The Modern Middle East (58 page)

All this has influenced the Mizrachim’s political proclivities. Most of the Mizrachim immigrated to Israel beginning in the 1950s, by which time the Ashkenazim had already solidified their control over the institutions of the state and the economy, including the bureaucracy and the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). Upon arrival, most Mizrachim were subjected to indignities by Ashkenazi officials—including being sprayed with DDT before being allowed into the country—and found themselves on the economic, political, and social margins of Israeli life.
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They blamed their predicament on the Ashkenazi-dominated Labor Party, which happened to be social-democratic in its ideological orientation. Some two decades later, by which time the Mizrachim immigrants had learned the rules of Israel’s political game, they felt confident enough to exert themselves politically, casting their votes in opposition to Labor and in favor of the Right.
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Thus began the ascendancy of the Likud in 1977 and, later, the religious Shas Party in 1984 (the party itself was formed in late 1983).
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As a political party founded by and largely representing the interests of the Mizrachim community, the Shas is a relatively recent phenomenon in Israeli politics. For a group that found itself increasingly on the margins of Israel’s political, cultural, and economic life, the Shas has represented a powerful tool for self-actualization and social integration. Since its entry into Israeli politics in 1984 after winning four seats in the Knesset (the parliament), the party has been rising both steadily and impressively, at one point in the mid-to late 1990s emerging as the country’s third-largest party.
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This rise was further facilitated by the party’s populist appeal to
lower-income Mizrachim, especially in the smaller towns and cities, where the larger political parties, notably the Likud and Labor, have not had as strong a foothold as they do in places like Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Through control over such key cabinet offices as the Ministries of Labor, the Interior, and Religious Affairs, Shas leaders were able to funnel government funds to many of their constituencies, thus enhancing their own chances for reelection. They even sought to strengthen their relations with Israel’s Arab bedouins, whose traditional values they to some degree share.
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Moreover, the Shas controls an extensive network of schools and religious seminaries, each offering a deep reservoir of volunteers in any given election, and throughout the year runs missionizing seminars to expand the circle of the “new returnees to Orthodoxy,” the
baalei tshuva.
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Clearly, the continued threat presented to both the Ashkenazim and the Mizrachim from a completely alien, even hostile ethnic group, the Arab Palestinians, has greatly blunted the potential for ethnic tensions among Israeli Jews. Despite their complaints, therefore, the Mizrachim have almost uniformly embraced the concept of
mizug galuyot,
the fusion of the exiles.
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Located in an intermediary position between the peripheral Palestinians and the dominant Ashkanezi—they have allied themselves with the Ashkenazim and with the Israeli state apparatus, seeking greater integration into the “mainstream” of Israeli society rather than segregation from it.
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According to one Israeli scholar, “By the early 2000s, more than 50% of Mizrahim belonged to the middle-class. Among this population, as shown by [previous] research, many were married to spouses of Ashkenazi origin and raised children hardly aware of any ethnic allegiance. This is widely accounted for by the broadly non-ethnic ‘all-Israeli’ mood prevailing in middle-class secular milieus and which, as such, cannot legitimately object to the acceptance of socially-mobile Mizrahi individuals. Mobility resulted in greater exposure to the dominant culture and rapprochement to secular patterns of life.”
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Many Mizrachim have not only assimilated but also reached impressive upward mobility in the political establishment, as demonstrated by the careers of David Levy, a Moroccan-born former foreign minister, and Moshe Katsav, the country’s Iranian-born president from 2000 to 2007. For its part, the (Ashkenazi-dominated) political establishment cannot afford to ignore this important “counterelite,” especially with the political muscle of the Shas behind it, and has embarked on frequent, much-publicized campaigns designed to improve the living standards of the Mizrachim. These have included schemes such as job creation and training, subsidies and allowances, and, of course, inclusion at the highest echelons of the state, especially in the cabinet.

Alongside the Ashkenazim-Mizrachim ethnic divide and its multiple social, economic, and political facets, a larger debate has emerged in Israel over the precise nature of Israeli national identity and particularly the proper role of religion—Judaism—in the constitution of Israeli identity.
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The increasing powers of the political Right in recent decades, coupled with unprecedented increases in the pace of building new settlements in Palestinian territories, have led to intensified exploration of the relationship between Zionism as a nationalist movement and Judaism as a religion. Questions such as “What does it mean to be an Israeli?” and, more basically, “Who is a Jew?” have become part of the dominant intellectual discourse of the country.
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Such questions were a product of the profound soul-searching instigated by the psychological shock of the 1973 War. In the words of one Israeli scholar,

When the October 1973 War destroyed the image of material power upon which the feelings of security of most Israelis was based, a deep sense of anguish was bound to pervade the whole nation. The crisis was all the more profound because of the rapidity with which the whole nation passed from a situation of pseudo-normality to one of a total struggle for survival. . . . The Israeli had been brought face to face with himself, with his split identity and his cultural alienation, and for the first time had no possibility of avoiding a look into the mirror of realities.
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Equally important in sparking such debates has been the Israeli state’s historical trajectory since its establishment. When the state was initially created, such thorny questions as Judaism’s role in the political process and the precise definition of a Jew were put on the back burner so as not to upset the fragile coalition of various Zionist tendencies fighting for the state’s creation. This is why Israel does not have a written constitution yet, although, at this point, after more than half a century of successful operation, it may never adopt one. Now, with all the wars fought and with Israel’s physical and military security more firmly established, the profound questions of being and identity have come to the fore again. In many ways, the ongoing scholarly debates signify a maturing of the national project, such that Israelis feel confident enough to undertake a thorough self-examination of Zionism and Israeli identity. That such discussion has emerged at a time when there are still Palestinians who reject the whole notion of an Israeli identity—as there are Israelis who reject Palestinian identity—attests to the sense of security that the debate’s protagonists feel.

