On Assimilation Politics in Israel

The Ambiguous Assimilation of Mizrahim

Jews who migrated to Israel from Arab and Muslim countries in the 1950s and 1960s were destined to function not only as a colonized labor force from abroad but mostly as a demographic consolidation to the Zionist project. Settled at frontiers and borderlands, they were sent to form a buffer against internal and external Arabs. Strongly encouraged by Zionist emissaries and in fear of sectarian violence in the aftermath of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, they fled their places of origin only to become stuck in their new homeland, held hostage by circumstance without the ability to return to their old homelands.8

However, unlike the convicts in Australia or the white population experiencing poverty in the United States, the Mizrahim arrived in the colonies from a different part of the world than the earlier Ashkenazi settlers. Although not all Mizrahi Jews came from Arabic-speaking countries or referred to themselves as Arabs, most looked like Arabs, and those who spoke Arabic certainly resembled Palestinian Arabs.9 These Jews were an anomaly that posed a challenge to their integration into the Jewish settler collective.

Religion has functioned as both a prism of colonial racial separation between settlers and Native people and a unifying ethnonational category of Jews. When living among Muslims, Jews were considered a different confessional community but not a separate race. Upon their arrival in Israel, these Jews were de-Arabized, to be differentiated from local Palestinians, and ethnicized as Jews on the basis of their racialized religion. The biblical category ‘am (people) helped turn a religious community into an ethnonational community. However, Mizrahim were also internally racialized as culturally inferior Jews based on an orientalist classification of their ethnicity, marked through the Hebrew terms eda (community) and motza (geographic origin). In this sense, and as I elaborate later, Jewish religion functions as a genetic marker of race (and ethnonationality) when turned outward to non-Jews, whereas ethnicity functions as a phenotypic marker of race (and cultural-geographic background) when internally differentiating between Jews.

These contradictory constructs of race had their effects on the subjectification of Arab Jews as Mizrahim. Once in Israel, many changed their Arabic names and adopted Jewish markers, such as wearing a kippah or a Star of David, so as not to be associated with Palestinians.10 Nevertheless, mostly secular or masorati (religiously traditional), their unrecognizable religious practices marked them as inferior others. Thus, many Mizrahim ended up adopting more observant forms of Judaism, including that of the haredi (pl. haredim: ultra-Orthodox) Ashkenazim, so as to qualify as a legitimate, recognizable part of the Jewish nation.11

While redistribution of resources, labor relations, and cultural value were structured according to the Ashkenazi–Mizrahi divide, acts of assimilation were still performed to blend Mizrahim into the Israeli New Jew. The “ingathering of exiles,” pro-immigration policy for Jews, and the “melting pot” policy of integration were applied to a large variety of Jews to turn them into a single nation. Since the pre-state period, Hebrew language and culture had been enforced against all other languages, particularly Yiddish, which symbolized the shameful diasporic Jew, and Arabic, which symbolized the dangerous enemy. However, considered to have come from “backward environments,” the Mizrahim received special attention with regard to their integration, which resembled habilitation in the form of the civilizing mission of modernization.12

The Israeli mission to the Mizrahim involved assimilation acts akin to the family separation of Indigenous children in other settler colonial contexts. This includes the infamous affair of the kidnapping of Mizrahi, especially Yemenite, children in the early 1950s.13 While the Israeli state still does not acknowledge this affair, a growing body of evidence, gathered from victim families and medical staff, points to how Mizrahi infants were stolen in hospitals, often right after birth, and delivered to Ashkenazi families for adoption. More openly discussed is the acculturation of Mizrahi children in the Israeli education system. An especially notable example of this is boarding schools, some of which were designed to acculturate gifted Mizrahi children into Ashkenazi society while maintaining their disadvantage.14 Still, compulsory army service is the main arena in which the Israeli melting pot policy has been practiced, wherein young adults are separated from their families to become the protectors of the settler-nation.15

The melting pot policy also encouraged miscegenation between different Jewish populations. Already during the pre-state period, the Zionist movement idealized mixed Mizrahi–Ashkenazi marriages for eugenic purposes.16 Finally, in recent decades, the Israeli institutional discourse has been so strongly inclined to formally collapse the Mizrahi–Ashkenazi binary that its Central Bureau of Statistics differentiated between Jews only based on their parents’ country of birth. In effect, this meant blurring the persistent ethnocultural differences between Jews two generations after migration. This was recently changed, after academics and activists criticized the state for obscuring inequality in Israel.17

