Rachel Shabi, author of We Look Like The Enemy, has won a
2009 National Jewish Book Award in the category of Sephardic
Studies.
Ethnic bias against middle eastern Jews within Israel has
far-reaching implications for the
whole region.
“There is a class split,” writes Rachel Shabi, “that runs on
ethnic lines”—specifically, between Jews of
European origin and
those whose ancestral homes were Arab or Muslim countries. Middle
Eastern Jews
from Egypt, Morocco, Iraq, Yemen, and other Arab
lands make up nearly half of Israel’s population. yet
European or
“Ashkenazi” Jews have historically disparaged them because the emigrants
looked Arab,
spoke Arabic, and brought with them what was viewed
as a “backward” Middle Eastern culture. David
Ben Gurion,
Israel’s first prime minister, called them “human dust with no Jewish or
human culture.” Such
opinions permeated Israeli society. Middle
Eastern or “Mizrahi” emigrants were kept in transit camp longer
than Ashkenazi Jews and had poorer housing, educational, and
occupational opportunities.
Shabi returned to Israel to
investigate the tense relations that still exist between Mizrahi and
Ashkenazi
Jews. She traces the history of this split, starting
with the centuries-old story of the Jewish Diaspora, then
discussing how Mizrahis figured in the founding and building of Israel,
protests by the Mizrahi Black
Panther Party in 1971—“the first
clash of Jew against Jew in Israel”—and a successful campaign in the
1990s to get the Israeli Ministry of Education to remove negative
stereotyping of yemenites in a textbook.
Internalizing such
stereotypes led a Moroccan israeli university professor to begin passing
for Ashkenazi
when she was only eight years old, even though it
meant “destroying, down to the roots, the identity that
my
parents gave me…rejecting everything: their past, their language, their
values.”
Israel’s striving to be a European country and
demeaning the culture of its Mizrahi citizens has dislocated
those citizens from their own Judeo-Arab identities, and has helped make
Israel a misfit state in the Middle
East. Shabi combines
historical research with intimate oral interviews to shed light on
ethnic injustice
within Israel, past and present. Her
passionate, personal connection and the heartfelt stories told by other
Mizrahis make We Look Like the Enemy a stunning,
unforgettable book.
