.

I once did a study and found that each time protest begins to build momentum, there is a war that breaks out or there is some turmoil in the territories, and so the country’s attention turns away from its social problems, from everything we’ve been talking about.

Samia: It sounds very Orwellian, but that’s what all governments do, even here…Why did the Ashkenazi Zionists want to bring all the Arab Jews into Palestine/Israel?

Sami: It’s simple math: They couldn’t declare a Jewish state without a [demographic] majority. There were only about 600,000 Jews in Palestine. There were 1.5 million Arab Palestinians. Eastern European Jews couldn’t leave, American Jews didn’t want to come, so Zionists deferred to about one million Jews in Arab/Muslim lands, and expelled half of the Palestinians.

—Edited by Jordan Elgrably

Gallery Talk on "Culture, Borders and Identity" With Sami Shalom Chetrit and Mahmood Ibrahim, Thurs. Dec. 2, 7:00 pm, Sherry Frumkin Gallery, Studio 21, 3026 Airport Avenue, Santa Monica Airport, Santa Monica, CA 90405]

With Barbara Grover's exhibit "This Land To Me, Some Call Palestine, Others Israel " as a bicultural backdrop, Sami Shalom Chetrit, an Israeli poet, essayist, educator and activist, will engage Palestinian historian, activist and educator Mahmood Ibrahim in a public conversation about the shared similarities and notable differences of Israeli and Palestinian cultures and identity, all in the context of the ever-shifting psychological and demographic boundaries between the two peoples.

Sami Shalom Chetrit was born in 1960 in Morocco and relocated to Israel with his Arab-Jewish family in 1963. He grew up in an immigrant working class neighborhood in the port city of Ashdod. He writes and publishes poetry, political essays and scholarly articles in many journals and papers. He is an activist for justice and peace in Israel-Palestine. In 1993 Chetrit was among the founders of Kedma - the alternative educational organization for equality in education in Israel, and served as the school principal of Kedma high school in southern Tel-Aviv. In 1996 he was among the founders of the social movement Hakeshet Hademocratit Hamizrahit (The Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow Coalition), that has been struggling for economic and social justice in Israel. In 2001 he finished his Ph.D. study on the Mizrahi struggle in Israel. It appeared as a book in Hebrew, by Am-Oved, in December 2003. In 2003 Chetrit wrote and co-produced and directed with Eli Hamo the documentary film "The Black Panthers (in Israel) Speak". Today, he teaches critical studies and is working on new studies and publications. Chetrit is the editor of the alternative web portal: Kedma - Middle Eastern Gate to Israel. He has taught at the Department of Near Eastern Studies at UC Berkeley, and is a Visiting Research Associate at UCLA.

Mahmood Ibrahim was born in Ramallah, Palestine. He lived the first years of his life in the Jericho refugee camp and later attended schools in and near Ramallah. He left the West bank in 1967 and moved to New York City, where he attended City College of New York (CCNY) and received a BA in history. Moving to Los Angeles, CA in 1973, he attended UCLA and majored in Islamic and Middle Eastern history, completing his Ph.D. in 1981. Mahmood is a Fulbright Scholar and the recipient of other awards such as a National Endowment for the Humanities grant. Mahmood taught at Birzeit University from 1984-1989, where he was Chair of the Department of History. He returned to Los Angeles and joined the faculty of Cal Poly Pomona in Sept. 1989; he has been the Chair of the Department of History since 1995. He is the author of two books, Merchant Capital and Islam, about the rise and expansion of Islam in the 7th century and The Oral History of the Intifada in Arabic, about the Intifada and how it could be used to challenge traditional/orientalist conceptions of Middle Eastern Society. Mahmood is the author of many articles and book reviews dealing with Middle East from the rise of Islam to the present.

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