Anti-Arab riots in Israel and the Mizrahi question, 1948-67

ABSTRACT

This article addresses anti-Arab riots that occurred in Israel during the “Little Israel” period − 1948–1967 – and the discourse around them, both in the media and and behind the scenes. It sheds light on the tendency to emphasize the rioters’ Mizrahi descent and to attribute their violence to “Mizrahi culture” and “Mizrahi primitivism,” which dovetailed the broader array of stereotypes attached to Mizrahim: low education, a patriarchal culture and savagery. This allowed for ascribing violence to Mizrahim even when they were not involved in it and overlooking assailants’ ethnicity when Ashkenazim were behind violent attacks. This article claims that projecting anti-Arab violence on the Mizrahim while ignoring all forms of anti-Arab violence that were perpetrated by state agencies or by Ashkenazi Jews was intended to enable the Ashkenazi-Israeli old guard to maintain its own self-image as humanistic and the image of Israel as a democracy that upholds equality among its citizens. Moreover, the perception of anti-Arabness as part of the very definition of Mizrahiness was adopted not only by the Ashkenazi establishment but also by some Mizrahim themselves, to the point that it has become a part of the Israeli popular political imagery to this day.

KEYWORDS:

• Mizrahim
• violence
• ethnic relations

Preface

The widespread discourse on Mizrahi Jews as perpetrators of violent acts against Palestinians that have topped the headlines in recent years – such as the burning to the death of the boy Mohammed Abu Khdeir by the “Jerusalem Group” led by Yosef Haim in 2014 or the shooting of Abed al-Fattah al-Sharif by soldier Elor Azaria in 2016 – is the starting point for this study. The media coverage and public denunciation of these incidents are often accompanied by a reference to the attackers’ Mizrahi origins, frequently invoking controversy among the commentators: Does “Mizrahi culture” generate excessive violence in general, or toward Palestinians in particular? Are the Israeli media racist, denouncing Mizrahi Jews more than they do others? Is the denunciation designed to divert public attention from the daily military violence in the Occupied Territories? Does “Mizrahi violence” derive from a different perception of self- and national identity, motivating the perpetrators to protect Israel’s “honor”? Or is it the result of the colonial settler structure in which Mizrahi Jews find themselves constrained between the Ashkenazi hegemony and the Palestinian subaltern?¹ Whether accepted or rejected, the image of the “violent Mizrahim” is pivotal to these discussions.

The question of “Mizrahi violence” and, in particular, the question of Mizrahi Jews’ attitudes toward Palestinian Arabs in Israel (hereafter, “Arabs”), has been extensively examined in the literature. Mizrahi attitudes toward the Palestinians since 1967, and even more so since 1977 following the Likud’s historic rise to power, have been closely studied because that was when the Mizrahi constituency came to be perceived as a threat in both news media and sociological discourse, dominated by the Ashkenazi veteran elites.² These studies, including voting pattern analyses, point to more hawkish attitudes among Mizrahim with regard to Palestinian nationalism or the status of the Arabs in Israel (e.g., their right to vote or various negative stereotypes regarding them).³ These anti-Arab attitudes have been explained in a variety of ways: in terms of traditionalism, historical opposition to the political left (perceived as pro-Arab), the desire to turn their backs on the Arabness of their origins in order to join the Zionist mainstream, and socioeconomic marginality.⁴

Another perspective on Mizrahi-Arab relations is historical. Based on an examination of these relations in the early days of Zionism, the recent literature highlights a key point made already by Sephardic leaders in real-time: Arab-Sephardic relations in the late Ottoman and early Mandate period were not confrontational. Rather, the origin of the bloody conflict lay in the attitudes of European Jews, who failed to consider the position held by Sephardi Jews and acted condescendingly and violently toward the local Arabs.⁵ The conclusion: the negative Mizrahi political attitudes toward Arabs that are so common are not inherent to their Mizrahiness, but rather are the product of triangular Mizrahi-Ashkenazi-Arab interrelations. This analysis is related to and sometimes informed by research and political agendas highlighting the closeness of Arab and Mizrahi identities. Note that this agenda has two polar opposite versions. One emphasizes the “Arab-Jewish” identity, viewing the Mizrahim, like the Arabs, as victims of Zionism, hence promoting Mizrahi-Arab cooperation against the Zionist hegemony.⁶ The other views the Mizrahim as a “bridge to peace,” and seeks to overturn the image of the “violent Mizrahi,” albeit from a Zionist viewpoint: the Mizrahim can mediate Zionism to the Arabs and minimize their alienation and hatred toward the Zionist project thanks to the cultural commonalities between Jews from Arab countries and the Arab world.⁷ Both versions of this agenda agree that the basic Mizrahi attitude toward the Arab world is that of cultural affinity rather than violent hostility. This then gives rise to the question: What are the sources of anti-Arab Mizrahi violence?

Another perspective on this question has been recently proposed by Lihi Yona and Itamar Mann, who argue that the Mizrahim have been Zionism’s “common soldiers,” doing its “dirty job” but get denounced for doing so nevertheless. Azaria is perhaps prototypical of this view – the Mizrahi grunt, who follows “the spirit of the orders,” but is abandoned to his trial when caught red-handed. According to this argument, Mizrahi culture is neither violent nor peace-loving; rather, being the marginalized Other of Israeli society, the Mizrahim fill the ranks of the order followers on the front, and the Ashkenazi establishment finds it easy to shake them off when it is politically expedient to do so.⁸

This article focuses on “Little Israel” (1949–1967), the period sandwiched between the Mandate years and the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, to examine the discourse of Mizrahiness as a source of anti-Arab violence. However, it is important to bear in mind that the tendency to emphasize the Mizrahi origin of attackers of Arabs while ignoring ethnicity when the attackers are Ashkenazi Jews has its roots in the 1930s, as we shall see below. In other words, despite the changes in the composition, the percentage, and the status of non-Ashkenazi communities in Israel following the mass immigration of Jews from Muslim states after the establishment of the state, the discourse about “Mizrahi violence” was prevalent in both periods. This is, among other reasons to be discussed in the paper, because of three major dimensions of continuity in Ashkenazi-Mizrahi relations and perceptions before and after the mass immigration: (1) the Ashkenazi sense of superiority and the stigmatization of Mizrahim⁹; (2) the overrepresentation of Mizrahi Jews in the lower classes and the attribution of their difficulties to their culture¹⁰; (3) and the leaning of Mizrahim toward the right – though to different degrees – for religious and identity reasons.¹¹

The focus on violent incidents beyond the legal pale is motivated not only by the relative lack of research on the Mizrahi-Arab question during those years but also by the fact that these were the years of massive Jewish immigration when Mizrahi identity came to be formulated vis-à-vis the absorbing Ashkenazi establishment. These years saw the crystallization of patterns that still affect social stratification in Israel, including the deployment of residential communities, employment patterns, education, and socioeconomic status.¹² Just as important were the stereotypes of Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Jews.¹³ As mentioned, the image of the wild and violent Mizrahi had already taken hold in the Yishuv’s discourse, but by the end of the period under discussion, it became ingrained in both the Ashkenazi and Mizrahi minds.

