As the peace process gets under way, the question arises: just who
is the Jewish-Israeli society which is about to make peace with its
enemies? To what extent is this society sufficiently mature to
respect the different identity of another people?
The Jewish-Israeli society is one of polarization, of fissures and
of divisions within its own ranks. Among its characteristics one
finds a long-standing racism toward the Oriental Jewish community
living within it. It is a society which is suffering from the
failure of its attempts at integration, repeated from generation to
generation.
The reasons for the failure to integrate diverse elements of the
population living in Israel are psychohistorical and deeply rooted.
In connection with this sociohistorical situation, I wish to put
forward a number of hypotheses:
My first hypothesis is that the split between the Ashkenazi
(Western) and Sephardi (Oriental) is embedded in the cornerstone of
the society. The people of the Second Aliya (wave of immigration,
1904-1914), who came from Russia to settle in Palestine, left an
indelible mark on Jewish-Israeli society for generations to come.
Their values were deemed preeminent: settlement on the land and
manual labor. They also abandoned religion, considered to belong to
the Diaspora and thus out of date. The central idea was to give
birth to a new sort of Jew, the forerunner of the proud Sabra
(native-born Israeli).
This mentality completely overlooked and even denied the fact that
the people of Israel were settling into the Middle East. It was as
if the Middle East with all its characteristics did not exist. From
the point of view of mentality, national identity and Jewish
existence itself had been created elsewhere. What we have here is
the rebirth in Palestine of European Jewry with rejuvenated
characteristics.
Over the years this core of mentality was augmented by
characteristics deemed to be Ashkenazi - language, accent, dress,
customs, music, etc. Everything symbolizing European culture was
considered supreme.
This mentality created a deep barrier between those who fitted in
and belonged, and the others, those who were different. The
Oriental Jews were imbued with traditional religious values. Unlike
the people of the Second Aliya who lived collectively, had rebelled
against the parent generation and left their homes, the Oriental
youth did not distance itself from its sources in such a way as to
create a new path for itself.
The Oriental Jews thus had from the start no part in the new
culture.
Thought of as a population which had nothing to contribute from a
cultural point of view, they suffered from an arrogant and
separative attitude on the part of the Ashkenazi population. My
hypothesis is that a social structure whose foundations were built
in this way must influence the social mentality of the here and
now. Today it is hard to reach integration when there is no basic
history of bringing the various elements together. Moreover, the
situation was never dealt with or corrected because the reality of
the problem had always been denied. This, therefore, made it easier
to ignore the actual existence of the dilemma.
Oriental Jews as an Unconscious Threat
My second hypothesis is that the Oriental Jews posed an unconscious
threat to the emerging society. It appears that unconscious
psychological processes created divisions and prevented the
possibility of integration.
In the first years of the life of the State the extremely young
Jewish-Israeli society was given to processes of formation and
establishment. It was not ready to incorporate differences and to
accept them as part of itself. This was a society which determined
clear values for itself and held onto them. The need to live
according to clear definitions was a natural one for a society in
the stage of being established. In addition, there was the trauma
of the Holocaust which led to placing the emphasis upon military
security. The slogan was: we will no longer go like sheep to the
slaughter. The national identity had to be both uniform and
clear.
With this background it was more natural to regard the Middle East
as a place which had to be conquered rather than as a place to
which one should try to feel closer, and where one should become
familiar with the peoples living in it. To approach the other and
to enter into a dialogue were not the first priorities in which
Jews really believed.
In this context, the Oriental Jews were not conceived as a
connecting link or as a bridge capable of bringing about
rapprochement. On the contrary, they threatened the clear
differentiation between Europeans and Levantines, between whites
and blacks. Their complex identity as Jews who were simultaneously
close to the Arabs as regards color of skin, the language and
customs served to blur the boundaries between West and East. For
the Ashkenazim, this blurring led to fear and confusion.
Because of their dread of being influenced by the Levant and
becoming part of the environment, the Ashkenazi Jews rejected
everything which had an Oriental flavor. For their part, the
Oriental Jews, who had for so long suffered rejection and
discrimination, also began to identify with these processes: they
themselves started to feel inferior and to be ashamed of their
origins. A society which develops instinctive fears of the other,
of the one who is different, is one which builds around itself more
and more walls. Everything which is different becomes dangerous and
threatening. It is a society living in mental siege, in which the
other is not a partner for dialogue and a source of fertilization
and growth/ but a frightening, often demonic enemy upon whom are
projected many fantasies connected with evil, inferiority and
crudity.
