Jewish Writer Documents Racism in Israeli Films

By Pat and Samir Twair

"Palestinians make up about 20 percent of the Israeli population, Jews from the Middle East another 50 percent. If you include the West Bank and Gaza, the figure reaches 90 percent—yet they are forced to view advertising, the media and films from the perspective of the minority Western Jews."

No, these weren't the words of a disgruntled Palestinian, but of Prof. Ella Habiba Shohat, an Iraqi-Jewish Israeli who teaches at City University of New York in Manhattan.

In 1992 when her book, Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation, was translated into Hebrew, her arguments shook the Israeli establishment with a national controversy that's still rumbling in the media.

Shohat isn't about to be silenced by right-wing nationalists, however, and her reasoned arguments make sense to all but the most devoted followers of Benyamin Netanyahu, who seem unable even to comprehend that all of Palestine once was the home of Muslim and Christian Palestinians.

In an interview with the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Shohat said her entire family emigrated from Baghdad in the 1950s.

"I was robbed of my cultural origins," she stated. "The first marker of one's identity is your name, yet when my relatives arrived in Israel, their Arabic names were immediately Hebraized. My grandmother's name was Masouda, but it was changed to Sara. My mother had wanted to name me for my great-grandmother, Habiba, who died shortly after the family arrived in Israel. But the authorities frowned on Israeli children having Arabic names and they were, after all, helping us shed our 'backward' ways. The whole idea was that anything Western was good and anything Middle Eastern was bad."

This, Shohat explains in her book, is the schizoid nature of the Israeli ethos: it is a nation in the Middle East, with a majority population of Middle Easterners, that denies any ties to the East.

Shohat attributes this to European Jews who established the Zionist state and then promoted and propagandized their Yishuv (settlement) years in films and the media as a struggle of blond, blue-eyed idealistic pioneers under constant attack by mean-spirited, inferior Arabs.

In this initial period of Israeli filmmaking, which she terms "the Heroic-Nationalist stage," Shohat argues that there were obvious analogies between American and Israeli films. Israelis were portrayed as brave settlers while the Arabs were portrayed as savages, just as American Indians were portrayed in early American Westerns. Oriental Jews were portrayed as unskilled laborers in Israeli films, not unlike past American portrayals of African Americans.

"Growing up an Oriental Jew in the '50s and '60s wasn't easy," she recalled. "Any ads we saw idealized blond children—the notion of beauty was a European ideal. It was tough to assert your Middle Eastern origins and so we internalized our shame and felt uncomfortable over our visible links with the East."

She says that at home her family spoke a Baghdadi-Iraqi colloquial Arabic. Even the Hebrew spoken by the Sephardim, the Oriental Jews, was an Arabized version different in syntax, words and accent from the Hebrew spoken by Western Jews.

"It was taboo to speak Arabic in school and whenever teachers wanted to chastise us, they would refer to us as 'you Moroccan' or 'you Iraqi' or 'you Yemeni,'" Shohat recalled. "Jews from the Middle East were expected to abandon their Middle Eastern traits, so we grew up without studying our history or culture. It was all the more tragic for Palestinian Israelis, who couldn't even read about Arab history in textbooks."

Shohat says that, in general, Oriental Jews must reach the Ph.D. level before they learn about their Middle Eastern heritage.

"Our history is different from that of European Jews," she continued. "For example, we only heard briefly about Maimonides (Musa ibn Maymun, court physician to Salahuddin and a 12th century philosopher who expounded Jewish law in Arabic)." The chasm between Western and Eastern Jews is exemplified, Shohat stressed, by the fact that many Oriental Jews who arrived in Israel in the 1950s had not experienced the Holocaust and had little knowledge of the idea of Zionism.

"It is taken for granted that the Holocaust is a shared historical memory of all Israelis, but, with all due respect, it isn't," she continued. "And so most mizrahim end up knowing nothing of our accomplishments and contributions to philosophy and literature in the Arab world."

It was her parents' generation, she remarked, who, for the first time in history, had to choose between all the generations they had been a part of Arab culture, and being an Israeli Jew.

Shohat had her own awakening in the 1970s, when the Israeli Black Panther movement was fighting discrimination. In the 1980s, she became involved in such mizrahi movements for peace as East for Peace, the Oriental Front, and Perspective Judeo-Arabes.

She cites such groups to repudiate the stereotype engendered by Ashkenazi (European) Jews that all Oriental Jews tend to hate Palestinians or that they support the Likud party.

Shohat was a delegate to the New York conference of the New York-based World Organization of Jews from Islamic Countries. In 1989, she was part of a ground-breaking Israeli Sephardic delegation that met with Palestinians in Toledo, Spain, under the auspices of the Spanish government. "Our objective was to link our concerns with those of the Palestinians," she explained.

And therein lies the premise of this outspoken scholar: "It is impossible to separate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from the Ashkenazi-Sephardic conflict."