This article focuses on major incidents of spontaneous physical violence against Arabs which were not following orders and were beyond the pale of the law. Formal state violence, even if it involved Mizrahim (whether legal such as the killing of Palestinian “infiltrators” along the borders or illegal such as the Kafr Qasim massacre) will not be examined here as it has already been extensively studied.¹⁴ Spontaneous violence, hitherto little studied, sheds another light not only on Arab-Jewish relations but also on intra-Jewish relations, as it reflects the values, sentiments and perceptions of the perpetrators, both with regard to state law and with regard to the Arabs. Moreover, unauthorized violence represents easily reprehensible criminal acts, but they are also acts that the authorities may choose not to prosecute or may choose to classify according to various categories, including not only crime but also political action, social divergence, and interpersonal conflict. Thus, whereas the large majority of studies on the Arab-Israeli conflict rightly deal with authorized military violence, the study of unauthorized violence can illuminate new aspects and generate new insights regarding the conflict.

*

This study examines the channels through which explanations and images about these violent acts have been disseminated: the press (then a critical actor in shaping the social agenda), parliamentary committees, municipal meetings, and police reports. As seen below, in the discourse on violence, as in Israeli discourse in general, the Ashkenazim were a “transparent ethnic group,” never referred to as such when involved in violence, whereas the Mizrahi origins of Jewish assailants were repeatedly mentioned.¹⁵ This followed a pattern that had already emerged in the Mandate years. However, the study shows that at certain times, the mainstream media ignored the ethnic aspect of the incidents. In addition, both Arabs and Mizrahim referred to the “Mizrahi aspect” of this violence and offered additional perspectives to those presented by the Ashkenazi establishment.

Although it is difficult to identify a conscious and coherent effort to spread the image of the violent Mizrahi Jew, two factors made it ubiquitous. The first was official-functional: presenting the Mizrahi as the violent Other served to “purify” the weapon of state violence, thus retaining the established Yishuv’s ethos of “purity of arms.” One of the essential motifs of the Zionist mainstream was to justify its violence as being forced upon them, and thus frame it as a form of self-defense. To construct this argument, another type of violence had to be denounced.¹⁶ The image of the hotheaded and vindictive Mizrahi and the denunciation of his violence served the self-perceived image of the establishment as restrained, legal, and disciplined. Note that this served both to present Israel to the world as a Western democracy and to retain the self-image and status of the old elite as deserving to lead the “masses.”

One final comment is in order before delving into the actual cases. As opposed to violent incidents from the 1980s onwards, where anti-Palestinian violence was clearly identified with both Mizrahiness and religiousness, this was not true in 1949–1967. Ours was the period of secular statism, which preceded the Ashkenazi religious ethos of the settlements in the Occupied Territories as well as the Sephardic return to religion (often involving elements of Jewish supremacism), a movement that turned traditionalism (in a new, Israeli version) into a key element of the Mizrahi identity. Thus, only since the 1970s has a new and powerful linkage been formed between religiosity and anti-Arab violence, which was not there in previous years, certainly not to the same degree.

Anti-Arab violence: an overview

Physical violence between Jews and Arabs in Israel was relatively uncommon throughout Israeli history – as opposed to physical violence by law enforcement authorities, state violence such as the imposition of the military government and land grabbing, or symbolic violence that designated the state as “Jewish.” The most prominent attacks on Arabs during the period under study occurred in Ramle (in 1949–52, 1955–56, and 1965); Acre (1961); Rishon LeZion (1962); and Netanya (1966). These towns varied in terms of the intensity of Jewish-Arab contact. In Ramle, an Arab town until 1948, only 2,000 Arabs remained after the expulsion of Arab inhabitants of the town, and 20,000 Jews were settled there during the seven years that followed the Nakba. In Acre, most of the Arab inhabitants were deported in 1948 as well, with the town repopulated by Jews thereafter. In both towns, there was daily contact between Arabs and Jews, some of whom lived in close proximity. In the 1960s, Rishon LeZion was an urban community that developed out of the longtime Jewish colony, and Arabs arrived there mainly to work in construction and citrus orchards. With the easing of the military government restrictions, some rented apartments there; when these restrictions were eased, Netanya became a center of employment and leisure activities for Arab youngsters from nearby villages, and their presence there became highly visible.

The violent incidents in these towns injured several dozens, mostly Arabs, but there were hardly any fatalities. In all cases, massive police intervention was required to stop the riots, including the arrest of Jewish attackers (and sometimes also Arabs). All attracted public attention and reactions from politicians and media commentators. The cases chosen for this study are most likely all documented cases of urban violence in the years 1949–1967 that (a) involved mass participation and (b) stimulated public discussion. The general attitude of the public was one of denunciation while trying to pinpoint the causes of the riots. In all cases, the relationship between the attackers’ Mizrahi origins and acts was central to the public discussion: some emphasized it as causal, while some offered alternative explanations. We will begin with the events in Ramle in the 1950s, where the Mizrahim were identified as the perpetrators, but the discourse did not focus on their ethnicity.¹⁷

Ramle criminals: neither Jews nor Iraqis

The scene of the most extreme violence during Israel’s first decade was Ramle and its environs. In May 1949, two Palestinians, arriving from across the border, murdered two Jewish immigrants; in July, a young Jewish security guard murdered two 12-year-old Arabs and threw their bodies in a well. In both cases, the perpetrators were prosecuted. Riots in 1951–52 had a different character: they involved Jewish attacks on Arabs’ private residences and shops, sometimes in small groups and sometimes en masse.¹⁸ In 1955, the incidents resumed, and in September 1956, an Arab café owner was stabbed to death. Due to the severity of the situation in Ramle, the Knesset’s Internal Affairs Committee twice nominated special subcommittees to discuss it (in 1952 and 1956), summoning local inhabitants and public officials to understand its causes. The ethnicity of the Jewish assailants was mentioned several times in the discussions but apparently ignored by the two subcommittees’ concluding reports and the media.

The first to point to the attackers’ Jewish-Iraqi origins were members of the local Arab community committee, whom the Knesset committee members met in August 1952. Community spokesperson Ismail Nahhas described a series of incidents and added: “The most recent case of rioting […] at the Shahin residence […] occurred when two hundred Iraqis gathered around the house and tried to storm it.”¹⁹ Nahhas not only identified the attackers as Iraqi but also suggested that they used their ethnicity to justify their acts. One of them arrived at a town council meeting and described the cruelty of the Arabs in Iraq against the Jews as the pretext. Nahhas was not impressed by this argument. He also avoided blaming all Iraqis, or all Jews, for the aggression, and sought to emphasize that “there is no hatred between the two peoples, but only certain people taking advantage of certain circumstances for their own private benefit.”²⁰

Nahhas’s statement, as a member of a minority subjected to the new Israeli rule, reflected the position the parliamentary committee member sought to promote. It was important for them to stress that Israel ensured religious equality and that Arabs were not attacked just because they were Arabs. Or as subcommittee member and future president Yitzhak Ben Zvi put it, “The outbreaks should not be seen as a manifestation of racial hatred or Jewish-Arab hatred.”²¹ Thus, they too suggested that the incidents be viewed as individual conflicts that only happened to occur between Arabs and Jews. The local Jewish-Iraqi Council held a similar view, as did the police commander in Ramle who corresponded with other government officials.²² Thus, the committee chose to ignore the ethnic question and mainly recommended that public information and educational campaigns be initiated in Ramle and that preventive police activity be increased.²³

