Thank you for this context. The actual demographics of Israel are important to keep in mind in light of the "white European settler-colonial" narrative that is pervasive at Columbia and elsewhere. The Mizrahim and Sephardim are not white -- and in Europe, the Jews were not seen as true "Aryan" whites or real Frenchmen. That said, I'm trying not take the bait from these hateful "Go back to Poland" types and keep my eye on the larger picture. The reason these campus protests have such intensity is because of the horrific cruelty of starving and bombing a civilian population in Gaza. And yes, I know Hamas planned it that way, with its hostages and human shields strategy, and is happy to martyr more Palestinians. Still, I agree with the Yuval Levin piece in Haaretz this week: Netanyahu's militarism and brutality, is endangering the entire Israeli project.
I want to raise a side issue, though. "Working-class Mizrahim are often spoken of as 'voting against their own interests,' in a similar way as the white working class who vote Republican in the United States. Like in America, this is not said without a little tinge of liberal condescension." I have never quite understood why the "voting against their own interests" argument is talked about in this way, as something condescending that it's bad to say, a bad sort of explanation. I grew up conservative, and it seems to me straightforwardly true: if you're poor, as my family was, and you vote for Republicans, you are voting against your interests. The Republicans spend a lot of money convincing us that this isn't true, misleading us about how much is spent on welfare and how much economic activity (and therefore employment) this money could be put toward, so that we genuinely don't understand that we'd be better off with Democrats in charge. When I learned that the Republicans were lying, my understanding changed and so did my voting.
The alternative explanation for such voter behavior that has arisen since that one fell out of favor, so far as I can tell, is this: that we're voting *for* our interests, it's just that we enjoy the "wages of whiteness" and the pleasures of pushing other people around and fondling our little grievances more than we enjoy having enough to eat or being able to go to the doctor. That second explanation strikes me as a million times more insulting than just suggesting that we're a little muddled in our understanding of economics. In the first scenario, these voters are a little misinformed about economics, which is forbidding and complex anyway; in the second, they are *morally idiotic to the point of self-sacrifice.* That's worse. Am I misunderstanding the whole conversation? Is there really any way to say "These voters are WRONG" without sounding a little condescending? And if not, isn't "non-wealthy conservatives don't know their own financial interests" the least insulting explanation?
There are a bunch of things going on regarding why American and/or Western activists in general seem to always glomp American/Western racial conflicts and issues onto the Israel/Palestinian conflict.
Part of it is just not being educated enough about Israeli society, demographics, and history. To the extent that an American or European people know Jews, they know Ashkenazi Jews or associate Judaism with Ashkenazi Jews because those predominate Jewishness in American/Western culture.
The other trickier and more insidious part is the thesis that "Jews don't count" in terms of who is and who is not a minority under the current views of such things. Jewishness seems ideal for intersectionality in theory. In reality, no one seems able to decide whether Judaism and Jewishness are a religion, race, culture, or a combination of it all.
A lot of the worst aspects of the current protests as you note come from people deciding Jews/Israelis are just a bunch of "settler colonialist" white people who need to go home.
And so it goes, the sacred nonsense of religious bent envelops governmental action and bends it to a particular myth. Nothing to see here.
Closer to home, the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representative, Mike Johnson, is taking the lead in insisting that his beliefs outweigh all others--God is on his side. We now know that the wealth of a senior white family is the U.S. is 10 time greater that the average of a black household. So, sure, let's debate ethnicity and tradition and color and so on as a pleasant diversion from the awful reality of what we've wrought on our neighbors.
Gad, there's the real disappointment, a zombie to be sure!
The woke "Protestors" are correct in opposing abuses of the Gaza population via the Israeli regime's collective guilt rationale. They are double fools for not protesting with the same fervor against Hamas thugs. And, for not seeing their own wokeism is the same fool's reflex to judge people by group traits or affiliations.
This article helps us avoid group-think about the Israeli population. Thanks, John!