For the Palestinians, becoming stateless has served as a particularly compelling source of cohesion. Internal divisions, derived from differences in religious affiliation, economic standing, and place of residence, tend to run deeper among Palestinians than Israelis. These divisions have remained constant, but other traditional characteristics of Palestinians, such as secularism and a weak middle class, have subtly but noticeably shifted, to a large extent because of the increasing loss of popular legitimacy among the primary articulators of Palestinian identity: traditional Palestinian notables and the PLO, both of whom saw themselves, initially with some justification, as the legitimate representatives of the Palestinian people.
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Institutions play defining roles in shaping all national identities. Such institutions may be social (e.g., the family, the neighborhood community, religious institutions, self-help groups) or political (e.g., the state or statelike institutions, political parties). Whatever their genesis and functions, institutions and national identity often have a symbiotic, mutually reinforcing relationship, each influencing and being influenced by the other.
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For Palestinians—whose nation has been diminished and fragmented by the birth of the state of Israel, by exodus and exile, and by life in seemingly permanent refugee camps—social and political institutions play an especially pivotal role in the articulation of national identity. These institutions are, after all, for many Palestinians the only tangible manifestations of national existence and a sense of the self.
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In turn, the changes experienced by Palestinian institutions—especially the rise or decline of their popularity—often reflect larger changes within Palestinian national identity. As this chapter demonstrates, the sense of identity that had given rise to the near-complete dominance of Palestinian politics by the PLO after 1967 underwent dramatic changes beginning in the late 1980s. The transforming effects of the
intifada
on Palestinian national identity gave rise first to a non-PLO-affiliated “counterelite” and then to the Hamas organization. By 1993, when the Oslo Accords were signed, the Palestinians’ uncertainty over their national identity was reflected in the chasm between the two main Palestinian institutions, the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) and Hamas. Several Palestinian civil society organizations were also established in the mid-to late 1990s, although their long-term efficacy and the consequences of their actions for Palestinian identity are far from clear.
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Meanwhile, economic and cultural divisions began pulling the Gaza Strip and the West Bank in different directions, a chasm accentuated by expansive ideological and political differences between the PNA and Hamas, with the former in control of the West Bank and the latter in control of Gaza. Intermittent armed clashes between the two groups throughout 2007
and 2008 led to scores of casualties and arrests by each side of supporters and sympathizers of the other, and the seemingly unbridgeable gap between the two territories took what remained of Palestine to the brink of civil war. As of this writing, in 2013, a tense and uneasy state of acrimony marks the relationship between the two.

Mention of the continued dispersion of Palestinians, both throughout the diaspora and within the Occupied Territories, must precede analysis of the causes and consequences of changes in Palestinian identity. Palestinians are divided by their place of residence into several different groups. According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, run by the PNA, the total number of Palestinians in the world in 2010 was estimated at around 9.6 million (not including an estimated 1.4 million Palestinians with Israeli citizenship), of whom 5.5 million live outside pre-1947 Palestine and 4.1 million live in the Occupied Territories. In 2012, there were an estimated 2.65 million Palestinians living in the West Bank and 1.64 million in the Gaza Strip. By far the largest number of Palestinians outside the Occupied Territories live in other Arab countries, some 4.9 million or 44 percent of a total of nearly 11 million Palestinians worldwide.
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Of these, many hold official refugee status; of the 8.5 million Palestinians who do not hold Israeli citizenship, nearly 5 million, or 59 percent, are officially registered as refugees by the United Nations. According to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), in 2010, of a total of 5 million registered Palestinian refugees worldwide, some 2 million live in Jordan (40 percent of total), 1.1 million in the Gaza Strip (23 percent), and the rest in the West Bank (850,000), Syria (486,000), and Lebanon (455,000).
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Additionally, approximately 1.5 million Palestinians, or nearly 12 percent of the worldwide total, live in Israel and are considered Israeli citizens.
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It is only natural that prolonged residence in different regions and countries gives different perspectives, dispositions, and identities to members of the same larger group. Life in Amman or Beirut is radically different from life in Bethlehem, and both in turn are different from life in Gaza or West Bank refugee camps. At some level all Palestinians share the characteristics of a dispossessed people, no matter where in the diaspora they may be, and the refusal of most of the host Arab countries to grant them citizenship and other rights has inadvertently served to strengthen their own Palestinian identity.
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Nevertheless, diaspora life is bound to have assimilating effects on the lives and identities of those experiencing it, especially in light of continued Israeli unwillingness to even discuss the possibility of Palestinian repatriation.
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At the very least, a subtle and gradual disconnect develops
between the members of the diaspora’s
perceptions
of life in the home territory and the
reality
of that life as those remaining behind experience it. Following the news of back home with great interest, or even trying to
make
news at home from a distance, as the PLO tried to do during its exile years, is quite different from experiencing developments firsthand. Slowly but surely, the “outside” leadership of the Palestinians, especially the PLO, and by implication their local allies, especially the notables, lost touch with the reality of life in the Occupied Territories. Not surprisingly, they found themselves shunted aside by an emerging counterelite that was a product of local developments.