In a subsequent cycle of violence in September 1956, when, as reported by the police, an Arab café owner was stabbed to death by Iraqi Jews and his son and son-in-law were severely injured, Arab locals stated that the violence was due to Iraqi Jews “who foster blind hatred toward the Arabs and persecute them constantly.”²⁴ The District Officer in charge of Ramle-Lod on behalf of the Ministry of Interior, Avraham Hayoun, suggested three explanations for this wave of violence by the immigrants from Iraq: their desire to take control over businesses in the town; the better living conditions of the Arabs in Ramle; and revenge for their suffering as Jews in Iraq.²⁵ In this round of violence as well, the attackers’ descent was discussed only in closed forums and was not mentioned in the media. Ramle’s Jewish Mayor Meir Melamed rejected the ethnic characterization of the perpetrators:

I strongly reject the attempt to point the finger at a single ethnic group, the Iraqis, as the killers […]. True, there were more conflicts between all groups since the arrival of the Iraqi-Jewish immigrants, but the fact that this young killer is an immigrant from Iraq is purely coincidental. It is precisely the good relations between the minority and the Iraqi immigrants that should be highlighted, since they are closer in terms of the language, and the Iraqi immigrants were also used to sit in cafés.²⁶

To reinforce his claim he listed several cases of quarrels and murders between Jews from other ethnic origins, from all across the country. A nationalist motivation was also denied by senior municipal officials: “I do not want you to view this affair as an ethnic conflict or one between the majority and minority. I’m convinced this matter has a purely criminal background,” said Deputy Mayor Pinhas Singer to the Knesset members. He was seconded by Deputy Mayor Rabbi Menahem Frenkel.²⁷ Municipal council member Moshe Gavsa, on the other hand, tried to argue that the motivation was nationalist: This murder was perpetrated in an atmosphere where certain things are allowed to members of one ethnic group [i.e., Jews] and forbidden to members of another […]. The problem won’t be solved so long as no comprehensive solution is found, and so long as there’s no full equality for all inhabitants of this country […].²⁸ His co-councilors attacked him virulently. “They [the Arabs] have more rights in this town than we do,” said Yaacov Dadoni. “Every word Mr. Gavsa enounced is a lie.”²⁹

The consensus was that the violence was caused by pockets of poverty and crime within the Iraqi population in Ramle, which was in turn due to the difficulties of absorption and the daily distress of living in the transit camps (ma’abarot) established for the immigrants in town, one of which was where the boy who killed the café owner came from.³⁰ A newspaper correspondent who visited Ramle told his readers that the chief defendant immigrated to Israel alone at age 13, and since then could be absorbed only in the world of crime; he also described the harsh living conditions and the lack of a developed cultural life in the transit camp. “In this forsaken and neglected place, the four murder suspects spent five years from among the finest in their lives,” he analyzed, without saying a word about Mizrahim and Mizrahiness.³¹ Ramle Arab representative Muhammad Haddad proposed a similar outlook: We can see that the economic condition of the Iraqi Jews in Ramle is difficult. If his socioeconomic status is not good, he can easily be incited. We see that there are certain groups in town that try to take advantage of these circumstances. […] The inciters argue: the Arabs have taken their jobs and live in houses better than theirs. I mention these facts in relation to the cases of assaults against Arab shops.³² Like other representatives, Haddad did not attribute the Jews’ aggression to their Mizrahi origins per se, but rather to their difficult absorption conditions. Thus, a paradoxical situation emerged whereby Arabs in Israel sought to improve the absorption conditions of Jews hailing from Arab countries.

Haddad’s reference to incitement brought an additional variable into the equation: “spontaneous” violence was not necessarily spontaneous. There were those who sought to spur the assailants into action out of political interests. Another correspondent, himself an immigrant from Iraq, wrote about anti-Arab incitement in the transit camps in the Tel Aviv area by “fascist elements.” The inciters spread horror stories about Jews attacked by Arabs and boasted their exploits in the April 1948 massacre in the Palestinian-Arab village of Dir Yassin, he wrote.³³

The consensual explanation for the violence in Ramle can be summed up as follows: harsh living conditions of Iraqi Jews led to criminality, among whose victims were Arabs. Apart from some isolated voices (which will be described below), Mizrahiness was hardly blamed for this violence. The idea that the immigrants had suffered under the Arabs in Iraq was also seen as unconvincing, and the assumption was it would not have been raised had the immigrants been better integrated in Israel. Neither public officials and representatives nor the media referred to the assailants’ ethnic origin as a factor. This was noteworthy as the public discourse at the time was steeped with official racism against Mizrahim.³⁴

Acre: violence in the name of the nation

In the wave of violence in the town of Acre in September 1961, gangs of Jews assailed Arab passersby and tried to attack Arabs’ houses in the Old City. The motivation for these riots was purely nationalistic – they erupted as a response to a nationalist demonstration by Arab inhabitants of Acre protesting the killing of five Arab youngsters in their attempt to cross the border from Israel into Egypt-controlled Gaza. One Hebrew daily described it as a “provocative demonstration within the very heart of a Jewish community.”³⁵ During the demonstration, several Jews tried to beat three demonstrating Arab female teachers, but the police protected them. At the same time, large groups of Jewish youngsters set out to attack Arabs all over town. Some got into a bus and beat Arab passengers. Others attacked the Arab neighborhood in the Old City. The next day, three young Arabs were attacked in the center of town and beaten to the point of requiring medical attention; a large group of Jews tried to break into the Old City, but they were pushed back by the police.³⁶

The police report explained that riots were caused by “bitterness accumulated in the heart of the Jewish population in town, and in the Old City in particular, due to the intensifying nationalist sentiment among the Arabs and the calls to support Egyptian President Nasser, as well as several cases of ‘unruliness’ of Arab boys who assailed Jews”.³⁷ Recognition of the nationalist motive was also articulated by the municipal council. Following the incidents, it laid the responsibility on “elements hostile to the state, which incited the Arab population,” and expressed understanding for “the sentiments of the Jewish inhabitants and their intolerance of the demonstration by the Arab pupils”.³⁸

What was mentioned in the police report but not in the press was the assailants’ ethnicity – “from among the North African immigrants.”³⁹ In this case, however, the acts were not denounced, possibly because, in the eyes of the municipality and police, the North African Jews were the executors of sovereign violence, to use Yona and Mann’s conceptualization,⁴⁰ as well as because their violence was not fatal. Despite the formal commitment of the municipality to equality and of the police to enforcing the law, including the Arabs’ right to demonstrate, the Jewish-Israeli desire to prevent the Arabs from “standing tall” was expressed by the support of the authorities to the actions of the rioters in Acre, who represented the Jewish-Israeli common will.

Blaming Mizrahi civilians for military excesses

In the case of the Ramle rioters, their Mizrahi origin was not mentioned out of the wish to downplay the nationalist aspect of the riots. In the case of the Acre assailants, their origin was not mentioned condoning their actions. In other cases, the attackers’ Mizrahi origin was emphasized, whether they were the actual attackers or not. During the so-called reprisal operations in the 1950s, mostly carried out by elite IDF units against civilians, the Mizrahim were used to cover up for their excesses.

The massacre in Qibya is the prototypical example. Following a series of killings of Jews in the town of Yahud and elsewhere east of Tel Aviv in the autumn of 1953, the government decided on a reprisal operation against the nearby village in the West Bank, then controlled by Jordan. The commander of the operation, future Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, stated the operation’s objectives as follows: “Attacking the village of Qibya, occupying it, and causing maximal damage to life and property.”⁴¹ On October 14, Israeli soldiers entered the village, planted explosives next to houses, and blew them up with their residents inside. 69 villagers were killed, most of whom were women and children.