"Even if there is peace, what does it mean if racist ideas and conditions continue to prevail in Israel? Real peace to me is rethinking attitudes—the Arab culture is a legitimate part of the history of Israel."

Shohat is not an individual to lose heart easily. She proved this when she stood up to Israeli news commentators and columnists in 1992.

"I was under major attack on the radio, TV and press—not because I was critical of Israel's heroic-nationalist films that brain-washed the people with the ideal of the Eurocentric Sabra—but because I refused to separate the Palestinian issue from that of the Western Jew denigrating the Oriental Jew and his culture."

She was surprised to discover that some academics most hostile to her theories were the so-called liberals in Israel's Peace Now Movement.

"Somehow, these Western Jews find it threatening to admit the Palestinian issue is related to the second-class treatment of Oriental Jews; they refuse to look into this complexity," she explained.

"I'm not out to abolish all differences in Israel. We Oriental Jews of the so-called Desert Generation want to reclaim our heritage and make a more positive future for those who follow after. We don't want Sephardic Jewish and Palestinian kids to be ashamed of their origins or their darker colors; we want them to be proud of the culture they come from."

Shohat has been supportive of two organizations dedicated to democratizing education in Israel, Hilla and Kedma. The first tries to fight discrimination within a state educational system geared toward training Sephardic students for blue-collar jobs. Kedma established two schools last year in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv that offer a different approach with multicultural classes.

"One of the things I encouraged last year at a seminar for Kedma teachers was to have children interview their parents and grandparents about their lives in the Middle East and North Africa. This is important because there is virtually no oral history of the Sephardic experience."

No doubt Shohat's latest book, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media, co-authored with Robert Stam and published by Routlege Press in 1994, will create even more denials from the European minority when it is translated into Hebrew. And no doubt Shohat will be ready again to enter into verbal combat with her Eurocentric critics.

AAPG Conference

The Arab American Press Guild sponsored a conference in July under the theme "Toward an Arab American Agenda." Traveling at their own expense to discuss challenges facing them in the future were Dr. Hala Maksoud of Arab American University Graduates, executive director Khalil Jahshan, of the National Association of Arab Americans and national president Hamzi Moghrabi of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.

All three agreed their agenda for the 21st century is to downsize, appeal to the new U.S.-born generation, and cultivate grassroots activists.

In addressing the conference theme, Dr. Maksoud said there are five issues to consider.

"A strategy must be developed to appeal to a new generation of Arab Americans," she said. Noting that the national organizations' agendas have remained the same while their membership is aging, she stressed "our discourse must change to embolden our young people to take part in the American process.

"We must sharpen our youths' pride in their Arab heritage. We cannot be insulated from other communities or world concerns. If we want the world to be concerned with our problems, we must contribute to concerns for human rights, population control, protection of the environment and women's rights."

Jahshan said that of the 2.5 to 3 million Arab Americans in the U.S., no more than 100,000 claim membership in any Arab-American organization. He said this equates to one out of 30, as opposed to one out of three American Jews who belong to an organized group.

Moughrabi reviewed the different waves of Arab emigration to the U.S. over the past century. The Oklahoma City bombing was a painful reawakening for Arab Americans, he noted. "We saw how precarious our existence is."

Responding to queries from the audience of more than 200 activists about the financial stability of the organizations, Moughrabi said ADC was threatened with bankruptcy last January but the local community helped pay its debts and ADC can survive at least until mid-September.

Maksoud said AAUG is not now in financial crisis, but it went through one four years ago.

Jahshan said that after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, NAAA membership doubled, but the peace process—which has not achieved proper results—has brought on financial problems over the past 18 months. NAAA has moved to smaller offices, he explained, and it has cut its 12 national office employees to three.

Wiesenthal Museum Thriving

"Lean Times Don't Imperil Wiesenthal Grant," read the surprisingly factual headline in the Los Angeles Times for a story revealing that while public schools and disabled people are losing tax funds, the private Simon Wiesenthal Center will receive a $5 million grant in the new California state budget.

Gov. Pete Wilson has a senior political adviser sitting on the Wiesenthal Center's board of directors, and Democratic and Republican lawmakers are backing the grant earmarked for the center's Museum of Tolerance. The museum hosts tours focusing on Holocaust exhibits for an estimated 350,000 visitors a year.

The L.A. Times article pointed out that the $5 million grant comes from state of California money that otherwise would be spent directly on public schools.

Owen Waters, a lobbyist for the California Teachers Association, one of the strongest lobbies in Sacramento, criticized the grant. Nonetheless, the Wiesenthal board has some powerful members, including Elizabeth Taylor, Frank Sinatra, financier Samuel Belzberg, and Beverly Hills investment banker Richard Blum, who is the husband of U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein.

Criticism of the center focuses on the enormous salaries paid its executives. According the the Times , Rabbi Marvin Hier, the center's dean, receives $225,000 a year.

Pat and Samir Twair are free-lance writers from Southern California.