Interestingly, Mizrahi assimilation somewhat resembles that of Indigenous populations in other settler colonial contexts. In this sense, the orientalist othering of Mizrahim marked them as both culturally inferior and of special cultural value because they were native to the Middle East. The Mizrahim, especially those from Yemen, were seen as the most authentic bearers of Jewish cultural tradition, thus complementing the Ashkenazi construction of the New Jew and legitimizing the Zionist project.18 As Natives of the region, the Mizrahim were mediators who justified foreign settlers’ appropriation of Palestinian cultural resources both to shape the cultural contours of the new nation and to claim the settlers’ Indigeneity that aimed to replace the Native population.19 Mizrahim, especially Arab Jews (from the Mashriq), were also of value to the Zionist military efforts. Their language skills, cultural knowledge, and physical appearance made them perfect undercover agents.20 Cynically, however, Arab Jews were allowed to become Arabs only when performing their identity in the service of inflicting harm on Arabs.21

In sum, while initially located among the lower ranks of the settler colonial hierarchy, the first generation of Arab (and other Eastern) Jews were a combination of labor migrants and assimilable supposed Natives in the process of becoming settlers. Held hostage by circumstance, many were victims, taken advantage of by the Zionist movement. However, transformed into Mizrahim, the second generation was more integrated as Israelis, especially in light of the settler colonial expansion in 1967, which led to their financial and political advancement as an active force of settlers. Furthermore, the Mizrahim as native to the Middle East will play a role in claiming a more authentic form of Zionism that introduces extreme Jewish genetic racialization to justify the violent replacement of Palestinians.

Unassimilable Palestinians: Selective Conversion Under a Demographic Threat

Although racialization legitimized the national aspirations of the Zionist movement, it was not enough to ideologically sustain a settler colonial project. At the same time, leaning on religious scripture to fulfill “the long-awaited return to the lost homeland” did not necessarily imply the replacement of those living there. While the racialization of Jews was exacerbated in Nazi Germany, where they were differentiated as an external and inferior semitic race, religion as a cultural identity was not enough to single Jews out. Indeed, their persecution in Germany following the enactment of the 1935 Nuremberg Laws was based primarily on genetic bloodlines and family genealogies.22 Tragically, genealogies functioned as the main ideological tool to justify religion as a marker of the racial difference of Jews in Palestine, while religious scripture was used to justify the sense of superiority among Jewish settlers and determine who belonged to the ‘am. In this sense, without genetics there is no Jewish people as a nation, and without religion there is no justification for Jewish privilege in a settler colonial hierarchy. The Zionist movement employed both ancient scripture and modern “genealogical science” to sustain rigid settler colonial hierarchies in which the Jewish people as a race had exclusive national rights to Palestine.23

After the declaration of Israel’s independence in 1948, the 1950 Law of Return facilitated Jewish immigration to the country, effectively institutionalizing privilege of settlers over Palestinian natives. The definition of who is a Jew was deliberately left vague in order to accommodate the largest possible number of Jewish returnees, turned in time into settlers. However, this created an ambiguity in defining Jews, as the halachic ruling defined Jews according to matrilineal bloodlines or rabbinic conversion.

At a vulnerable period of demographic fluctuation, and following its British predecessor, Israel kept matrimonial law according to the Ottoman millet system, whereby each religious authority had the autonomy to oversee marriage among its community members.24 While this bureaucratic separation heavily reduced the possibility of miscegenation through interreligious marriage, it could not stop it altogether. Rare cases of marriages between Palestinians (mostly men) and Jews (mostly women) occurred. Jewish women were more likely to convert to Islam or Christianity, owing to the relatively lenient processes, as compared to Jewish conversion, which was officially assigned to the strict ultra-Orthodox rabbinical authority.

In 1963, Israel began to recognize civil marriages conducted abroad if either one or both spouses were its citizens. This allowed interreligious couples to get married without having to convert; more importantly, it opened exogamous marriages of Jewish Israeli citizens to non-Jewish foreign spouses. This moderate loosening of religious boundaries allowed a slight rise in the proportion of secular white Ashkenazim, as the non-Jewish spouses were culturally absorbed.