The operation was condemned internationally, as well as criticized within Israel. In response to that criticism, Ben-Gurion spoke to the nation on the radio, and denied any IDF involvement:

The [Jewish] border settlers in Israel, mostly refugees, people from Arab countries and survivors of the Nazi concentration camps, have, for years been the target of […] murderous attacks […] until some of the border settlements lost their patience and after the murder of a mother and her two children in Yahud, they attacked, last week, the village of Kibya [sic], across the border, that was one of the main centers of the murderers’ gangs.⁴²

This mendacious statement was designed to clear Israel of international responsibility, but the choice to put the blame on certain populations was also designed to serve other purposes: maintaining Israel’s international image as an enlightened Western democracy, led responsibly by the Labor Movement, and retaining this movement’s self-image as morally superior to others, including both Holocaust survivors and immigrants from Arab countries.

In this discourse, the Mizrahim represented not only the targets of misattribution but also the core motivation for the reprisals. “Thousands of these inhabitants came from the Oriental lands, where the citizen had been raised on ‘gom’ – blood feud, ‘eye for an eye’ – and acts of vengeance on their part could have turned into a rampage and a bloodbath of innocent civilians on both sides,” said Ben-Gurion in the Knesset in 1955, in order to justify further reprisals.⁴³

In practice, however, the only unauthorized military reprisals by Israelis across enemy lines were carried out by Ashkenazi farmers. The severest case was the action by IDF officer Meir Har-Zion and his three friends, who murdered five innocent Bedouins in the West Bank to avenge the death of Har-Zion’s sister and her boyfriend. They were not prosecuted since Ben-Gurion refused the police’s request to interrogate military officers and allowed the investigation to wind down. In the press, they were identified as “Hebrew youngsters” and “sons of the kibbutzim.”⁴⁴ Another known case is an act of revenge by Ashkenazi members of Moshav Mevo Beitar, who shot and severely injured children in the village of Wadi Fukin.⁴⁵

The attribution of terrorist attacks to Mizrahim built upon a routine that began during the Arab Revolt and continued during the 1948 war. Many of the Irgun Tzvai Leumi (IZL) terrorists were Mizrahim. This was mainly for operational reasons, as they were able to blend into areas populated by Arabs. The commanders behind the scene were Ashkenazim. The IZL acted against the Zionist leadership’s policy of constraint (havlaga). As part of its struggle against the IZL, the Labor Movement emphasized the terrorists’ Mizrahi origin, as did other public representatives who supported the policy of constraint. For example, in a booklet titled “Neged ha-terror” (Against Terrorism), Yehuda Leib Magnes wrote in the summer of 1939 about a conversation he had with Mizrahi youngsters who supported the killing of innocent Arabs to avenge killings of Jews and concluded: “And thus, slowly but surely, the chosen people in the Land [of Israel] edges closer to the cruel primitivism of the desert.”⁴⁶ Another contributor to the booklet, social worker and activist Hannah Thon, defined the attitude of the Mizrahim to the Arabs as “primitive racist hatred,” and pointed out the cultural similarities between the two groups.⁴⁷ The academic background for these statements was the emerging Orientalist sociological research in the Yishuv, which presented the Mizrahim as a primitive group, a social burden that brought little political or economic benefit to the Jewish state in the making.⁴⁸

During the 1948 war, Ben-Gurion and others continued to associate acts of Jewish terrorism with the Mizrahi origins of their perpetrators. After the Dir Yassin massacre, he wrote: “Kurds and others, members of the IZL, are excited about Dir Yassin.”⁴⁹ Israel Galili did the same following the massacre in Al-Duwayma, to the west of Hebron, in late October 1948. Despite the socioeconomic and ethnic diversity of Battalion 89 which occupied the village, and despite evidence that “civilized [read Ashkenazi] commanders […] turned into ignoble murderers,” Galili ascribed the battalion’s horrific acts to “many from Lehi [Stern Gang], French [volunteers], Moroccans, predisposed to immoral conduct.”⁵⁰ Indeed, this was the mind-set of the Labor Zionist elite: atrocities by Mizrahim and members of the political right were due to their character, culture, or history. Similar acts by Ashkenazim from the Labor Movement represented a “divergence” that was not typical of the perpetrators.

Mizrahiness as the cause of violence

In the 1960s, three anti-Arab riots were the subject of considerable public attention. The immediate background of each was unique, but two elements recurred in the public discourse about them: first, they were viewed as a moral and social problem; and second, the aggression was identified with Mizrahiness, unlike the discourse of the previous decade. The main arguments now invoked Mizrahi history and culture as key causes of violence. Historically, the Mizrahim were seen as assailing Arabs in revenge for their past suffering in Islamic countries. Culturally, the argument went, the Mizrahim immigrated to Israel carrying with them a primitive and violent mind-set. Having been suppressed for several years, this interpretation regained popularity in the 1960s, probably as a result of the 1959 rebellion in Wadi Salib and elsewhere (see below), and the tempestuous Mizrahi protests in Tel Aviv’s Ha-Tikva neighborhood in 1965, both of which ignited profound anxieties among Israel’s Ashkenazi elites. It is also likely that the renewal of mass immigration of Moroccan Jews to Israel (90,000 arrived in 1962–1965 in the framework of Operation Yakhin, adding to the 110,000 who immigrated in the previous decade), contributed to this anxiety.⁵¹

The claim that Mizrahim acted out of vengefulness assumed that they had accumulated hatred toward the Arabs. Common as it was, this assumption was only partly true.⁵² This claim also has its roots in the Mandate period. In her 1939 article, Thon enumerated among the reasons for Mizrahi violence “their difficult personal experience in the Land [of Israel] or in their Oriental countries of origin.” And even if personal experience was not the reason, she wrote, “Perhaps it is the heritage of ancient generations of persecution, the heritage of forefathers, who have lived in fear, constantly on guard.”⁵³ Similarly, Chief of Staff Yigael Yadin offered a similar explanation for the conduct of IDF troops in 1949, including rape (by Moroccan soldiers, as Ben-Gurion emphasized): “This [generic Mizrahi] man was so oppressed by the Arabs and was now given the opportunity to be the master.”⁵⁴ Finally, when commenting on the Ramle riots, the Interior Ministry’s District Officer ascribed them to “the Iraqis’ desire to pay the Ramle Arabs back for what had been done to them by the Arabs of Iraq.”⁵⁵ As mentioned, media coverage avoided mentioning the attackers’ Mizrahiness at the time; this changed in the 1960s.

