Settler-colonialism in the West Bank from the standpoint of its Mizrahi settlers

ABSTRACT

This article is about Israel’s West Bank settler-colonial project from the standpoint of settlers who are of Mizrahi origin (i.e. Jews of African or Middle Eastern descent). While historically predominantly Ashkenazi (i.e. Jews of European descent), with time many Mizrahim have moved to the West Bank and joined the settlement project. And yet, there is more or less scholarly silence regarding the existence of Mizrahi West Bank settlers, and when they are addressed, their motivations are reduced to simplified “economic” considerations; in a way that devoids them of political consciousness compared to their Ashkenazi counterparts. While there has been an immense body of work dealing with ethnic tension between settlers and the indigenous population, by centering the experience of a particular group of Mizrahi settlers, this article examines how internal ethnic tensions within the society of settlers play into and are transformed in the settler-colonial process.

KEYWORDS:

• Settler-colonialism
• Mizrahim
• Jewish
• ethnicity
• West Bank settlements
• Israel/Palestine

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 The research for this paper has been approved by the City University of New York Institutional Review Board (IRB) ethics committee (#2017-0503). In line with the ethics committee approval, I have used pseudonyms for the people and name of communities I refer to throughout the article. Occasionally I changed a few details about my interlocutors in order to further protect their anonymity.

2 In “Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims,” paraphrasing in turn Edward Said’s “Zionism from the standpoint of its victims” (1979), where he brought to the fore the destructive effects of Zionism on the Palestinian population, Shohat points to “negative consequences of Zionism not only for the Palestinian population but also for the Sephardi Jews … ” (1988, 1).

3 The seminal book collection Tensions of Empire edited by Ann Stoler and Fredrick Cooper provides a case in point: Against the understanding of colonial societies as monolithic, a number of the most prominent scholars of colonialism sought to address directly issues of tensions within colonial societies. However, when describing the different tensions they see, the writers mention class, gender, status, ideology, and social position within colonial rule – without thinking to address cases of ethnicity (see for instance 1997, 21,24). Subsequently, throughout the collection there is no direct investigation of ethnic tensions between the settlers compromising the colonial societies in question.

4 According to the Israeli CBS (Central Bureau of Statistics) Report, Statistical Abstract of Israel – No 73. https://www.cbs.gov.il/he/publications/doclib/2022/2.shnatonpopulation/st02_16x.pdf. This number does not include an additional 227,000 Jews who by the end of 2019 were living in neighborhoods built in East Jerusalem in areas Israel occupied in 1967, and unlike the rest of the West Bank, were formally annexed to the state (on the number of Jews living in East Jerusalem: Institute for Policy Research, Publication No.563 2021. https://jerusaleminstitute.org.il/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/2021-על-נתונייך-עברית-דיגיטל-סופי_pub_563.pdf).

5 Counting today the number of Mizrahim in the West Bank (and in Israel proper) is notoriously difficult. As Cohen, Lewin Epstein and Lazarus (2019) explain, the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistic determines the ethnic identity of Jews based on the fathers’ continent of birth. With time however, growing number of Jews are third and fourth generation Israeli born. Thus, for example, Jewish Israelis, including West Bank settlers, whose father was born in Israel are classified as having an “Israeli” origin (in a way that challenges our ability to recognize whether they are Ashkenazi or of Mizrahi heritage). In addition to the way in which in its data collection the state aims to blur the ethnic divisions among Jews in favour of creating a kind of all-Israeli identity, on the ground, among the younger generations in Israel, there is an increasing proportion of marriages between Ashkenazi and Mizrahi individuals, whose offsprings are of mixed Jewish ethnicity (Cohen, Lewin-Epstein, and Lazarus 2019). Despite these challenges, in the most substantial attempt so far, Yinon Cohen found that the percentage of Mizrahi settlers in the West Bank is roughly equivalent to or slightly lower than their percent in the general population within the Green Line (2015, 17).

6 An interesting reversal is at play here regarding the effect of frontier dwelling with regards to Mizrahi identity: While the relocation of Jewish immigrants from Arab countries to the development towns during the 1950s emphasized and in a way invented the “Mizrahi” identity of these Arab-Jews (Khazzoom 2005), in the outposts we see somewhat the reverse: Now, in this second frontier case, the expansion into the hinterland works to seemingly erase this ethnic identity.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Mellon/American Council of Learned Sciences: [Grant Number Dissertation Completion Fellowship]; Social Science Research Council: [Grant Number Mellon International Dissertation Research Fellows]; Wenner-Gren Foundation: [Grant Number Dissertation Fieldwork Grant].