>many Jews who speak Arabic; given that the response of many Arab
>governments to the creation of Israel in 1948 was to ratchet up the
>level of oppression against the Jewish population. (This is ironic,
>becuase these anti-Zionist governments were encouraging increased
>Jewish emigration into "the Zionist entity."(One could argue that a
>far more effective anti-Zionist strategy on the part of governments
>in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Morocco etc. would have been to do everything
>possible to encourage Jews to stay and to keep them safe; rather
>than scapegoating them because they were unhappy that the modern
>state of Israel was created in 1948.)
***** What Do Palestinians and Arab-Jews Have in Common? Nationalism and Ethnicity Examined Through the Compensation Question
Yehouda Shenhav
Department of Sociology and Anthropology Tel Aviv University(1) Tel Aviv 69978, Israel e-mail: shenhav at post.tau.ac.il
ABSTRACT: This article focuses on the immigration of Iraqi Jews to Israel in the early 1950s and examines the manner in which the Israeli State has used this immigration to offset the claims of the Palestinian national movement. It also sheds light on actions taken by WOJAC (World Organization of Jews from Arab Countries) to further Israel's national interests, as well as on how these interests were challenged and re-formulated by WOJAC's non-Israeli members. The history of WOJAC serves as an example of the anomalous relationship between nationality and ethnicity in the Zionist context. Lastly, this article underscores the conspicuous compartmentalization of "the Palestinian question" and the "Mizrahi question" within Israeli political and intellectual discourse.
Introduction
The histories and memories of Jews from Arab lands have been used in the political arena (national and international) in order to offset the claims of the Palestinian national movement regarding three issues: legitimate rights over the land (Palestine/Israel), the right of return (Zchut Ha'Shiva) and compensation for the Palestinian refugees of the 1948 War. This paper focuses on the third claim (an extended discussion of the other two claims and their histories are presented elsewhere. See: Shenhav, forthcoming) and reveals how the State of Israel constructed linkages between Jews-from-Arab-lands and the Palestinians, as well as how its "national accounting theory" became embedded in state practices. The State's theory of national accounting is examined through the prism of several events, including the peace treaty with Egypt in the 1970s, the Gulf War in 1991, and the interim agreements with the Palestinians in the late 1990s. In addition, this paper examines WOJAC's (World Organization of Jews from Arab Countries) response to state theory and action. Analysis shows that WOJAC's efforts to legitimize practices of the State paradoxically and unintentionally resulted in the deconstruction of the theory behind these practices. Not surprisingly, the epistemological vantage-point from which this de-construction was possible was provided by non-citizen Jews, members of WOJAC living outside of Israel.
Let me begin with a telling story that took place in Israel in January 1952, about half a year after the official conclusion of the operation that brought Iraq's Jews to Israel. During this year, two Zionist activists, Yosef Basri and Shalom Salah, were hanged in Baghdad. They had been charged with possession of explosive materials 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." (Hillel, 1985: 342) It would have only been natural for Iraqi Jews in Israel to react to the news of this hanging with outrage. On the contrary, however, the mourning assemblies organized by leaders of the community in various Israeli cities failed to arouse widespread solidarity with the two Iraqi Zionists. In fact, the opposite was true. A classified document from Moshe Sasson, of the Foreign Ministry's Middle East Division, to then Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett maintained 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 this reaction attests to an acute level 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.
Even if it does not represent the reaction of the entire Iraqi community in Israel, this historical document certainly attests to a problematic element in the primordial perspective of nationalism espoused by the Zionist movement since its inception. (Smith, 1986) This perspective deems nationalism to be the awakening of an ancient ethnic force, engendered by a primeval need to belong to a national framework. Zionism, according to Anthony Smith, is a particular case of such nationalism, and, more specifically, a characteristic case of "diaspora nationalism." More than a mere academic model, the concept of diaspora nationalism also serves as a yardstick of Zionist historiography and praxis. Through its prism, Zionism viewed the Jewish communities around the world as inherently part of the Jewish national identity in Israel. Israeli encyclopedias and textbooks describe what is known in the Zionist epos as "Operation Ezra and Nehemiah" (which brought Iraq's Jewish community to Israel in 1950-1951) as a "rescue aliya" (aliya, literally translated as "going up," is the standard Israeli term to denote immigration to Israel) that saved persecuted Jews who yearned to return to their ancient homeland, after enduring ethnic repression and discrimination (3).