Rishon LeZion

The riots in Rishon LeZion began in October 1962 with an assault on two Arab youngsters who were talking with a Jewish woman. It is not clear whether they were harassing her and attacked for that reason, or whether she was dating an Arab of her own will, which local Jewish youngsters could not stomach. And if that is so, it is unclear if the woman knew her date was an Arab, or if he pretended to be Jewish. The Arabs managed to flee, gathered some of their friends, returned to the center of town, and assaulted Jewish youngsters; one of their victims, a Jew of Syrian origin, was stabbed and moderately wounded. This brought about a third round: around midnight, a group of several dozen Jewish youngsters, recently established under the name “The Punitive Squad,” raided apartments and huts inhabited by Arab workers and severely beat large numbers of them.⁵⁶

The incident made headlines: “Dozens wounded in mass brawls between Jews and Arabs in Rishon LeZion. Clubs, rocks, and knives were used in clashes between local youngsters and minority laborers. Twenty-seven arrested.” Among the detainees, 19 were Arabs, mostly wounded. The next day, a group of Jews assaulted Arabs once again. The correspondent did not fail to mention Jews who tried to protect Arabs in the melee, nor that one of the attackers was a member of the Souleimani family, a relative of the Jew stabbed the previous night.⁵⁷

This mention alluded to the common perception of Mizrahi vengefulness. Yoel Markus, a correspondent for the Histadrut’s (and MAPAI’s) mouthpiece Davar, emphasized the role of history, attributing the “Punitive Squad”’s response to “prejudice, the hatred of generations accumulating in the hearts of people who resided in Arab towns and fell victim to the punches of the ‘shabab’ [Arabic for youngsters; in Hebrew it has the added connotation of hoodlums].”⁵⁸ This comparison of the Rishon LeZion rioters to non-Jewish rioters in the diaspora was designed to express denunciation coupled with a measure of understanding. However, the immediate trigger – reporter Dan Margalit added – was the reality in the present: Arabs dating Jewish women, often while pretending to be Jews, and usually using the name “Mizrahi” (literally, “Eastern,” a common name among Middle Eastern Jews).⁵⁹

MAPAM’s newspaper, Al-Ha-Mishmar, took the opportunity to comment on the social hierarchy in Israel as reflected in the choice of names: “It is ironic that this Arab in Rishon LeZion coveted the name ‘Mizrahi’ of all names. It is indeed no secret that quite a few of those bearing that name in truth replace it with ‘Kedmi’ [Kedem is another Hebrew word for East], or all kinds of newfangled names out of that same desire to be assimilated in a society, which has determined foolish birthrights.” Al Ha-Mishmar criticized the Israeli social hierarchy that MAPAM did very little to change: Ashkenazim as the higher class, Mizrahi Jews below them, and Arabs at the bottom of the ladder.⁶⁰ However, the very existence of this hierarchy was not questioned: this had been Israel’s social structure since its establishment as a state, if not before.

Ramle revisited

The rioters in Ramle in 1965 also mentioned Arab men pretending to be Jews and dating Jewish girls as one of the causes of anti-Arab hostility and attacks. The riots began in a car accident on August 21, in which an Arab taxi driver from Ramle killed a Jewish motorcyclist. Thousands attended his funeral, following which hundreds of young Jews swarmed to the center of town, blocking the traffic on the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem highway (which passed through Ramle at the time) and shouting “revolution,” reported a Ma’ariv correspondent. The correspondent, like Jewish public discourse in general, did not stop to wonder what kind of revolution the rioters demanded, and from whom. “At that moment, groups of youngsters raided the Arab Ghetto [in the Old City] […]. The Arabs quickly shut themselves in of fear of the youngsters’ rage. The first Arab to fall into their hands was beaten up and stoned […]. Another Arab who didn’t manage to close his shop on time was stoned.” The correspondent went on to describe the mayhem: “A third group of rioters raided the Communist Party headquarters on 24 St. and caused destruction there […]. In the meantime, the havoc continued on the main street […]. ‘Kill them all’, others shouted”.⁶¹

Davar reported additional details on the incident: “10–12 casualties, damage to a gas station and two taxi offices, 20 young Jews arrested – this is the sum total of the riots of the Babylonian [Iraqi-Jewish] youngsters in Ramle.” Thus, the ethnic origin of the rioters was central to the coverage.⁶²

Netanya

Several months later, in January 1966, Jews attacked Arabs in Netanya. As in Rishon LeZion, the violent outbreak followed a conversation between Arab youngsters and a Jewish woman. According to one version, the young woman was beaten up by her boyfriend, and the Arabs came to her help. The Jewish boyfriend called up a group of his friends, and they made their way to the taxi stations in Netanya, where Arab laborers would gather in the afternoons on their way back to their villages. They beat up several Arabs until the police dispersed them.⁶³ The scope of violence was smaller than in Ramle, reported Ma’ariv correspondent Menachem Talmi, and public support for the assailant was weak, but “everyone is of the opinion that twice that day, for a moment, the atmosphere in the center of Netanya was that of a veritable pogrom, whose agitators were among the most negative types to be found in this town.”⁶⁴

The following days saw demonstrations and counterdemonstrations: the Arab villagers from the neighboring Triangle Area went on strike, placed roadblocks at the entrances to their villages, and organized protests. Several days later, Knesset Member Uri Avneri led a convoy to express solidarity with the Triangle Arabs, violently held back by the police. At the same time, Jews demonstrated against the Arabs and Avneri in Netanya and were also dispersed by the police. The anti-Avneri demonstrators were described in his popular weekly Ha-Olam Ha-Ze as North African Jews, who shouted, “The Arabs are marching on Netanya,” and “We will butcher the Arabs and Uri Avneri.” The weekly wrote that the Jewish protesters were organized by RAFI, Ben-Gurion’s new party, echoing the claim by Ramle’s Arabs that political (read, Ashkenazi) interests were behind the riots

Davar also identified the dominance of the Mizrahi demonstrators, but uncharacteristically, showed understanding toward them: “Within the crowd, there was also a group of youngsters of North-African origin, who wanted to prevent Avneri and his people from entering the city. Why can’t these youngsters demonstrate their opposition to an irresponsible bunch, intent on causing dissent and hatred between peoples?” (Davar, February 18, 1966). Davar saw those Mizrahi protestors as executing mainstream violence, an act that legitimized them.

The importance of these incidents in the eyes of Israel’s security establishment is attested to by the fact that during the demonstrations, the Chief of the IDF’s Central Command, Uzi Narkis, arrived at the area together with Police Chief Pinhas Kopel and other senior security officials It was feared that the removal of some of the military government restrictions on Arab mobility in Jewish areas would exacerbate tensions between Arabs and Jews across the country, and at the same time tarnish its image as a democratic state that ensures ethnonational equality.⁶⁵ Therefore, the security agencies acted to prevent both the Jewish demonstration in Netanya and the Jewish support convoy in the Triangle villages.

Against the backdrop of the riots, the Prime Minister’s Advisor on Arab Affairs, Shmuel Toledano, was interviewed by Ma’ariv. Hailing from a Moroccan-Jewish family that immigrated to Palestine during the Ottoman period, and having served for many years in the Mossad, Toledano was considered an expert on both Arabs and Mizrahi Jews. He was asked whether it was true that “the relations of Mizrahi Jews with the Arab population are more strained than those of Jews from other origins?” Here, the notion of Mizrahi-Arab tension, which went along with the stereotype regarding Mizrahi violence in general, became fundamental to the public discourse. Toledano answered as follows:

{Level-headedly} The facts indicate that in the Ramle and Netanya incidents, mainly people of Mizrahi origins were involved. {With maximal emphasis} I do not accept the view that they did so because they had suffered at the hands of the Arabs in their countries of origin and that what we have here is a kind of revanche because those 17- and 18-year-olds were six or seven when they left their country of origin. It is of course conceivable that they have grown up in a home that was mired in prejudice toward Arabs. The fundamental reason is, I believe, the particularly acute sensitivity of Mizrahi men in the area of women’s honor, and the fact that they live in mixed cities, next to Arabs, exacerbates this problem several times over.⁶⁶

Toledano presents the basic facts to the interviewers: the Jews involved in the violence were mainly Mizrahim. In his analysis, he rejects the explanation based on revenge, but offers another “Mizrahi” cause for the violence: Mizrahi cultural traditions, and specifically, their extreme sensitivity to women’s “honor,” and their opposition to having their daughters, and other Mizrahi women, date Arab men.