The Israeli territorial expansion into the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967 took place just as the last Mizrahi Jews immigrated to Israel in the mid-1960s. By the end of the decade, as Mizrahim were undergoing intensive integration into the Jewish settler-nation, the borders between Palestinians in Israel and those in the newly occupied territories were melting as well. While Israeli citizenship was a strong biopolitical tool to differentiate “Israeli Arabs” from the rest of the Palestinian nation, the ’67 Palestinians were colonized for both land and labor. Israeli settlements soon expanded to the new territories, pioneered mainly by religious nationalist settlers and some Mizrahim, and the ’67 Palestinians were granted permission to work in Israel, thus replacing the Mizrahim as the main labor force in the lower ranks in Israel.25

While Israel depended on the labor of the ’67 Palestinians, measures to regulate their movement increased with the enlargement of settlements and anticolonial resistance. This dependency was largely overcome in the mid-1990s with temporary labor migrants, mostly from Southeast Asia. In contrast to the enslaved African people in the United States, this form of globalized labor exploitation allowed the benefit of abundant cheap labor without the absorption of an underclass population into the settler colonial structure, at the same time pushing a dispossessed Native population into smaller enclaves.26

The Law of Return was amended in 1970 to legislate more inclusive criteria for individuals eligible to immigrate to Israel, thus including “a child and a grandchild of a Jew, the spouse of a Jew, the spouse of a child of a Jew and the spouse of a grandchild of a Jew.”27 While this amendment tackled the natural growth of Palestinians and Mizrahim, who together became a majority of Arabs or “Orientals,” it risked allowing in immigrants who were not halachically Jewish.28 Initially, this was not problematic, as it allowed mostly small groups fleeing antisemitic regimes in Europe, such as Poland, to join the Ashkenazi ranks. But in the 1990s, when the fall of the Soviet Union coincided with the government’s urge to tackle the “demographic threat,” Israel admitted around a million ex-Soviet immigrants, of whom some two hundred thousand were descendants of a Jewish father or grandfather, along with their spouses and children.29 This was a major anomaly, as some of these immigrants overtly went to local churches and, in some rare cases, even married local Palestinians, mostly Christians.30 However, over the years, most of the ex-Soviet immigrants were assimilated into the Jewish settler ranks through giyur (conversion to Judaism).31 Wolfe was right to view this group as the inverse of the Mizrahim case, since their white phenotype was seemingly sufficient to allow absorption into the settlers’ genotype, even at the cost of ignoring the religious rules.32 Some affinity to Judaism was, however, necessary to allow the gradual assimilation of ex-Soviet non-Jews at various stations of their life: during marriage to Israeli Jews, joining the military, receiving a burial plot, and so on.33 The official Orthodox rabbinate had to be lenient with the conversion of this population in order to secure a demographic majority of settlers and avoid an anomalous category of immigrants who are “neither settlers nor natives.”34

Furthermore, the intake of ex-Soviet non-Jews contests the argument that the Jewish religion has never been proselytizing. This might have been true when Jews were a vulnerable minority protecting themselves from assimilation, but at earlier periods of history there were entire communities that converted to Judaism.35 The case of ex-Soviet non-Jews shows that even religious regulations, as markers of racialized difference in Israel, are not set in stone. If so, where does this leave the possibility of assimilating Palestinians?

To answer this question, it is worthwhile exploring the case of the singer Nasreen Qadri, a Muslim Palestinian citizen of Israel, who was in a long romantic relationship with Aviezer Ben-Moha, a Jewish Mizrahi man and member of her band.36 Eager to become part of Israeli Jewish society, Qadri attempted to cross every barrier, including relocating to the Tel Aviv area, speaking primarily Hebrew, and embracing Zionist ideology. Yet things became complicated when Qadri and Ben-Moha wished to marry. A masorati Jew, Ben-Moha insisted on marriage through the state’s Orthodox rabbinate, for which Qadri had to undergo giyur. During the demanding process, Qadri agreed to observe Shabbat, kashruth laws, and modest dress. A crisis developed when Qadri was, for religious reasons, prohibited from singing before a mixed-gender audience. Ben-Moha compromised on a civil marriage but quickly retracted this, as he realized that their future children would not be considered Jewish. After all, in Judaism a child’s religion is determined according to the mother. This, however, could have also reflected on the father. Given the Mizrahi phenotypical proximity to Arabs, Ben-Moha’s settler status could have been shaken if he became a father to so-called non-Jewish Arab children.

This explains why the few interreligious marriages between settlers and natives are usually performed by civil marriage abroad and mostly involve Muslim or Christian Arab men and Jewish women.37 Furthermore, non-Jewish female spouses of Israeli Jewish men unsurprisingly face greater pressure to convert than non-Jewish male spouses, and this is so even in cases of civil marriage abroad.38 While foreign non-Jewish spouses may convert abroad with a more lenient non-Orthodox rabbi and have this approved in Israel for citizenship purposes, Indigenous non-Jewish spouses (like Qadri) undergoing conversion in Israel and wishing to have their conversions recognized in Israel, particularly as related to issues of personal status, must undergo the strictest Orthodox giyur.39 Finally, Qadri and Ben-Moha separated, yet she still completed the giyur independently of the Chief Rabbinate, under the guidance of reform Rabbi Dudu Dery. However, the Israeli state and its Chief Rabbinate refused to recognize her conversion, since it was not conducted under their auspices, and she remained officially registered on Israeli documents as a Muslim.

