PARADOX OF ISRAEL'S OPPRESSED JEWS
Mizrahim and Immigrants Face Poverty and Marginalization as Demographic
Cannon Fodder
by Guy Izhak Austrian
In a public housing project on the outskirts of Jerusalem, four young
Israeli women watch an elderly Russian grandmother struggle up the stairs,
waiting until she reaches the gray and white concrete cube that she lives
in. From the warehouse-metal door of another apartment, a brown-skinned
mother gathers up her toddling son, grudgingly nods to the girls'
respectful "shabbat shalom," and heads back inside. It's cold in the
hills, and all the families try to stay close to the electric space heaters
that are the gravitational centers of their households.
The girls agree that this is the first time the woman has acknowledged
them. It's a bit of progress in their work here in the "absorption center"
of Gilo, a "neighborhood" built south of Jerusalem after 1967 -- over the
Green Line, on land confiscated from the Palestinian town of Beit Jalla and
annexed to the municipality of Jerusalem
.
The story begins in 1991, when the Israeli government decided to tear down
the absorption center of 280 units, which served as temporary shelter for
new immigrants from Russia. A group of poor and unemployed Israelis in
Jerusalem heard about the decision, left the homeless shelters and their
relatives' apartments, and took over the absorption center. The squatters
began a long battle against the state, preventing the demolition, winning
the right to live there, and agitating for improved conditions.
Six families who arrived in 1994 founded a small collective ("kibbutz," in
Hebrew) called Beit Yisrael, sharing finances and organizing the other
residents to fight Israel National Housing, Ltd. (Amidar), a
government-owned company that builds and administers most of the country's
public housing, including the Gilo absorption center. Protests, lawsuits,
and stubbornness have slowly resulted in a few repairs, outdoor lights, and
water boilers, but in January 2004, Amidar was still threatening to raise
the rents far above the residents' ability to pay in the devastated Israeli
economy.
Asi and Siga Chai are among the founders of the kibbutz. Asi is a fix-it
man supporting Siga and their four children. Like most of the compound's
residents, Asi's family came to Israel in the 1950's from Morocco, and like
many Mizrahim (Jews from North Africa and the Middle East), he has a long
history of trouble with the government. Walking or driving down the streets
of Jerusalem, he is
frequently stopped by police and soldiers who think he might be a
Palestinian. But if they see Siga with him--she is a light-skinned
Ashkenazi Jew from Eastern Europe--they relax and let them move on.
Yet the Chais have accepted the racial profiling and harassment that they
suffer. They believe that they are not the "real targets." Although they
are fighting an economic and social war with the Israeli government that
has ignored and impoverished this community for decades, they do not see
allies in Palestinians targeted by the same government.
In the late '90s, the kibbutz set up programs by which young Israelis doing
various kinds of "national service" would come live in the housing complex
and serve the residents with tutoring, after-school programs, maintenance,
and more. At the kibbutz's invitation, about 30 graduates of these programs
continue living there on a committed basis as participants in the
community. These young people are an intentional mix of secular and
religious Jews, as an experiment in bridging that vicious divide in Israeli
society.
Together with the families in the kibbutz, they struggle to address the
problems of a deeply poor neighborhood--unemployment, drug abuse, domestic
violence, teen pregnancy, school dropouts, police harassment. Young men
with petty criminal records resist joining the army, the main ladder out of
poverty for young people, and the army is reluctant to draft these troubled
cases. Those who do get drafted may find themselves under cruel and violent
officers who assign them the dirtiest and most dangerous jobs.
Meital, 23, is one of the young newcomers to the absorption center. A law
student from an Ashkenazi family in the Tel Aviv suburbs, her goal is to
bring lawsuits that would establish equal civil rights for all citizens of
Israel, whatever their religion, ethnicity or skin color. Meanwhile, she
helps her neighbors with legal cases against Amidar, the housing authority.
In her free time, Meital participates in several Israeli groups that work
with Palestinians to end the occupation. She has been to the West Bank
often, bringing supplies to village medical clinics and serving as a
human-rights monitor at Palestinian olive harvests to deter violence
against the farmers from soldiers and settlers.
She says she struggles daily with the contradictions of being an ally to
two groups of people who have a hard time seeing the common ground they
live on.
Meital estimates that the majority of Gilo's 40,000 people do not even know
that they are over the Green Line, which is nowhere marked. Because the
area has been annexed to Jerusalem, they do not enjoy the legal status and
subsidies of settlers, and do not think of themselves as part of the
settler movement. However, Israel's is the only government that recognizes
the annexation of Gilo.