In the interview, the advisor marks the violent opposition to intimate relations between Jewish women and Arab men as a distinctly Mizrahi concern. In fact, Jewish women dating Arabs were often beaten up by (Ashkenazi) members of the Haganah militia during the Mandate years and no one referred to the ethnic origin of these activists.⁶⁷When the violence was perpetrated by Mizrahi youngsters, however, it was attributed to the “primitive” Mizrahi culture.

*

The cultural explanation – not necessarily in the context of “family honor” but rather more broadly – had already been suggested in the closed discussions around the Ramle incidents in the 1950s. It was most powerfully articulated by Member of Knesset Arieh Altman of Menachem Begin’s Herut Party, who served on the parliamentary committee on the Ramle incidents in 1952. He proposed that the committee conclusions include the statement that “The Jewish public in Israel includes new population segments that due to old habits from their countries of origin are used to quarrel dramatically, a tendency absent from the general population.”⁶⁸ Like Ben-Gurion, the longtime nemesis of Herut, Altman also tended to associate the violence with marginal groups in Jewish-Israeli society. At that time, however, the Knesset members preferred to keep a low profile on that issue and his proposed statement was not included in the final report of the committee.

In the 1960s, Prime Minister and Defense Minister Levi Eshkol sharply denounced the attacks on Arabs: “Such shameful acts that have occurred in Ramle are contrary to the will, spirit, and dignity of the people of Israel. We must not let bullies taint the purity of our national project,” he said in a conversation with the Chief of Israel Police, subsequently released to the press. He made no mention of any ethnic group. Some could read “bullies” as a reference to Mizrahiness, but that is not necessarily what it meant. However, the archival filing, in this case, betrays the unsaid: the document was filed in “Ethnicities” (“Edot”), a folder dealing with the Mizrahi issue in Israel.⁶⁹

An opinion piece published in Davar is metonymic of the ambivalence toward anti-Arab violence. Journalist Shabtai Klugman, a Holocaust survivor who immigrated to Israel in 1948, titled his piece “The Ramle Debacle,” describing it as a “heavy blow to the Jewish people.” He went on to explain:

Our pride and joy as Jews has always been the “Jewish head,” the mastery of the mind. We are a nation of intellectuals and individualists. The Israeli “shabab” from Ramle lent a fatal blow to our national consciousness […]. The Ramle events have lowered our moral standard, bent our spiritual stature, and turned us into an apparently backward nation, governed by instinct rather than intellect.⁷⁰ In reviewing the causes for the riots, he listed the reasons commonly accepted in the contemporary public discourse – reaction to Arab nationalism, painful memories by Mizrahim, Arabs impersonating Jewish men and dating Jewish women, socioeconomic marginality – and most generally, the Mizrahi “culture” of the rioters. “Every Jew is the combined product of Jewish history and culture and the culture of the environment where he is raised, and therefore we have among the Mizrahim people who are as hotheaded as the nations among which they resided,” Klugman added.⁷¹

The tension that existed from the very beginning of the Zionist movement between the European sense of superiority and the desire to include the entire Jewish people in the Zionist project was also expressed in the response to anti-Arab violence. Its informal, spontaneous manifestations were seen by spokespersons of the Ashkenazi elite as bringing shame upon the entire Jewish nation. At the same time, however, they emphasized that the perpetrators were a product of Mizrahi, rather than Jewish, culture.

Conclusion

In a pamphlet published by Rishon LeZion inhabitants following the 1962 incidents, they attempted to counter the anti-Arab stereotype of the Mizrahim:

Certain press reports have attributed to Mizrahim from Rishon and to longtime and distinguished families severe allegations of agitating quarrel and strife between Arabs and Jews […]. We, members of the acting committee, declare: It is not the Mizrahim who are interested in exacerbating relations between Arabs and Jews. We are the architects of understanding between the two nations, which belong to a single family. We call: Upon the politicians: Take your hands off the Mizrahim. They alone are the guarantee of the sincerity of the aspiration for Jewish-Arab rapprochement. Upon the public: Join our efforts and strengthen our hands. Make your contribution to truth and peace.⁷²

This approach is reminiscent of this of the Sephardi-Oriental leadership prior to 1948, despite the changes in the status of the non-Ashkenazi communities throughout the years. It does not challenge the concepts of the Zionist mainstream but rather seeks to view the Mizrahi Jews of the 1960s – like the Sephardim of the 1920s-1940s – as a bridge to Israeli-Arab peace within the existing Israeli political-ideological framework. This was an important approach among Mizrahim in the 1960s and was also manifested by the joining of veteran and new immigrants from Arab countries in the security and intelligence agencies, the military government, the police, the education system, the Histadrut, and the Israeli Arabic radio.⁷³

An alternative approach that challenged the existing order on various levels was presented by Mizrahim who had joined the Communist Party or – to a lesser degree – MAPAM. These activists participated in demonstrations against the military government, signed petitions following the October 1956 massacre in Kafr Qasim (Iraqi Jew Latif Dori, MAPAM member, was one of those who exposed the affair), opposed administrative arrests of Arab communists and supported a Jewish-Arab alliance.⁷⁴ The movement established by the leader of the Wadi Salib Uprising – David Ben Harush of the Union of North-African Immigrants – also represented an alternative approach. It espoused collective and individual freedom, freedom of the press, religious freedom, and the end to discrimination and favoritism. In the Jewish-Arab area, it favored “Cultivating peace and friendship with our Arab neighbors, an appropriate solution for ending the military government […] equal rights for every citizen regardless of religion or sex, improving the standard of living of the rural population.”⁷⁵ This approach was sidelined and delegitimized by the authorities, and some of its members, including Ben Harush himself, found themselves in the rightwing Herut party. A prime example of Israel’s official rejection of this trend was the sudden and violent evacuation of the Kfar Saba transit camp in 1953 and the transfer of its inhabitants to other transit camps – including the one in Ramle, mentioned as a breeding ground of poverty and violence – due to the membership of some of the immigrants in the Communist Party and the fear of their contacts with Arabs within Israel and across the border.⁷⁶

The third model was that of the violent, anti-Arab Mizrahi. It became one of the main images of the Mizrahim in public discourse. The reality into which Mizrahim were tracked – life in the economic and cultural margins and in the “mixed” cities, under constant competition with their Arab neighbors in times of economic hardship – gave it particular prominence. The constant contrasting of Ashkenazim (the “real” Israelis, subscribing to the purity of arms and virtues) and Mizrahim (primitive Arab-haters), and the fact that Ashkenazi origin had never been mentioned in the context of Jewish violence, turned the Jewish rioters into representatives of Mizrahiness – though in real time the support of these acts of violence was usually limited.⁷⁷ This public image affected the self-image of Mizrahim of the lower class and sometimes was even adopted by them.