This example further illustrates the difficulty that Native Palestinians, particularly women, face in being accepted into the Israeli settler ranks. Such acceptance cannot be achieved only through legal marital ties; it also requires that children be born to Jewish mothers. Based on this, miscegenation politics in Israel are clearly about gendered and racialized religious conversion to Judaism as much as they are about phenotypes. We saw in the previous section how miscegenation between Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Jews was encouraged but interreligious marriages between Jewish settlers and Indigenous Palestinians are rejected because the children of such marriages may instead assimilate to the Indigenous population. However, guided by Jewish fear of their own assimilation, the conversion of Native Palestinians did not take place, not only because Judaism is a supposedly nonproselytizing religion but because the intake of large numbers of Palestinians into the Jewish ranks might affect the distinction between settlers and natives.40 In the next section, I discuss the recent developments in antimiscegenation and racialized religious xenophobia in Israel after the failure of ethnonational separation in the 1990s.

The Guardians of “Jewish Race”: Segregation and Antiassimilation

Along with the major demographic challenge, the 1967 Israeli colonial expansion marked a milestone in the religionization of the Zionist project. The religious nationalist movement of Gush Emunim dominated the new settlements in the ’67 territories, since the primary justification of colonial expansion with great risks had to become increasingly theological. As the ’67 Palestinians entered the lowest ranks of manual labor, the Mizrahim advanced as small-scale contractors and independent entrepreneurs who employed this new labor force.41 Along with these intense encounters, Mizrahim became increasingly observant to emphasize their religious difference and claim their colonial privileges as Jews. This boundary making sharpened as the Mizrahim became involved in settler-national politics.

In 1984, Shas—a haredi party that attracted many masorati and less observant Mizrahim—became the first Mizrahi party elected to the Knesset. Unlike most Ashkenazi haredim in Israel, who disengaged from Zionism as a modern national movement, Shas uniquely combined ultra-Orthodox positions with Jewish nationalism.42 This empowered Mizrahim to claim a new position, one more pragmatic than that of the haredi Ashkenazim and more authentic than that of secular Ashkenazim.43

The difference between Mizrahi haredim and the ’67 settlers is more subtle, as both are considered religious nationalists. According to Nissim Leon, the ’67 settlers, rooted in the Zionist movement, are mostly concerned with territorial expansion and safeguarding the physical borders of the Land of Israel, while Mizrahi haredim are concerned with safeguarding the Jewish confessional community, to maintain both its moral and its “ethnic” purity.44 To support his argument, Leon shows how in the 1990s Shas was willing to accept territorial compromise for peace with Palestinians, while it took a hard line against miscegenation of Jews with Palestinians, admission of ex-Soviet non-Jews to Israel, and homosexual relations among Jews.45

Although concerns about the purity of the Jewish collective resemble a colonial discourse based on racial boundaries, Leon argues that the religious Mizrahi project, at least in the 1980s and 1990s, was mostly a sectarian endeavor for integration into the Jewish nation.46 Eventually, in light of liberal policies of Israeli multiculturalism in the 1990s, and increasingly after the Likud’s reign in the last two decades, Mizrahim became more integrated, even if they remained at a socioeconomic disadvantage in relation to Ashkenazim.47

After the failure of the Oslo negotiations over the separation of Jews and Palestinians into two nation-states, the Zionist settler colonial project took a clearer step toward the expansionist option. The Mizrahi haredim and the ’67 settlers grew closer, especially as both populations became partners in the long-standing rule of the Likud, which also relied heavily on Mizrahi voters. Siding with territorial expansion under increasing theological justification, this coalition sees itself as an inheritor of the old secular Ashkenazi hegemony, which is portrayed as less rooted in the land. Although the significant numbers of Mizrahim who joined the settlements in the ’67 territories were not seen as “ideological settlers,” religion and religiosity facilitated Mizrahi integration into the privileged settler-nation.48 Today in a leadership position of this collective, their role as guardians of the Jewish people as a confessional community can be more clearly seen as based on colonial constructs of racialized religious outward exclusion.