Mizrahim, who are the clear majority in Gilo's absorption center, in urban
slums, and in isolated "development towns" on the periphery of the country,
make up 45 to 50% of the Israeli population. They have a reputation for
tough anti-Arab politics, stemming in part from oppression some experienced
as minorities in the countries they came from. Suicide attacks on Israeli
civilians also have a profound effect, and have claimed many Mizrahi and
working-class lives.
Radical Mizrahi activists on the left identify several other deep and
complex forces that shape this attitude. Many Mizrahim feel pressured to
deny their own Arabic heritage to prove their loyalty to
a state founded and defined by Ashkenazim. And decades of discrimination
and mistreatment by the Labor Party governments that ruled Israel until
1977 have left a strong bitterness and mistrust. Many Mizrahim perceive
that "peace" efforts led by Labor and liberal movements are playthings for
Ashkenazi elites who care more about Palestinians than about poor and
unemployed Israelis.
About 9,000 Jews live in Yeruham, a development town in the Negev Desert.
Most of Yeruham's people are originally from Morocco; some are from Russia
and India.
Walking down the block to the last row of houses, the view just opens out
onto blue sky and brown hills of sand forever. Walk back in another
direction for a few blocks, and suddenly the sidewalk ends and world opens
out onto desert again. A lonely "poom poom" sounds in the distance from the
army tanks practicing over the horizon.
There's almost nothing to do--no jobs, lots of white cube houses. Things
have picked up a little since Montreal's Jewish community donated funds for
a small music school and theater, and a public library. But it's hard to
motivate the kids to go, or to convince a trained librarian or music
teacher to live there. People who can, leave.
Shmulik Ben-Aretz is from a Romanian family that was one of the first to
settle in Yeruham around 1950. He runs Midrashat B'Yahad ("the together
school"), which offers educational programs to Yeruham residents and hosts
groups of Israeli teenagers on two- and three-day visits. On a breezy day
in January, a roomful of 14-year-old Orthodox girls from a settlement were
watching a documentary about the Wadi el-Salib revolt of 1959, when Mizrahi
Jews in a poor neighborhood of Haifa fought police in the streets over
"bread and jobs." Later the girls would talk with Yeruham residents, study
Jewish ethical texts, and play a lot of ping-pong and foosball.
Shmulik believes that progressive "national religious" Jews like himself
are one of the best hopes for transforming Israeli society, because of
their strong commitment to ethics and public service. National religious
Jews are Orthodox Jews who participate in state institutions and wear
modern clothing, with knitted kippot (skullcaps) for the men. Many in the
settler movement also consider themselves "national religious" Jews, but
Shmulik says the settler rabbis have deviated from the core values of the
tradition and "have created for themselves a new religion."
One young woman who works at Midrashat B'Yahad says, "The situation with the
Palestinians doesn't really affect us here. We're too far to get missile
attacks from Gaza, and there aren't any suicide bombings." People in
Yeruham have their own worries, with education, housing, health care, and
welfare all being slashed or privatized under the neoliberal policies of
Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Yet limited budgetary resources are poured into the military and the
settlements. As shown by Hannah Kim in the Israeli daily Ha'aretz, the
right wing is replacing social programs inside Israel with massive
investments in housing, education, and other services in the settlements
("Welfare State over the Green Line," May 25, 2004). For many low-income
Israelis with relatives in the settlements, support for the right wing and
the Occupation becomes one of the few ways to ensure that their families'
basic needs are met.
"No peace without equality, and no equality without peace," said Sami
Shalom Chetrit, an Israeli Mizrahi activist, writer and filmmaker, in an
appearance at New York University in December 2003. He suggested that to be
effective, activists must learn to address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
together with struggles for social and economic justice in Israel.
In his article "Peace, Justice, and the Mizrahi Accounting" (News from
Within, February 2003), Chetrit explains how Israeli elites offer a "magic
formula" to the disadvantaged: "We need only to finish off the terrorists
and make peace, and then we will immediately implement 'social justice.'"
Yet, he warns, an Oslo-style peace without social and economic justice will
only enrich the Ashkenazi elite; Mizrahim "will not only lose the feeble
hope for economic growth in Mizrahi areas, but more than anything they will
lose the Palestinian ass they were so good at kicking and on which they
built their national identity."
Meanwhile, the Israeli right wing keeps sailing along on the harsh winds of
nationalism and fear, and the sand keeps blowing through Yeruham's empty
streets, past underfunded schools and clinics, past unemployed families on
dwindling welfare checks. And a Bedouin woman stands on her tiptoes looking
into a dumpster, picking through what's left in the trash.
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For more information, see Kedma - Middle East Gate to Israel
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Special to WORLD WAR 3 REPORT, May 5, 2004
Reprinting permissible with attribution
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