Why Israel is a racist state, even more so than you think.
It is because Israel is based not only on Jewish supremacy against Arabs, but also European Jewry supremacy against Oriental Jews. Think about it, 50% of Israeli Jewish are Mizrahi or Sephardi; but where are they? Israel has not elected one prime minister from the latter two, Israeli governments are overwhelmingly composed of European Jews. Of course, there is always a token Mizrahi.
Read the Israeli historian Tom Segev and his book “1949: The First Israelis” about how the Oriental Jews were rounded up in camps and separated from the “white” Jews.
The founding father of Israel and its first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion himself spoke with contempt against Oriental Jews and declared that the state of Israel was not built for them.
Instead, it is the Jews of Europe whom are “the leading candidates for citizenship in the State of Israel. Hitler, more than he hurt the Jewish people, whom he knew and detested, hurt the Jewish State, whose coming he did not foresee. He destroyed the substance, the main and essential building force of the [Jewish] state. The state arose and did not find the nation which had waited for it.” [Segev, 157].
More than that, Ben-Gurion attacked the Jews of North Africa:
“Even the immigrant of North Africa, who looks like a savage, who has never read a book in his life, not even a religious one, and doesn’t even know how to say his prayers, either wittingly or unwittingly has behind him a spiritual heritage of thousands of years. . . .”
“They tell me that there are thieves among them. I am a Polish Jew, and I doubt if there is any Jewish community which has more thieves among them. I am doubtful if there is any Jewish community which has more thieves in it than the Polish ones.” A few years later Ben-Gurion wrote to Justice Moshe Estzioni: “An Ashkenazi gangster, thief, pimp, or murderer will not gain the sympathy of the Ashkenazi community (if there is such a thing), nor will he expect it. But in such a primitive community as the Moroccans’—such a thing is possible. . . . ”
Ben-Gurion also attacked Yemeni Jews. Oriental Jews continue to suffer discrimination in Israel. Ethiopian Jews get is worse. They are often turned away from schools and apartments and routinely called “niggers.”
And now a Mizrahi Jew, Rachel Shabi, writes about the discrimination:
One of the most striking sentiments expressed by Mizrahis in Israel is a sense of disbelief. Some of these Jewish migrants from Arab countries are still stunned at the level of ignorance and prejudice that greeted them in the new Israel. For some reason, their new Jewish co-nationalists – who often came from the ghettos of Eastern Europe – thought the Mizrahis were backward and inferior, or, as Lyn Julius puts it, “badly educated” and “unwashed”.
That’s why former Jewish musical legends of the Arab world – feted performers, whose names still inspire adoration in the Middle East – ended up selling pots in the city slums of Israel. That’s also why there are over 20 European classical music ensembles in the Jewish state, and just one Mizrahi outfit – currently on the verge of extinction.
You could, as Julius has done in this section, say that such prejudice is ancient history, the teething problems of a struggling new state. Many Israelis would emphatically agree with you. Others simply don’t. The ones that still feel the daily impact of prejudice will laugh in your face – as I experienced, many times – if you declare social inequities to be done with. How can it be over, they’ll ask, when it is etched into the county’s DNA?
Those Mizrahis will shake their heads at your folly in suggesting – as I did – that the army, the Jewish intermarrying, the Mizrahi politicians and Israeli society at large have all hammered out all those early hitches. If it were over, they’ll ask, then why would the recent, first Israeli series of Big Brother dissolve into an ethnic spat?
If it were over, why would Mizrahi kids still be refused admission into central city clubs? Why would there still be pathetically wide ethnic gaps in education or professional attainment? Why would the majority of Israel’s judges have European surnames, while most blue-collar criminals are Mizrahi?
Israel’s establishment is simply one dominated by European Jews with Middle Eastern Jews basically non-existent:
There is no discrimination, we claim, yet our entire political, economic, legal, academic and even military leadership is made up of Ashkenazim, with a smattering of Sephardim as the exceptions that so remarkably prove the rule. And the rule is that, even 62 years after its establishment, Israel is run by an ethnically pure elite. True, we did have two presidents of Sephardi origin, but there’s no way they could have been Moroccan Jews, who until recently comprised the largest ethnic community in the country. We have had two or three Sephardi army chiefs of staff and there are already a few major generals, a bank head or two, but not one prime minister. Who’s counting, though? Equality reins.
Remember that Zionism was and remains a European colonial project and one that disregards the rights not only of the native people but all of non-European Jews.
If this is how Israel treats fellow Jews, then you can understand why they (and this includes the discriminated against Mizrahi) treat Palestinians even worse.