As we have seen, attributing anti-Arab violence to Mizrahim is a practice that was in the toolkit of the Zionist (Ashkenazi) establishment since the mid-1930s, and was used alternately according to political needs and public sentiments. The Wadi Salib uprising of 1959 and the new wave of immigration from Morocco (Yakhin Operation, which started in 1961) both widened the ethnic gap in Israel and strengthened the tendency among Ashkenazi mainstream to distinguish itself from the immigrants from Muslim countries – hence the revival of the image of the violent anti-Arab Mizrahi. The adoption of this violent image by Mizrahim in the following years went along with another simultaneous process within the Mizrahi community: their low-self esteem as a result of existing in Israel’s geosocial periphery. As a result, many Mizrahim came to accept their low job market status and education as part of their ethnic identity.⁷⁸

Thus, even if the public discourse on Mizrahiness as the cause of violence was not uniform, as we have seen, the labeling of Mizrahim as violent Arab-haters – together with the level of unemployment and sociocultural marginality – affected their self-image. Indeed, whoever deviated from that image was counter-labeled – in a process that gained force after 1967 and more so since the 1980s – as “Ashkenazified.”

A distilled expression of that phenomenon in the intra-Moroccan discourse was offered by Shlomo Bohbot, Mayor of Ma’alot-Tarshiha, some 15 years later, when the process discussed here reached its culmination. In a letter he sent to fellow Moroccan Jew Charlie Biton of the Black Panthers following the latter’s meeting with PLO leader Yasser Arafat in 1980, Bohbot declared: “You have stopped representing our ethnic group and the weaker social groups and begun representing the enemies of the state […]. By the very fact that you have shaken the bloodied hand of the master butcher – you have removed yourself from the [Eda, meaning Moroccan] community and from the people of Israel in general.”⁷⁹ This is a strong statement: it is not every day that a politician declares his colleague as an outcast from an ethnic group. For our purposes, the important element is to see that under the watchful eye of Ashkenazi Israeliness, Bohbot – himself a member of the Labor Party – announced a Moroccan ethnic commitment to adopt an anti-Palestinian (though not necessarily violent) approach.

Apparently, pushing Mizrahim to the right wing was not what the labor movement intended when it initially labeled the Mizrahim as Arab haters in the 1930s, continued to do so after the massive immigration of the 1950s and further marginalized the Mizrahim once they arrived in Israel. Nonetheless, this push to the right was one of the unintentional consequences of these actions.

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank to Ron Dudai and the editors of JIHIST for their thoughtful comments on the draft of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the autho(r).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hillel Cohen

Hillel Cohen, Dept. of Islam and Middle East Studies, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Studying Jewish-Arab and intra-Jewish relations. Latest books: Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli Conflict 1929 (Waltham: Brandeis UP, 2015); Haters, A Love Story: on Mizrahim and Arabs (and Ashkenazim as well) (Penn State Press, forthcoming 2024).

Notes

1. For the public discourse following the Azaria Affair and the various approaches to it, see Eastwood, “Reading Abdul Fattah al-Sharif,” 60–5.

2. Rimon-Or, “Mi-mot ha-aravi,” 24.

3. Seliktar, “Ethnic Stratification.” For a review of the literature from 1973–1982, see Rimon-Or, “Mimot ha-aravi”; Diskin, Bhirot u-boharim; and Shamir, The Elections in Israel.

4. For literature explaining this phenomenon in the 1980s from political, cultural and economic perspectives, see Yishai, “Hawkish Proletariat”

5. See Klein, “The Twenty-First-Century New Critical Historians,” for a review of the literature. For an earlier reference to this approach, see Bartal, “Du-kiyum nikhsaf”

6. Shohat, “Sephardim in Israel”; Shenhav, The Arab Jews; Chetrit, Intra-Jewish Conflict, 206–9. Bear in mind that the concept of the “Arab Jew” is central to current academic discourse but has gained little popularity in the Israeli mainstream.

7. Smooha, “Ethnic Stratification and Allegiance”; Adler, “Israel’s Mizrahim.” On mediating Zionism see Jacobson and Naor, Oriental Neighbors, 86–120.

8. Yona and Mann, “Ha-motziim la-fo’al,” 55–7.

9. Shafir and Peled, Being Israeli, 75–79.

10. Razi, Yaldei ha-hefker, 168.

11. Zadka, “Propaganda and Guerrilla,” 101–2.

12. Shohat, “The Invention of the Mizrahim,” 16; Chetrit, Intra-Jewish Conflict, 43–80; Bernstein and Swirski, “The rapid economic development of Israel.”

13. Lissak, “Dimuyey olim”; and Tzur, “Eimat ha-carnaval.”

14. Morris, Milhamot ha-gvul shel Israel, 244–5.

15. On the transparency of Ashkenazi Jews and changes over time in this regard see Sasson-Levy, “Ethnic Generations,” esp. 401, 407–10.

16. For example, the young state’s rejection of capital punishment as barbarous “revenge” served to legitimize military actions as being forced upon Israel, rather than vindictive; see Dudai, “Restraint, Reaction, and Penal Fantasies,” 862–88.

17. For a detailed account of post-1948 Ramle, see Piroyansky, Ramle Remade.

18. Various letters and telegrams, Israel State Archives (ISA), ISA-MOIN-MOIN-0003gwa, “Kfar Kasem.”

19. Ramle Subcommittee, meeting minutes, August 11, 1952, ISA, ISA-knesset-knesset-000464w (my italics).

20. Ibid., 4.

21. Minute No. 3 of the Subcommittee Meeting, August 18, 1952, ISA, ISA-knesset-knesset-0003tb9.

22. Minute No. 3, ibid., Steinberg to Hayoun, “Complaint on the Conduct of Jewish Immigrants from Iraq,” August 17, 1951, ISA, ISA-knesset-knesset-0003tb9; Organization of Iraqi Jews in Ramle to Minister of Interior, July 10, 1952, ISA, ISA-MOIN-InteriorRegns13-000k203.

23. “Maskanot va’adat ha-pnim be-kesher li-meora’ot Ramle”” August 19, 1952, ISA, ISA-Privatecollections-YitzchakbenZviAr-000ezea.

24. Report of Central District Governor to the Department of Minorities, Ministry of Interior, September 23, 1956, ISA-MOIN-MOIN-0003gwa.

25. “Matzav ha-bitahon be-Ramle [The Security Situation in Ramle],” A. Hayoun, Ramle-Lod District Officer to the Tel Aviv District Director, September 16, 1951, ISA, ISA-MOIN-MOIN-0003gwa.

26. Subcommittee of Interior Committee, visit to Ramle, November 22, 1956, pp. 8–11;ISA-MOIN-MOIN-0003gwa.

27. Ibid. All four quotes are from the same meeting.

28. Ibid.

29. Ibid.

30. Subcommittee of Interior Committee, visit to Ramle, November 22, 1956, p. 4; and ISA ISA-MOIN-MOIN-0003gwa.

31. Dov Goldstein, “Kan hayu ha-hashudim be-farashat ha-retsah [The suspects lived here],” Maariv, September 13, 1956, 2.

32. Subcommittee of Interior Committee, visit to Ramle, November 22, 1956, 5; and ISA ISA-MOIN-MOIN-0003gwa.

33. Al-Mirsad, March 12, 1953, Quoted in Roby, The Mizrahi Era of Rebellion, 74–75.

34. e.g. Shohat, “The Invention of the Mizrahim”; and Segev, 1949, 155–9.

35. Yitzhak Schwarts, “Be-akko hayu mehumot bein yehudim ve-aravim [Riots between Jews and Arabs in Acre],” Maariv, September 24, 1961, 2.

36. Ibid.; See also Acre County Headquarters to Commander of Northern District, Israel Police, “Doh mesakem – eiru’im be-Akko u-kfarei ha-ezor [Summary Report: Incidents in Acre and Neighboring Villages],” October 3, 1961, ISA, 200/36.