Are you familiar with the plays of Hanoch Levin? Specifically Hefetz. If not, I highly recommend checking it out. It’s a brilliant dissection of this social hierarchy (he wrote it in the 70s). The play also works as a universal allegory about a particular human impulse — that, no matter how miserable we are in the current system, as long as there is a class of people even more deserving of misery, we’ll find ways to justify and defend the status quo. Also it’s very, very funny.
> Shlaim unveils in his book "undeniable proof of Zionist involvement in the terrorist attacks" which prompted a mass exodus of Jews from Iraq between 1950 and 1951.
The historian concluded, after extensive personal research, that while a grenade assault on the Masuda Shemtov synagogue in Baghdad - which killed four Jews in January 1951 - was carried out by an Arab, other bombings were allegedly the work of Mossad, Israel's spy agency.
These were carried out to quicken the transfer of 110,000 Jews in Iraq to the then-newly created state of Israel, he said.
The existence of a racial heirarchy in Israel also does not preclude their involvement in genocide and ethnic cleansing. An analogue can be drawn to the trajectory of Irish immigrants escaping famine and oppression and their assimilation into the US racial order. You might like Noel Ignatiev's book on this - How the Irish Became White.
A good explainer indeed! It only leaves out the Russian bloc--which isn't Mizrahi/Sephardi, is decidedly not part of the Ashkenazi elite, and is only partially Jewish by descent. To oversimplify a bit, this bloc is anticlerical and ultranationalist.
A personal note. When I was young, my parents stressed Israel as an escape for American Jews, if necessary. Nowadays, many American Jews are thinking of a refuge from Trumpism. I am the son of one of the few Polish survivors, which I believe conveys Polish citizenship. Poland is looking like a better bolt-hole than Israel these days, especially if PiS stays out of power.
Thank you for this context. The actual demographics of Israel are important to keep in mind in light of the "white European settler-colonial" narrative that is pervasive at Columbia and elsewhere. The Mizrahim and Sephardim are not white -- and in Europe, the Jews were not seen as true "Aryan" whites or real Frenchmen. That said, I'm trying not take the bait from these hateful "Go back to Poland" types and keep my eye on the larger picture. The reason these campus protests have such intensity is because of the horrific cruelty of starving and bombing a civilian population in Gaza. And yes, I know Hamas planned it that way, with its hostages and human shields strategy, and is happy to martyr more Palestinians. Still, I agree with the Yuval Levin piece in Haaretz this week: Netanyahu's militarism and brutality, is endangering the entire Israeli project.
Thanks for writing this piece, genuinely. I really learned a lot.
This is really useful, as always.
I want to raise a side issue, though. "Working-class Mizrahim are often spoken of as 'voting against their own interests,' in a similar way as the white working class who vote Republican in the United States. Like in America, this is not said without a little tinge of liberal condescension." I have never quite understood why the "voting against their own interests" argument is talked about in this way, as something condescending that it's bad to say, a bad sort of explanation. I grew up conservative, and it seems to me straightforwardly true: if you're poor, as my family was, and you vote for Republicans, you are voting against your interests. The Republicans spend a lot of money convincing us that this isn't true, misleading us about how much is spent on welfare and how much economic activity (and therefore employment) this money could be put toward, so that we genuinely don't understand that we'd be better off with Democrats in charge. When I learned that the Republicans were lying, my understanding changed and so did my voting.
The alternative explanation for such voter behavior that has arisen since that one fell out of favor, so far as I can tell, is this: that we're voting *for* our interests, it's just that we enjoy the "wages of whiteness" and the pleasures of pushing other people around and fondling our little grievances more than we enjoy having enough to eat or being able to go to the doctor. That second explanation strikes me as a million times more insulting than just suggesting that we're a little muddled in our understanding of economics. In the first scenario, these voters are a little misinformed about economics, which is forbidding and complex anyway; in the second, they are *morally idiotic to the point of self-sacrifice.* That's worse. Am I misunderstanding the whole conversation? Is there really any way to say "These voters are WRONG" without sounding a little condescending? And if not, isn't "non-wealthy conservatives don't know their own financial interests" the least insulting explanation?
