Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness (Emphasis on the "pursuit")!

As Donna Rosenthal explains in The Israelis, the story of eastern Jews to Israel is one that is not often told. She opens by telling a story about a young girl (Naomi) who felt like an outsider, how her school books were written by the Ashkenazim, how this girl’s people did not matter to the rest of Israeli society. Rosenthal furthers that the one time a boy from Naomi’s class, he was shocked, and Naomi was mortified. The path the Mizrahim (Eastern Jews) took to get to Israel was a scary one and once they arrived they were not treated the best that they could have been, they were certainly not welcomed with open arms. The following two paragraphs attempt to shed light on the situation and to offer examples of what this minority group faced.

Michael Greenspan, in the video below, begins to uncover a discussion on Mizrahi Jews living in Israel. From his talk he seems to be generating a strong sympathy for the plight of the Jews of Arab lands who entered Israel He explains, “They had to leave everything behind them.” And, when asked to discuss this issue as being overlooked in comparison to the Palestinian Refugee crisis of the late 1940s, he explains that the UN often has simply left this issue out of their discussions. He claims it never became a global issue. He offers, “Maybe we have to change [the] narrative, you know we use the Zionist story as if everybody wanted to go back home. And that’s only partially true. Many Jews were kicked out [of] Arab countries…and they left behind them a lot of assets.” He wants people to take away from this discussion the truth and a sense of the issues Israel has faced internally over the years.



To further Greenspan’s ideas, there is an article written by Sami Shalom Chetrit on Israel’s Black Panther Party. This article is not a response to Greenspan, but also discusses issues of discrimination, and (some would say) racism, in Israel. The Black Panther Party emerged in Israel for a very brief period of time in the early 1970s and took their name from the famous party in America. In January of 1971, as Chetrit explains, they said, “We shall be the Black Panthers of Israel” wherein they fought for social, economic, and racial equality among the Israeli nation. They staged riots and fought against Golda Meir, they truly tried to uphold the neo-Marxist ideal. The “discourse…was absorbed in the movement’s rhetoric in terms that included ‘oppressors and oppressed’, ‘exploiters and exploited’, ‘unskilled worker’, ‘and of course ‘equality’, ‘justice’, and ‘revolution’” as Chetrit comments. It seems that as unskilled workers and a group of people who were put into development towns by the Ashkenazim, these “Black Panthers” were attempting to create a sense of class-consciousness amongst the nation that did not necessarily exist there before. Perhaps Chetrit’s most important point is the following: “…The Israeli Black Panthers took not only the intensity of radicalization of the discourse from the American Black Panthers, but also the determination in their collective confrontation with the Israeli establishment.” With that said, though, their existence was short-lived and their “determination” could not outlive an international war.

Interestingly enough, and perhaps a matter that would have inevitably “brought down” the Panthers in Israel, the war of 1973 had the biggest effect on the movement. It would appear that national unity was more important regardless of class and race. With time anyway, these Mizrahim would have blended into the society in their own way, much like many of the other nations that make up Israel.

In attempt to generate sympathy for both sides equally, the Ashkenazim were faced with the trouble of what to do with this large influx of people coming into a land they had established and had been working on for years. What were they supposed to do? Put aside all of their hard work to make room for an influx of approximately 600,000 people? Plus, should they not have been proud of the work they had done? Wouldn’t they have wanted to take a minute to be proud? And the Mizrahim needed to stand up for themselves. The Black Panther idea, although extreme, was their way of aaserting themselves as essential parts of this society. They needed to be seen, to be known. As Rosenthal quotes in her book, in an attempt to bridge gaps I suppose by showing a man named Meir’s example, “We Israelis fight together, so why separate ourselves and fight each other? Why keep pushing the differences? We’re all Israelis.”