Do you wanna know why Israel is a racist state? I mean even more so.

It is because Israel is based not only on Jewish supremacy against Arabs, but also European Jewry supremacy against Oriental Jews. Think about it, 50% of Israeli Jewish are Mizrahi or Sephardi; but where are they? Israel has not elected one prime minister from the latter two, Israeli governments are overwhelmingly composed of European Jews. Of course, there is always a token Mizrahi.

Yemeni Jews.

Read the Israeli historian Tom Segev and his book “1949: The First Israelis” about how the Oriental Jews were rounded up in camps and separated from the “white” Jews.

The founding father of Israel and its first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion himself spoke with contempt against Oriental Jews and declared that the state of Israel was not built for them.

Instead, it is the Jews of Europe whom are “the leading candidates for citizenship in the State of Israel. Hitler, more than he hurt the Jewish people, whom he knew and detested, hurt the Jewish State, whose coming he did not foresee. He destroyed the substance, the main and essential building force of the [Jewish] state. The state arose and did not find the nation which had waited for it.” [Segev, 157].

More than that, Ben-Gurion attacked the Jews of North Africa:

“Even the immigrant of North Africa, who looks like a savage, who has never read a book in his life, not even a religious one, and doesn’t even know how to say his prayers, either wittingly or unwittingly has behind him a spiritual heritage of thousands of years. . . .”

“They tell me that there are thieves among them. I am a Polish Jew, and I doubt if there is any Jewish community which has more thieves among them. I am doubtful if there is any Jewish community which has more thieves in it than the Polish ones.” A few years later Ben-Gurion wrote to Justice Moshe Estzioni: “An Ashkenazi gangster, thief, pimp, or murderer will not gain the sympathy of the Ashkenazi community (if there is such a thing), nor will he expect it. But in such a primitive community as the Moroccans’—such a thing is possible. . . . ”

Ben-Gurion also attacked Yemeni Jews. Oriental Jews continue to suffer discrimination in Israel. Ethiopian Jews get is worse. They are often turned away from schools and apartments and routinely called “niggers.”

And now a Mizrahi Jew, Rachel Shabi, writes about the discrimination:

One of the most striking sentiments expressed by Mizrahis in Israel is a sense of disbelief. Some of these Jewish migrants from Arab countries are still stunned at the level of ignorance and prejudice that greeted them in the new Israel. For some reason, their new Jewish co-nationalists – who often came from the ghettos of Eastern Europe – thought the Mizrahis were backward and inferior, or, as Lyn Julius puts it, “badly educated” and “unwashed”.

If it were over, why would Mizrahi kids still be refused admission into central city clubs? Why would there still be pathetically wide ethnic gaps in education or professional attainment? Why would the majority of Israel’s judges have European surnames, while most blue-collar criminals are Mizrahi?

This is how Israel treats Mizrahi Jews, is it any surprise that they would treat Palestinians and Arabs they way they do?

Israel could have used its Mizrahi Jews to build bridges to the Arabs, but Zionism has no patience for that:

Yosef Eliyahu Chelouche despaired of the Zionists leadership’s insularity. The Yishuv, he wrote in his autobiography, considered every factor except one: the Arabs who lived in Palestine. “During this period of building our country we know nothing about Arab customs, habits, manners, tribes and social trends, their economic and cultural situation and more. In all the Zionist literature there is not even one book that would describe these people’s lives accurately or contain genuine information about their situation.”

The governor’s bridge still spans the wadi, which is now a car park. Like the Palestinians, the Sephardi Jews are part of Jaffa’s lost, or marginalised, history. How different that might have been had the Chelouches and the Moyals been able to bridge the divide between the Ashkenazim and the Palestinians.

And as Rachel writes:

Recognising that is not to suggest that Mizrahis didn’t experience persecution in the Arab world. They did, as Julius (whose family fled from Iraq) points out. Researching my book, I heard many Mizrahi recollections of fear, suffering and discrimination in former homelands. But just as many readily share other memories: of happy lives, equal rights and considerate neighbours. “Our doors were always open,” Mizrahis often told me, when they spoke of past lives in Arab or Muslim countries.

When the pupils find out that it wasn’t always like that, they start to ask different questions: “Hang on, so why are they so against us today?” The accepted view of the conflict, as centuries-old and defined by innate hatreds, suddenly collapses. A new narrative emerges, of a relatively recent struggle within a wide-frame of historic Arab-Jewish co-existence, creativity, productivity and plain old friendship. All of which might explain why this other story, the story of the Mizrahis, is so threatening to those who insist on holding tight to a monochrome script – one that helps to keep Arabs and Israelis stuck in a locked-down conflict, with no possible hope of escape.

Israel should recognize its own asset for peace, if it cares for peace.

Sources: The suffering of Israel’s Mizrahis

Stage effects