Orit Bashkin

Impossible Exodus

Iraqi Jews in Israel

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Between 1949 and 1951, 123,000 Iraqi Jews immigrated to the newly established Israeli state. Lacking the resources to absorb them all, the Israeli government resettled them in maabarot, or transit camps, relegating them to poverty. In the tents and shacks of the camps, their living conditions were squalid and unsanitary. Basic necessities like water were in short supply, when they were available at all. Rather than returning to a homeland as native sons, Iraqi Jews were newcomers in a foreign place. Impossible Exodus tells the story of these Iraqi Jews' first decades in Israel. Faced with ill treatment and discrimination from state officials, Iraqi Jews resisted: they joined Israeli political parties, demonstrated in the streets, and fought for the education of their children, leading a civil rights struggle whose legacy continues to influence contemporary debates in Israel. Orit Bashkin sheds light on their everyday lives and their determination in a new country, uncovering their long, painful transformation from Iraqi to Israeli. In doing so, she shares the resilience and humanity of a community whose story has yet to be told.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 320
• Erscheinungstermin: 15. August 2017
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 229mm x 152mm x 22mm
• Gewicht: 640g
• ISBN-13: 9780804795852
• ISBN-10: 0804795851
• Artikelnr.: 47548771

Autorenporträt

Orit Bashkin is Professor of Modern Middle East History at the University of Chicago. She is the author of New Babylonians: A History of Jews in Modern Iraq (Stanford, 2012) and The Other Iraq: Pluralism and Culture in Hashemite Iraq (Stanford, 2008).

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
Introduction: The Death of an Arab Jew
chapter abstract
This chapter contextualizes the history of Iraqi Jews in Israel within
Zionist, Mizrahi, Arab, and global histories. While liberal Zionist
discourse emphasizes that Israel before 1967 was an ethical society,
attempting to meet the challenges of survival and migration, the
Introduction argues that the period from 1948 to 1967 was one of the most
horrific eras in Israel's history, when many of its citizens, Jews and
Arabs alike, were faced with losing their past homes, livelihoods, and,
essentially, everything that they had, amid the indifference of the people
living around them. This chapter describes how the state interacted with
the Iraqi Jewish community as a project of social engineering, wherein
state elites believed that all immigrants, especially Middle Eastern Jews,
needed to become Hebrew-speaking, socialist Zionists.
1Human Material
chapter abstract
This chapter shows that Iraqi Jews in Israel were migrant-citizens. They
had been granted citizenship rights upon their arrival, so that they could
vote in general elections and receive welfare benefits and social services.
Nonetheless, because the authorities believed they came from a primitive
country and were in need of discipline, and because the state did not have
resources to attend to their needs, Iraqi Jews were treated as
migrant-citizens, namely, as people who should be thankful for the little
they got and who were undeserving of full citizenship rights. Iraqi Jews,
as well as other groups of migrants to Israel, were classified as "human
material," a classification that reflects their dependency on the state and
their dehumanization as a result of migration.
2Children of Iraq, Children of Israel
chapter abstract
This chapter tells the story of Iraqi-Jewish children in Israel, who grew
up in transit camps, in the poor neighborhoods, and on kibbutzim. These
children were quicker to adjust to the new living conditions in Israel as
their memories of Iraq faded and they learned Hebrew. And yet, these
children were the most vulnerable group among the newcomers. They suffered
from malnutrition; their parents could not always deal with the pain of
displacement and sometimes took out their anger on their children; they
attended poor-quality schools; and they often had to leave school to work
to support their families. These able and creative children, however,
learned how to adjust to the new conditions and challenge and resist the
state.
3The Only Democracy in the Middle East
chapter abstract
This chapter proposes that the Israeli political system, despite being only
partially democratic, offered venues in which Iraqi Jews could voice their
complaints. It looks at political parties that had Iraqi-Jewish members who
were active in the transit camps and published in the Arabic newspapers of
various political parties. The chapter explores Iraqi-Jewish involvement in
these organizations and analyzes how parties' leaders conceptualized their
relationship to Iraqi Jews. Despite the parties' efforts at outreach,
however, none of the political organizations in Israel offered a
comprehensive solution to the Iraqi problem. At each and every step of the
way, the parties' refusal to recognize the racism of their own members
curtailed the possibility of providing a genuine solution.
4Elements of Resistance
chapter abstract
Focusing on the issue of political action, this chapter explores elements
of resistance to the state's politics. Despite being poor migrants, Iraqi
Jews became subversive political actors. From transit camps to the streets
of towns, Iraqi Jews resisted the state's housing and employment politics,
wrote and sang protest songs, established local committees to negotiate
their concerns with the state, showered the state's ministries and
administrative bodies with petitions, and destroyed public property. Some
were successful in that they managed to secure livelihoods for unemployed
individuals, improve their living conditions, or gain employment. Others'
protests were less successful in achieving the newcomers' goals, but were
effective in raising public awareness of the sufferings of Iraqi Jews.
5Israeli Babylonians
chapter abstract
This chapter highlights three identities of the Iraqi-Jewish community that
emerged during the 1950s and 1960s in Israel. The first is Iraqi; facing
hardships in Israel, Iraq became the Promised Land for many Iraqi Jews. The
second was Arab-Jewish; Iraqi Jews continued writing and communicating in
Arabic with Arabic-speaking Israeli Jews and Palestinians. Their mastery of
Arabic also made them valuable to the state as teachers, translators, and
members of the state's security apparatus. The third was Mizrahi, an
identity shaped through the struggle against Ashkenazi hegemony, which
connected Iraqi Jews to other non-European Jews. The intertwining of these
identities created Israelis of Iraqi descent, who were critical of the
Ashkenazi establishment, and yet considered themselves Israeli patriots.
Conclusion: The Death of Arab Jewishness
chapter abstract
The chapter looks at the history of Iraqi Jews in Israel after 1967. It
suggests that contemporary Mizrahi debates have their roots in the 1950s
and 1960s, when some Iraqi Jews chose to focus on exclusively the Mizrahi
and Iraqi struggle for civil rights, while others, especially communists,
sided with the Palestinian struggle. Today, Mizrahi radicals are torn on
the issue of the connections, or their absence, between their struggles and
those of other oppressed groups in Israel, especially the Palestinians.
Looking ahead, it seems very plausible that Israel will become a more
segregated society, where Iraqi Jews will still partake of Mizrahi Arab
culture as produced in Israel, yet will struggle as Jews in the Jewish
state.