37. Schwarts, “Be-akko hayu mehumot bein yehudim ve-aravim”

38. Ibid.

39. Ibid. For a similar report following subsequent riots in Acre in 1965, see Advisor on Arab Affairs North to Advisor Office in Jerusalem, June 22, 1965, ISA, ISA-PMO-ArabAffairsAdvisor-000ebco.

40. Yona and Mann, “Ha-motziim la-fo’al”

41. Morris, Milhamot ha-gvul shel Israel, 250–2.

42. Rokach, Israel’s Sacred Terrorism, Appendix 1.

43. Morris, Milhamot ha-gvul shel Israel, 207.

44. A. Noga, “Arba’at ha-tzeirim yeshuhreru be-karov? [Will the Four Younger be Released Soon?],” Herut, March 24, 1955, 4; “Shoklim efsharut sgirat ha-tik neged 4 ha-tze’irim bney ha-meshakim [The cases against the Youngsters may be closed],” Haaretz, March 28, 1955, 2.

45. On the arrest of Har Zion and his friends and the forgiving attitude toward them see: Commander of Investigations Division to Minister of Police, “Ha-atzurim Meir Har Tzion ve-aherim [The Detainees Meir Har Zion and Others],” March 23, 1955, ISA, ISA-justice-AttorenyGeneral-000azoc; on the Mevo Beitar assailants and Israeli denial see: Morris, Milhamot ha-gvul shel Israel, 600, fn. 151.

46. Magnes, “Siha,” 53. I thank Avi-Ram Tzoref for this reference.

47. Thon, “Hinukh ha-noar be-edot ha-mizrah,” 46–7.

48. Karl Frankenstein, “Hinukh ha-no’ar me-edot ha-mizrah,” Haaretz, June 9, 1938, 3–4. On the overall development of the study of Mizrahim in the Yishuv, see Sharim, “The Struggle for Sephardic-Mizrahi Autonomy,” 240–45.

49. Segev, Medina be-khol mehir, 442.

50. Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 495 n54.

51. The Jewish Agency, Aliyat yehudei Maroko.

52. The memoirs of Mizrahim are laden with contradictory descriptions of the social relations between Arabs and Jews; some wax nostalgic whereas others recall humiliation and suffering, suggesting that these relations were above all complex. See Meir-Glitzenstein, “Avar hamakmak”

53. Thon, “Hinukh ha-noar be-edot ha-mizrah,” 47.

54. Segev, Medina be-khol mehir, 441–2.

55. “Ha-matzav ha-bithoni be-Ramle [The Security Situation in Ramle],” A. Hayoun, Ramle-Lod District Officer to the Tel Aviv District Director, September 16, 1951, ISA, ISA-MOIN-MOIN-0003gwa.

56. Dan Margalit, “Dam be-tzel ha-tapuzim [Blood in the Shadow of the Orange Tree],” Herut, October 17, 1962, 2; Yoel Marcus, “Tzoharey ha-yom be-Rishon LeZion [High Noon in Rishon LeZion],” Davar, October 17, 1962, 3.

57. A. Peleg, “Asarot nifts’eu be-tigrot hamoniyot bein yehudim ve-aravim be-Rishon LeZion [Dozens injured in Mass Brawls between Jews and Arabs in Rishon LeZion],” Maariv, October 15, 1962, 1; A Peleg, “shlosha aravim niftse’u ba-hitnagshut ha-laila [Three Arabs injured in the Clash Tonight],” Maariv, October 16, 1962, 1; A. Peleg, “Im hayekha yekarim lekha brah maher [If You Value your Life, Run as Fast as You Can]” Maariv, October 16, 1962, 2.

58. Marcus, “Tsoharey ha-yom”

59. Dan Margalit, “Aklim Stavi bi-Shkunat Aviva [An Autumnal Weather in the Aviva Neighborhood],” Maariv, October 18, 1962, 2; Ami Shamir, “Invey ha-za’am shel Ramle [Ramle’s Grapes of Wrath],” La-Merhav, August 27, 1965, 3.

60. Gavriel Stern, “Kashe li-hyot adam [Hard to be a Man],” Al Ha-Mishmar, October 22, 1962, 2.

61. Micha Limor, “Li-rtzo’ah et kulam, za’aku ha-por’im [The Rioters shouted Kill Everyone],” Ma’ariv, August 23, 1965, 22.

62. Itzhak Ya’akovi, “Ha-metihut be-Ramle od lo shakhekha [High Tension in Ramle],” Davar, August 24, 1965, 7.

63. Yosef Ginat and Meir Jarah, “The Netanya Incident,” undated internal report, ISA, ISA-PMO-ArabAffairsAdvisor-000ebco.

64. Menahem Talmi, “Takrit Netanya: ha-har she-holid akhbar [The Netanya Incident: The Mountain That Turned Out to be a Molehill],” Ma’ariv, February 4, 1966, 7.

65. La-merhav reported that Newsweek had covered the Ramle riots and had also mentioned the fact that Mizrahi Jews participated in the anti-Arab “pogrom,” see ibid.; see also “Mi-boker ad boker [From Morning till Morning],” Ha-Boker, September 2, 1965, 2.

66. Refa’el Bashan, “Shmuel Toledano,” Ma’ariv, March 4, 1966, p. 10.

67. Cohen, 1929, 208–209.

68. Ramle Subcommittee, meeting minutes, no. 1, August 4, 1952, ISA, ISA-knesset-knesset-0003tb8.

69. Defense Minister’s Office, August 24, 1965, ISA, ISA-PMO-PrimeMinisterBureau-000uur6.

70. K. Shabtai, “Ha-mapala be-Ramle [Defeat in Ramle],” Davar, August 27, 1965, 4.

71. Ibid.

72. Author’s copy.

73. On Arabic-speaking Jewish immigrants in the Israeli Arabic-language radio, see Ba-ma’arakha, July 24, 1961. On the phenomenon more generally, see Bashkin, Impossible Exodus, 197–202.

74. See, for example, a pamphlet by inhabitants of Majdal (later Hebraized to Ashkelon), signed by immigrants from Iraq and Morocco; pamphlet from Kafr ‘Ana (Kiryat Ono) and donation for the detainees – see ISA ISA-knesset-KnessetSpeaker-0005l49; on Dori, see Bashkin, Impossible Exodus, 120–23, 207–8.

75. Algazi “Kol min he-avar: mered”

76. Ofer Aderet, “Ha-layla bo hu’alu toshvey ma’aberet Kfar Saba le-masa’iyot [The Night on which the resident of the Kfar Saba Transit Camp were Put on Trucks],” Haaretz online, July 8, 2016; https://www.haaretz.co.il/news/education/2016-07-08/ty-article/.premium/0000017f-e297-d804-ad7f-f3ff0fa50000. Accessed August 15, 2023.

77. This can be seen by the condemnations of the leadership of the Iraqis of Ramle in the 1950s and also with regards to intra-Jewish protests as can be seen by the failure of Ben Harush in his campaign to the Knesset in November 1959. For a wider context see Bar-On Maman, “Mehaa u-ma’amad,” 83, 91, 109.

78. Tubi, “Me-ha-hathala ani sholel”

79. “Marok’ai mitbayesh be-maroka’i [A Morrocan is Embarassed by Another Morrocan],” Ma’ariv, October 28, 1980, 17.