It’s wrong to see Israel through the prism of US identity politics - The Jewish Chronicle

Last spring, during the most recent round of violence in Israel, an article in the Washington Post claimed that many US liberals were seeing the conflict in a new light in the post-George Floyd world. Instead of “a complicated dispute over ancient claims”, the Post claimed that increasing numbers of liberal-minded Americans saw the dispute in terms of their domestic context of racial conflict and state violence against “people of colour”.

But to understand the Israeli-Palestinian dispute through the lens of US race relations is a huge mistake, not least because the complex ways in which “race”, class and politics interact in Israel is completely different to the American situation.

Here in Israel, “Jews of colour” (Mizrahi and Ethiopian Jews) overwhelmingly support parties of the Right, particularly the Likud, while the Left draws its support almost exclusively from “white” Ashkenazim.

The American progressive association of “whiteness” with support for nativism, Islamophobia, militarism, and so on, and the assumption that “brown” people are against this is turned on its head in Israel. Class, race and education are correlated in such a way that the descendants of the original Ashkenazi immigrants occupy the most socially and economically privileged positions, and make up the vast majority of the support for the Israeli “left”, such as it is.

Back in 2011, a protest in Charles Clore Park, near the waterfront of southern Tel Aviv, demonstrated the complexity of “race” in this country. Organised in opposition to the mistreatment of East African asylum seekers, the crowd consisted mostly of young, Ashkenazi Israelis, descendants of the European Jews who emigrated to Israel in the years around the time of the state’s founding.

In the days before the protest, missiles fired from Gaza at southern Israeli towns had left one dead and 30 injured, and at the conclusion of the march a moment of silence was held to commemorate these casualties. Afterwards, during a succession of short speeches, muted heckling began from the edge of the crowd as a group of five men with distinctively Mizrahi accents demand that the speakers denounce the missile barrage; their heckling increased when an Arab speaker took to the podium, and the atmosphere became increasing vitriolic.
At one point, a protester told the Mizrachi hecklers to “go back to the zoo”, to which the leader of the counter-protesters shouted: “You son of a bitch. Hitler didn’t kill enough of you.”

The invocation of the Holocaust as a means for one Jew to attack another demonstrates the complex of histories of the various inhabitants of Israel, and the particular way in which “race”, class and politics interact in this country. For Mizrahim from North Africa and the Middle East, the Holocaust does not have the same place within their collective memory and contemporary identity; often their mistreatment and expulsion from their native countries after the formation the Israeli state in 1948 or after the Six Day War in 1967 holds greater significance.

In some ways, the Charles Clore Park incident could have taken place in many different countries: a crowd of mostly young, middle-class, “white”, university-educated people protested in solidarity with a group of people different from themselves. They were criticised by working-class men, who accused them of being insufficiently patriotic and who implied that their concern was a result of their “privilege”.

But in this case the group of working-class men were themselves from a group historically and currently mistreated and disadvantaged within their own country due to their ethno-national background and the colour of their skin.

Even to this today, virtually all of the people killed by the Israeli police are Muslim Arabs, Ethiopian Jews, or Mizrachim. In fact, Yigal Amir — who in 1995 assassinated Yitzhak Rabin in response to what he saw as the betrayal of the Oslo Accords — was radicalised at least in part by the experience of being a Mizrachi student at an Ashkenazi Yeshiva, where he was badly bullied.

Yet at the same time, police and security force violence against Palestinians and Israeli Arabs is nearly always perpetrated by brown and black Israelis. This is starkly and visually illustrated by the large number of black and brown faces wearing military fatigues and lugging M16s around downtown Tel Aviv — the majority of Ashkenazi Israelis are able to avoid front line infantry positions and occupy elite positions in the Air Force, intelligence, paratroopers, special forces, and so on, and are very unlikely to come into physical contact with Palestinians.

A friend of my sister-in-law, who volunteered for a frontline unit, was nicknamed “milkshake” as she was the only “white” one. Of the victims of the recent terrorist attacks in Israel, two polices officers — Yezen Falah and Amir Khoury — were from the Druze or Arab minorities. In this sense, there is some similarity with the situation in the US, where law enforcement is also ethnically diverse: two of the four police officers charged in relation to the George Floyd murder are Asian Americans.

The regular contact between Palestinians and working-class Mizrachi, Ethiopian and Arab Israelis through the auspices of the police and security services is also found in the criminal underworld. As the Palestinian journalist Salim Tamari has written, co-operative ventures across the Green Line have been taking place between Jews and Palestinians for years: they just happen to be illegal.

When it comes to drug trafficking, prostitution and transportation stolen goods, there is genuine brotherhood and religion and nationality are put aside as criminals on both sides work together to make money.

This characterisation should not be taken too far: first, it ignores the strictly Orthodox, many of whom are Ashkenazi and most of whom are poor. Furthermore, just because the vast majority of the left is Ashkenazi and middle class does not by any means mean that most Ashkenazi middle-class people are on the left.

You do not need to go far in south Tel Aviv to find a hipster with all the right opinions on climate change, trans rights, and police violence against black people who will nonetheless casually inform you that Arabs are “terrorists”.

Finally, it doesn’t consider the millions of Arab Muslims with Israeli citizenship, who overwhelmingly support the left in terms of opposing the “occupation”, although they tend to be less keen on other left-wing priorities such as gay rights. But it does tell us to be wary of the complexities of race — or more accurately colour — class and politics in the Middle East.
An appreciation of the complexity of colour and class in Israel is vital to understanding the intricacies of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. To view it through the prism of US racial politics is not only highly ignorant, but makes it much harder to reach any kind of solution.

It also illustrates the broader problem of refracting issues around race, colour and ethnicity through the prism of US race relations. That country has around 30 million black people, barely three per cent of the more than one billion black people on the planet, and it is important to resist the trend towards seeing race through the specific context that prevails in that country — in Israel, in the UK, and everywhere else.

David Swift is the author of ‘The Identity Myth: Why We Need to Embrace Our Differences to Beat Inequality’, out now (Constable, £20)

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Israel