Superior and Inferior in the Social Order
My third hypothesis is that the need for belonging and not
belonging does not facilitate integration. The Jewish-Israeli
society is made up in all its layers of immigrants who were tom
from their roots and had to start afresh. In this society the
terminology associated with those who came first took upon itself a
mythical dimension. The first to come, the pioneers and the
veterans, are the Israeli aristocracy. This phenomenon is so deeply
ingrained in the psychology of the society that the new immigrant
is always inferior, never belongs, has not built anything from
scratch, has no foundations here. This is a society where classes
are created which distinguish between those with ancestral rights
and the others, who do not belong.
In addition, the society underwent a change when, following the
creation of the State, it shed the pioneering values now considered
anachronistic. While these values were lost, the problems of
belonging continued in all their severity. The criteria for
belonging changed and are now divorced from the former values;
belonging is now determined by economic status and by all the
accompanying manifestations of this status. However, the need for
people who do not belong, who will be peripheral to the society,
existed then and remains today. Now, when we look ahead to the
peace process, we must also explore the difficulties of Jewish
society in making peace within itself, and the derogatory attitude
toward the Oriental communities, as well as toward the immigrants
of recent years from Ethiopia and from Russia. This attitude also
projects upon relations with the Arabs. Because they have suffered
and been humiliated, the Oriental communities themselves project a
derogatory attitude upon other groups, namely the Arabs. When the
social order is built upon superior and inferior, masters and
servants, there is no reason why the Oriental communities will
desire to form relationships with the Arabs. On the contrary, they
need them as a lower order on which to deposit their own
inferiority and non-belonging. What this means is that the
derogatory attitude toward the Oriental communities has
implications on the relationships of the two peoples, the Jewish
and the Arab.
The psychological phenomenon which should be examined and
researched is connected with the human need that there should
always be an other, someone upon whom one can cast all the evil.
The less progressive and mature the society, the more it needs to
maintain - within its borders but a small distance away - another
society which will typify all the lowly and inferior aspects. In
this way the society itself can foster the illusion that it is
exalted and superior. The three hypotheses which I have raised show
that we must try to make a thorough investigation of the roots, and
how the seeds of current difficulties were sown many years ago. In
a television program in December 1993, Yaron London reported how in
the 1950s, the years of the great immigration from Morocco, a
senior journalist from the daily Ha'aretz went to see the
immigrants in the transit camps. After his visit, this journalist
claimed in an article that the North African immigrants were
barbarians. The editor of the newspaper supported the article and
stressed that in his opinion, selectivity should be introduced in
accepting the immigration. A great commotion arose in the wake of
this, in the course of which the paper tried to shed responsibility
for these racist expressions.
Discrimination - Theory and Practice
In this country there have always been commotions, and debates in
which racism and discrimination have been condemned. In practice,
however, in spite of declarations against racism, the Oriental
Jews, including those born and bred in Israel, had to bear the
brunt of not insignificant blows because of their Oriental
identity.
As a daughter of Oriental Jews born in Israel in its early days, I
felt that I had to erase or modify a guttural form of speaking
which, though correct, was considered inferior. My parents' mother
tongue was Arabic and in my childhood, Arabic was the second
language spoken at home. The sound of the language always made me
ashamed. The world outside brought home to me that reading and
writing in Arabic were inferior. I never thought or felt that I
possessed an important asset, an instrument of communication with
the East. The subtle and indirect message permeated so deeply
within me that, fearing to be similar to the Arabs and identified
with them, I was eventually unable to take in a single word of
Arabic.
This is merely a private example of a general phenomenon which was
always prevalent in Israel: the need of the Jews to preserve their
identity, separatism and keeping a distance from the people of the
region. This phenomenon is still making its mark today, repeating
itself before our own eyes day in and day out. In a weekly
television news program in September 1994, an item was broadcast on
how, in Oriental neighborhoods, six high schools currently under
construction will cater only for children of the Oriental
communities. This differentiation between Ashkenazim and Orientals
is intended to encourage the Orientals to take a higher place in
society. However, such a phenomenon should be seen as a warning
light, for it is perhaps a public admission of the failure of
integration.
In the New Year issue of the evening paper Yediot Achronot,
September 1994, findings from a research project by Naomi Tsion on
youth from all over the country were published by Shulamith Teneh.
Here is an excerpt from the article:
The Ingathering of the Exiles, the melting pot, a united Israeli
society - all these are slogans. But it transpires that Israeli
youth is full of hostile and even hateful prejudice toward groups
of youth which appear in their eyes to be different from them in
character. The research indicates an abyss of strangeness dividing
distant and polarized groups of youth like kibbutzniks, pupils from
development towns, and high school pupils from the better-off north
and the poorer southern parts of Tel Aviv. Here, for example, is
what the kibbutzniks thought of their contemporaries from Shderot:
they are street-wise, they have an Eastern accent, they dress
gaudily. Their girls are cheap, their heads are full of music and
shit. The youth from Shderot is also full of stereotypes regarding
the kibbutzniks: they are Ashkenazim, arrogant, leftists, snobs,
square, and enjoy the benefit of favoritism in the army.