Despite the lesser dependence on the ’67 Palestinians’ labor, turning them in effect into a “surplus population,” the demographic threat has become more acute during the last two decades, as the number of Palestinians between the river and the sea is reaching near that of Jews.49 New plans were devised to keep as many ’67 Palestinians outside the borders of the settler colonial polity while expanding it into their lands. These plans include the construction of the Separation Wall around the West Bank starting in 2002, the disengagement from the Gaza Strip since 2005, its blockade since 2007, and the horrific genocide since October 2023—all this while advanced preparations are underway to annex the West Bank’s Area C, after ethnically cleansing it of Palestinians. Measures were also taken to control the Palestinian demographic increase inside Israel. Along with long-standing policies to reduce the birthrate of Palestinian citizens, the legal system was also recruited to separate and remove them.50

The anxiety around settler colonial demography is also directed at maintaining a Jewish advantage. The past two decades witnessed an unprecedented number of laws instituting Jewish privilege, yet complementary efforts have also been made to maintain the proportion of Jews to non-Jews.51 While Jewish immigration weakened in comparison to the big waves of the 1990s, efforts are increasingly directed at preventing Jews from crossing religious and racial boundaries.

In 2005, a group of religious nationalist settlers who are closely associated with the political party Otzma Yehudit, which follows the racist ideology of Rabbi Meir Kahane, founded the antiassimilation organization Lehava (Flame).52 Competing with the older haredi antiassimilation organization Yad L’Achim (A Hand to Brothers), and radicalizing it, Lehava holds a Jewish supremacist ideology and turns the religious discourse of anticonversion of Jews into one of race.53

Thus, Lehava’s activism has expanded—from Yad L’Achim’s interventions against Jewish conversion to Christianity to a general xenophobic ideology that demands the removal of any non-Jewish presence in Israel. This includes not only Christians but also African asylum seekers and, of course, Palestinians. Similarly, Yad L’Achim’s small-scale supposed rescue of Jewish women who reported abusive Palestinian men grew into an antimiscegenation agenda with an unapologetic racist tinge, directed at all Jewish–Palestinian couples, even if no rescue was required. Lehava’s interventions, which are highly mediated to intentionally cause scandal and shaming, range from activists’ videotaped appeals to convince couples to end their relationship (such as in the case of Qadri and Ben-Moha) to organizing public demonstrations at such couples’ weddings.54

More concerning, however, Lehava’s antimiscegenation activism expanded to include other spheres of life, such as setting fire to and spraying racist graffiti on the Hebrew-Arabic bilingual school in Jerusalem.55 Focused mainly on Jerusalem as the organization’s center of activity, Lehava’s campaigns also include preventive action taken to solidify segregation. Such actions include naming and shaming Jews who rent flats to Palestinians, sending threatening letters warning Palestinians not to breach Jewish neighborhoods, and violently targeting young Palestinian men in the Jewish city center, especially in the area of Zion Square, to deter them from harassing Jewish women.56

While founded and led by Bentzi Gopstein, an Ashkenazi ’67 settler, Lehava’s street activists are mainly Mizrahi youth coming from the lower socioeconomic classes and diverse intensities of religious observance, including haredim and members of the racist La Familia—fans of the Beitar Jerusalem Football Club.57 This demonstrates my earlier point regarding the growing convergence between the religious nationalist streams from among the ’67 settlers and the various Mizrahi communities, who act together as the self-proclaimed new guardians of the racialized boundaries of the Jewish collective in Israel.

Although seemingly a marginal organization, driven more by scandal than effective action, Lehava should not be taken lightly. Guided by a religious racist ideology of antimiscegenation and removal of Palestinians, Lehava is part of a larger network within the expansionist streams of the settler colonial project. This network operates in different spheres and levels of influence, reaching as high as being in charge of ministerial offices in the current Israeli government. Unsurprisingly, this government recently (July 2023) approved a law for stricter punishment of “nationalistically” motivated sex offenses; it is a racist law that, owing mainly to fear of false accusations, will have a chilling effect on Palestinian men who are in or are considering romantic relationships with Jewish women.58

As religion, race, and nation intersect, the Zionist settler colonial project demonstrates an especially radical case of exclusion, as it has little room for unaligned populations, beyond the strict settler/native binary. While ex-Soviet non-Jews were eventually assimilated though conversion or marriage to Jews, Lehava’s violent policing of racial boundaries goes beyond Indigenous Palestinians and includes small populations of non-Palestinian Christians, as religious competitors, and African asylum seekers, as non-Jews of a lower phenotype. These populations are perceived as a threat to the racial and moral purity of the settler-nation and therefore are expected to leave or be forcefully removed.