There are a bunch of things going on regarding why American and/or Western activists in general seem to always glomp American/Western racial conflicts and issues onto the Israel/Palestinian conflict.
Part of it is just not being educated enough about Israeli society, demographics, and history. To the extent that an American or European people know Jews, they know Ashkenazi Jews or associate Judaism with Ashkenazi Jews because those predominate Jewishness in American/Western culture.
The other trickier and more insidious part is the thesis that "Jews don't count" in terms of who is and who is not a minority under the current views of such things. Jewishness seems ideal for intersectionality in theory. In reality, no one seems able to decide whether Judaism and Jewishness are a religion, race, culture, or a combination of it all.
A lot of the worst aspects of the current protests as you note come from people deciding Jews/Israelis are just a bunch of "settler colonialist" white people who need to go home.
Well done. So often it feels like even liberal Zionists never got past the Leon Uris phase of how to think about Israel.
And so it goes, the sacred nonsense of religious bent envelops governmental action and bends it to a particular myth. Nothing to see here.
Closer to home, the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representative, Mike Johnson, is taking the lead in insisting that his beliefs outweigh all others--God is on his side. We now know that the wealth of a senior white family is the U.S. is 10 time greater that the average of a black household. So, sure, let's debate ethnicity and tradition and color and so on as a pleasant diversion from the awful reality of what we've wrought on our neighbors.
Gad, there's the real disappointment, a zombie to be sure!
The woke "Protestors" are correct in opposing abuses of the Gaza population via the Israeli regime's collective guilt rationale. They are double fools for not protesting with the same fervor against Hamas thugs. And, for not seeing their own wokeism is the same fool's reflex to judge people by group traits or affiliations.
This article helps us avoid group-think about the Israeli population. Thanks, John!
Are you familiar with the plays of Hanoch Levin? Specifically Hefetz. If not, I highly recommend checking it out. It’s a brilliant dissection of this social hierarchy (he wrote it in the 70s). The play also works as a universal allegory about a particular human impulse — that, no matter how miserable we are in the current system, as long as there is a class of people even more deserving of misery, we’ll find ways to justify and defend the status quo. Also it’s very, very funny.
https://youtu.be/ZIMgMn8AJ4o?si=s9fYkaZGgHvKNikj&t=2m50s
The Lavon Affair in Egypt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavon_Affair and Mossad's involvement in Iraq are also key context here that is missing https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-shocking-truth-behind-the-baghdad-bombings-of-1950-and-1951/
> Shlaim unveils in his book "undeniable proof of Zionist involvement in the terrorist attacks" which prompted a mass exodus of Jews from Iraq between 1950 and 1951.
The historian concluded, after extensive personal research, that while a grenade assault on the Masuda Shemtov synagogue in Baghdad - which killed four Jews in January 1951 - was carried out by an Arab, other bombings were allegedly the work of Mossad, Israel's spy agency.
These were carried out to quicken the transfer of 110,000 Jews in Iraq to the then-newly created state of Israel, he said.
The existence of a racial heirarchy in Israel also does not preclude their involvement in genocide and ethnic cleansing. An analogue can be drawn to the trajectory of Irish immigrants escaping famine and oppression and their assimilation into the US racial order. You might like Noel Ignatiev's book on this - How the Irish Became White.
A good explainer indeed! It only leaves out the Russian bloc--which isn't Mizrahi/Sephardi, is decidedly not part of the Ashkenazi elite, and is only partially Jewish by descent. To oversimplify a bit, this bloc is anticlerical and ultranationalist.
A personal note. When I was young, my parents stressed Israel as an escape for American Jews, if necessary. Nowadays, many American Jews are thinking of a refuge from Trumpism. I am the son of one of the few Polish survivors, which I believe conveys Polish citizenship. Poland is looking like a better bolt-hole than Israel these days, especially if PiS stays out of power.