Hatred of the Other
The Israel of 1994 faces the same fissures and the same barriers
which have always divided its society. Accordingly, processes of
uniting, merging and integrating are not taking place. The younger
generation, which has been steeped in these failures, will continue
to pass them on to the next generation.
The fear of the other, the need to see him as responsible for the
bad and the inferior, is a deep and archaic human fear, the roots
of which are to be found in the foundations of human culture. The
hostility between Jews and Arabs is only one example of the deep
human need for hatred of the other. The more a society needs the
other in order to attribute its own failures and weaknesses to him,
the less open it is to sustain differences and to recognize its own
internal barriers.
One interesting general example which helps us to realize how deep
is the fear of the stranger and how strong the need to regard him
as inferior, to look down on him and to hate him, can be found in
the meaning of the word "barbarian." I am referring, of course, to
the changes and distortion of the original meaning of the
word.
According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, "Barbarian is the name
among the early Greeks for all foreigners, including the Romans."
The word probably represents the uncouth babbling which the Greeks
heard in languages other than their own. "It soon assumed an evil
meaning, becoming associated with the vices and savage nature which
the Greeks attributed to their enemies. The Romans adopted the word
for all peoples other than those under Greco-Roman influence and
domination."
In this development of the meaning of the word, we can sense that
there is a psychological need to look at someone who behaves
differently, speaks a different language and looks different, as
inferior to oneself. It seems that all cruelty, violence and crude
behavior are projected onto the stranger. In this way, one can
preserve the goodness and purity of one's own identity.
I would like to relate briefly to the book Waiting for the
Barbarians by the South African writer J.M. Coetzee. It deals with
a kingdom in which rumors broke out and spread throughout the
community that the barbarians were threatening the kingdom. Coetzee
does not specify time or place concerning
these happenings. These events could happen any place, any time.
The book tells of a colonel who wanders around the borders of the
kingdom, taking into captivity barbarians that he comes across.
These barbarians are simple fishermen and vagabonds who do not know
what he wants from them. However, the atmosphere is full of menace.
Throughout the kingdom the feeling permeates that soon the
barbarians will destroy their way of life. It is therefore
necessary to interrogate the captives.
The irony of the story is that the more the colonel tries to
suppress the barbarians in various inhuman ways, the more he
himself sinks to the uttermost depths of depravity. He, who
represents culture, becomes the barbarian.
Coetzee touches here upon a universal human phenomenon. This book
was written long before the Intifada, but contains an exact
description of the impossible dynamics of the situation in which
the Israeli soldier was placed. A soldier who became a
representative of the occupation was compelled to perpetrate acts
which were contrary to his human values.
Fear of the Arab - who is different, the other side, the foreign,
the enemy - grew stronger in the wake of the Intifada.
A Period of Transformation
It can be assumed that a society which needs barbarians who contain
all the evil, will make sure that in reality it will have such
people. Jews-Israelis meet Palestinians or see Palestinians on the
television only in the context of disturbances and terror, or as
unskilled laborers. Many Palestinians meet Jews-Israelis only as
soldiers in uniform, or as employers exploiting them.
These sorts of encounters perpetuate the fear, the suspicion, the
hostility and the hatred. The society which created these sorts of
encounters overlooks the fact that this type of aggressive
confrontation screened on television is the consequence of years of
oppression, discrimination and occupation.
The period ahead can be one of transformation, one of transition
from violent encounters perpetuating hatred and fear, to those of a
different nature, facilitating dialogue and rapprochement. The
decisive question is to what extent such a change is possible and
what are the ways to encourage it. Peace with Egypt did not bring
real rapprochement and seeing people as stereotypes continued. Is
it possible to reach different relations between the parties,
relations over and above those of cold peace?
Prolonged work over generations may be needed in order to make it
possible to see the other through a new prism.
Rapprochement with the stranger may take place when there are
mutual interests benefiting the two peoples. Change does not take
place through information, preaching, or education, since social
processes permeate indirectly and with an emotional power. This is
what dictates our concept of the other. It is to be hoped that
change will take place through joint projects in the economic and
cultural fields. In these sorts of encounters, it will be possible
to relate to the other with respect, to learn from him and to
facilitate the development of mutual fertilization.
So as to enable such encounters to take place, each of the peoples
must feel itself sufficiently mature and confident; to reach this
level, there will be a need for a long period of self-growth and
development.