Conclusion: The Haunting Effects of Racialized Forms of Religion

Unlike in the United States or other new-world settler colonies, assimilation and miscegenation politics in Israel are applied to the settlers’ genetics rather than to those of Indigenous populations, albeit through genealogical family lines. While this is a remnant of the Jewish diasporic history in Europe, I have tried to demonstrate how religion is a fragile category of racialization in Israel, since it is “counterproductive” to the preservation of a demographic majority of settlers.59 If conversion of external individuals puts any confessional community in peril of cultural change, among Jews in Israel such fears are heightened because they reflect old fears of genetic dilution when admitting others to the settler ranks.60 Based primarily on racialized forms of religion, Zionist settler colonialism is standing out not only because it is less readily able to assimilate Indigenous populations but because any non-Jewish population causes more of a demographic anxiety than a potential reinforcement, even when it is supposedly white.

The 1967 territorial expansion of the Zionist project forced settler colonial justification to rely more on theological convictions than on national aspirations. Guided by the fulfillment of prophecies, it becomes harder to declare the completion of the Zionist project, leading the way to harsher means that justify ambiguous ends.61 Meanwhile, with a large number of unassimilable Palestinians living inside the geographical borders of the settler colony, the Zionist project is far from being concluded. Thus, instead of acting as a sovereign nation, Jews in Israel find themselves in perpetual anxiety, needing to safeguard the racial boundaries of their religious community of settlers, just as when they lived as diasporic minorities under threat of assimilation.

The Mizrahim play a crucial role in shaping the future of the Zionist project and the relations between Jews and Palestinians. If the “negation of exile” is one of the main Zionist imperatives in constructing the New Jew, the Mizrahim became the perfect Zionist subject by being Jews by religion but also having a rooted history in the Middle East.62 No wonder that in recent years some Mizrahim are claiming a more authentic and legitimate Zionism than that of the old secular Ashkenazi hegemony, which they perceive as foreign to the region. These doubts only increase in light of the larger numbers of Ashkenazim who (re)claimed European passports in the last two decades.63 This too stands in a stark opposition to most Mizrahim, who are barred from returning to almost all Arab and Muslim countries and thus have less ground to reclaim Jewish diasporic identities.

However, native to the Middle East and embodying a liminal category between Jews and Arabs, the Mizrahim are still in a good position to bring forward political dynamics based on cultural similarity and not on racial difference. This way, they can redefine their relations with not only Ashkenazim but also the Indigenous Palestinian population. Indeed, Mizrahi consolidation of Jewish ethnonational identity allows them to reclaim Arab heritage and cultural identity.64 If combined with theological-racial exclusionary politics, as we saw in the last section of this article, their claim of Indigeneity may lead to justifying Jewish privilege and even siding with harsher attempts to remove and replace Palestinian Arabs. Alternatively, cultural affinity with Palestinians may lead to decolonial political futures that treat them as equals. This second scenario, however, demands the constitution of a new political imaginary that does not simply break the binary of settlers/natives but mainly challenges its correlation with racial, ethnic, and religious identities.

Nadeem Karkabi is senior lecturer in anthropology at the University of Haifa and a founding member of Insaniyyat—Society of Palestinian Anthropologists. His current research examines the performances of Arab music and music in Arabic among young Mizrahi Jews in Israel to explore imaginaries of Indigeneity, exile, and home.

Notes

I would like to thank Eilat Maoz for her valuable comments on an earlier draft of this article.

1. 1. Patrick Wolfe, “Land, Labor, and Difference: Elementary Structures of Race,” American Historical Review 106, no. 3 (2001): 866–905.

2. 2. Wolfe, “Land, Labor, and Difference,” 904. As opposed to Arab Jews, and despite being an Israeli political construct, I use the term Mizrahi (pl. Mizrahim) as most common and inclusive naming of non-European Jews. Although it came to eclipse the Arab origins of most Jews who belong to this category, it also went through a process of reclamation in the 1980s. I do not use the term Sephardim (lit. “Spaniards”) because it historically refers only to Jews expelled from Spain and today is used mostly in a religious context.

3. 3. Patrick Wolfe, Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race (Verso Books, 2016), 259; Gershon Shafir, Land, Labour, and the Origins of the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict, 1882–1914 (Cambridge University Press, 1989).

4. 4. Raef Zreik, “When Does a Settler Become a Native? (With Apologies to Mamdani),” Constellations 23, no. 3 (2016): 351–64.

5. 5. Yali Hashash, “We Are All Jews: ‘White Trash,’ Mizrahim, and Multiple Marginalities Within the Hegemony” [in Hebrew], Theory and Criticism 48 (2017): 249–64.

6. 6. Rachel Z. Feldman and Ian McGonigle, eds., Settler-Indigeneity in the West Bank (McGill-Queen’s Press, 2023).

7. 7. Ella Shohat, “Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims,” Social Text 19/20 (1988): 1–35.

8. 8. Shohat, “Sephardim in Israel.”