The story of how Iraq's Jews were brought to the newly established State of Israel provides an opportunity to reexamine the essence of the connection between ethnicity and nationalism. (Smith, 1986; Armstrong, 1982) Developments surrounding the "nationalization" of Iraq's Jews reveal how problematic it is to apply the thesis of primordial Zionism to them as an ethnic group, as well as to other Jewish groups in Europe and the Middle East. From the complex sequence of events in which the Iraqi Jews were brought to Israel, I have chosen to deal with one specific episode that has not yet been recounted: the fate of the property of Iraq's Jews, and its connection to the property of the Palestinian Arabs who were expelled or who fled in 1948.
This article focuses on two intersecting claims that faced the Israeli government between 1948 and 1951. One was the demand, put forward by the United Nations and the governments of the United States and Britain, that Israel compensate the 1948 refugees for property that had been impounded by the State's Custodian of Absentee Property. The other was the expectations of former Iraqi Jews that they would be compensated for their property that had been frozen by the Iraqi government in 1951. I will draw on archival sources to show that the Israeli government turned this bind into a system akin to double-entry accounting with regard to the two categories of property - that of the 1948 Palestinian refugees and that of the Iraqi Jews - in an effort to neutralize the claims of both. The Government of Israel cited the injustice that the Iraqi government had done the Jews of Iraq in order to explain its refusal to compensate the Palestinians, but told the Iraqi Jews in Israel to apply to that same Iraqi government for the restitution they sought.
This logic of accounting was propounded by exploiting circumstances; it was not necessarily a deliberate scheme. However, when implemented as a raison d'état it enabled the Israeli government to "legitimately" absolve itself of responsibility for compensating the Palestinian refugees (4). Moreover, Israel's nationalization of the identity and property of Iraq's Jews in its relentless drive to articulate Jewish nationalism served as a bargaining policy with which to deny Palestinian nationality. This article confirms that the Jews of Iraq became an instrument in a decision-making process from which they were excluded and which rested on basic assumptions they did not necessarily share. Furthermore, I draw on another source of archival data in order to document how WOJAC responded to the theory employed by the Israeli State. WOJAC strove to facilitate the linkage between the property of Iraqi Jews and the property of the Palestinian refugees. But, as it turned out, the organization's non-Israeli members challenged these assumptions and developed a form of resistance against them.
The present case shows that the transition from (Jewish) ethnicity to nationalism is neither natural nor self-evident. While naturally concerning itself with the tension between "ethnicity" and "nationalism," this paper's empirical description will also shed light on the manner in which Israel played an active role in the Middle Eastern arena. Throughout its analysis, the Israeli government is conceptualized as a political broker acting to construct "national interests" and "ethnic categories" in order to fulfil its own objectives (raison d'etat). State political actors formed a common Zionist identity for Jews of very different backgrounds, and simultaneously formed a common identity of opposition for all "Arabs". This paper demonstrates that by relating to the property of each group as collective, rather than individual, the State assisted in constructing these antagonistic categories of national identity.
I begin with a contextual background, which lays down the major parameters within which the drama described by the empirical material took place. This will be followed by an analysis of the emigration of Iraq's Jews in the context of the ongoing theoretical debate over the question of nationalism. I will then present an empirical description of the actions taken by the Israeli Government vis-à-vis the Jewish property and the Palestinian property in question. Finally, I will describe the various voices raised by WOJAC members in the course of the discussion surrounding the compensation issue. . . .
[The full text is availabel at <http://www.arts.mcgill.ca/MEPP/PRRN/papers/shenhav1.htm>.] ***** -- Yoshie
* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>