9. 9. Lital Levy, “Historicizing the Concept of Arab Jews in the ‘Mashriq,’” Jewish Quarterly Review 98, no. 4 (2008): 452–69.

10. 10. Yehouda Shenhav, The Arab Jews: A Postcolonial Reading of Nationalism, Religion, and Ethnicity (Stanford University Press, 2006).

11. 11. Shenhav, Arab Jews.

12. 12. Ella Shohat, “The Narrative of the Nation and the Discourse of Modernization: The Case of the Mizrahim,” Critique: Journal for Critical Studies of the Middle East 6, no. 10 (1997): 3–18.

13. 13. Meira Weiss, “The Children of Yemen: Bodies, Medicalization, and Nation-Building,” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 15, no. 2 (2001): 206–21.

14. 14. Avi Shoshana, “The Phenomenology of a New Social Category: The Case of the Gifted Disadvantaged in Israel,” Poetics 35, no. 6 (2007): 352–67.

15. 15. Dana Kachtan, “The Construction of Ethnic Identity in the Military—from the Bottom Up,” Israel Studies 17, no. 3 (2012): 150–75.

16. 16. Dafna Hirsch, “Zionist Eugenics, Mixed Marriage, and the Creation of a ‘New Jewish Type,’” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15, no. 3 (2009): 592–609.

17. 17. Sigal Nagar-Ron, “National Statistics, Ethnic Categorization, and Inequality Indicators in Israel” [in Hebrew], Israeli Sociology 22, no. 1 (2021): 6–25.

18. 18. Yael Guilat, “The Yemeni Ideal in Israeli Culture and Arts,” Israel Studies 6, no. 3 (2001): 26–53.

19. 19. Oz Almog, The Sabra: The Creation of the New Jew (University of California Press, 2000).

20. 20. Gil Eyal, The Disenchantment of the Orient: Expertise in Arab Affairs and the Israeli State (Stanford University Press, 2006); Shenhav, Arab Jews.

21. 21. Yonatan Mendel, “Re-Arabizing the De-Arabized: The Mista ʿaravim Unit of the Palmach,” in Debating Orientalism, ed. Ziad Elmarsafy, Anna Bernard, and David Attwell (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

22. 22. Ronit Lentin, Traces of Racial Exception: Racializing Israeli Settler Colonialism (Bloomsbury, 2018), 34.

23. 23. Nadia Abu El-Haj, The Genealogical Science: The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of Epistemology (University of Chicago Press, 2012).

24. 24. Daphna Hacker, “Inter-Religious Marriages in Israel: Gendered Implications for Conversion, Children, and Citizenship,” Israel Studies 14, no. 2 (2009): 178–97.

25. 25. Rivi Gillis, “Ethnic Identity in the Israeli Settlements” [in Hebrew], Theory and Criticism 47 (2016): 41–63; Deborah Bernstein and Shlomo Swirski, “The Rapid Economic Development of Israel and the Emergence of the Ethnic Division of Labour,” British Journal of Sociology 33, no. 1 (1982): 64–85.

26. 26. Iyko Day, Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism (Duke University Press, 2016).

27. 27. Adalah, “The Law of Return 5710 (1950),” Amendment No. 2 5730–1970, https://www.adalah.org/uploads/oldfiles/Public/files/Discriminatory-Laws-Database/English/36-Law-of-Return-1950.pdf.

28. 28. Ian S. Lustick, “The Red Thread of Israel’s ‘Demographic Problem,’” Middle East Policy 26, no. 1 (2019): 141–49.

29. 29. Lustick, “Red Thread of Israel’s ‘Demographic Problem.’”

30. 30. Maha Karkabi-Sabbah, “Ethnoreligious Mixed Marriages Among Palestinian Women and Jewish Men in Israel: Negotiating the Breaking of Barriers,” Journal of Israeli History 36, no. 2 (2017): 189–211.

31. 31. Michal Kravel-Tovi, When the State Winks: The Performance of Jewish Conversion in Israel (Columbia University Press, 2017).

32. 32. Wolfe, Traces of History.

33. 33. Lustick, “Red Thread of Israel’s ‘Demographic Problem.’”

34. 34. Mahmood Mamdani, Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities (Harvard University Press, 2020).

35. 35. Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People (Verso, 2009).

36. 36. Nadeem Karkabi, “Arabic Language Among Jews in Israel and the New Mizrahi Zionism: Between Active Knowledge and Performance,” Journal of Levantine Studies 9, no. 2 (2019): 81–106.

37. 37. Karkabi-Sabbah, “Ethnoreligious Mixed Marriages.”

38. 38. Hacker, “Inter-Religious Marriages in Israel.”

39. 39. Michal Kravel-Tovi, “Accounting of the Soul: Enumeration, Affect, and Soul Searching Among American Jewry,” American Anthropologist 120, no. 4 (2018): 711–24.

40. 40. Elise K. Burton, “An Assimilating Majority? Israeli Marriage Law and Identity in the Jewish State,” Journal of Jewish Identities 8, no. 1 (2015): 73–94.

41. 41. Bernstein and Swirski, “Rapid Economic Development of Israel.”

42. 42. Yoav Peled, “Towards a Redefinition of Jewish Nationalism in Israel? The Enigma of Shas,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 21, no. 4 (1998): 703–27.

43. 43. Nissim Leon, “Ethno-Religious Fundamentalism and Theo-Ethnocratic Politics in Israel,” Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 14, no. 1 (2014): 20–35.

44. 44. Leon, “Ethno-Religious Fundamentalism”; Nissim Leon, The Headdress and the Flag: Oppositional Nationalism in the Mizrachi Ultra-Orthodoxy [in Hebrew] (Van Leer Institute, 2016).

45. 45. Leon, Headdress and the Flag.

46. 46. Leon, Headdress and the Flag.

47. 47. Uri Cohen and Nissim Leon, “The New Mizrahi Middle Class: Ethnic Mobility and Class Integration in Israel,” Journal of Israeli History 27, no. 1 (2008): 51–64.

48. 48. Gillis, “Ethnic Identity in the Israeli Settlements.”

49. 49. Rhys Machold, “Reconsidering the Laboratory Thesis: Palestine/Israel and the Geopolitics of Representation,” Political Geography 65 (2018): 88–97.

50. 50. Gala Rexer, “Borderlands of Reproduction: Bodies, Borders, and Assisted Reproductive Technologies in Israel/Palestine,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 44, no. 9 (2021): 1549–68. For example, since 2003, there has been a legal ban on ’67 Palestinians claiming citizenship and residency rights in Israel based on family reunification through marriage to a Palestinian citizen of Israel. This joins legislation for revocation of citizenship of ’48 Palestinians and the revocation of residency rights of Palestinian Jerusalemites. Nadim N. Rouhana and Areej Sabbagh-Khoury, “Settler-Colonial Citizenship: Conceptualizing the Relationship Between Israel and Its Palestinian Citizens,” Settler Colonial Studies 5, no. 3 (2015): 205–25.

51. 51. Adalah, “The Discriminatory Laws Database,” September 25, 2017, https://www.adalah.org/en/content/view/7771.

52. 52. Sarah Ihmoud, “Policing the Intimate: Israel’s Anti-Miscegenation Movement,” Jerusalem Quarterly 75 (2018): 91–103.

53. 53. Burton, “Assimilating Majority?”

54. 54. Burton, “Assimilating Majority?”

55. 55. Orly Noy, “When Setting Fire to a Bilingual School Is No Longer ‘Racist,’” +972 Magazine, April 18, 2015, https://www.972mag.com/when-setting-fire-to-a-bilingual-school-is-no-longer-racist/.

56. 56. Ihmoud, “Policing the Intimate.”

57. 57. Ari Engelberg, “Fighting Intermarriage in the Holy Land: Lehava and Israeli Ethnonationalism,” Journal of Israeli History 36, no. 2 (2017): 229–47.

58. 58. Noa Shpigel, “Israel Passes Law Setting Stricter Punishments for Nationalistically Motivated Crimes,” Haaretz, July 30, 2023, https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-07-30/ty-article/.premium/israel-passes-law-setting-stricter-punishments-for-nationalistically-motivated-sex-crimes/00000189-a700-df3e-a7eb-f74bb2bb0000.

59. 59. Burton, “Assimilating Majority?”

60. 60. Gauri Viswanathan, Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief (Princeton University Press, 1998).

61. 61. Zreik, “When Does a Settler Become Native?”

62. 62. Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, “Exile Within Sovereignty: Critique of ‘The Negation of Exile’ in Israeli Culture,” in The Scaffolding of Sovereignty: Global and Aesthetic Perspectives on the History of a Concept, ed. Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, Stefanos Geroulanos, and Nicole Jerr (Columbia University Press, 2017).

63. 63. Yossi Harpaz, Citizenship 2.0: Dual Nationality as a Global Asset (Princeton University Press, 2019).

64. 64. Karkabi, “Arabic Language Among Jews”; Nadeem Karkabi, “The Impossible Quest of Nasreen Qadri to Claim Colonial Privilege in Israel,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 44, no. 6 (2021): 966–86.