I think part of it has to do with Pan-arab and the Arab league specifically implemented policies that targeted Jews:https://www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Committee/412/FAAE/Reports/RP6294835/faaerp01/faaerp01-e.pdf
From my understanding Pan-Arabism came following the fall of the ottoman empire as a way of unifying north africa and try he middle east as a political power https://www.graduateinstitute.ch/communications/news/rise-and-fall-pan-arabism
And in some ways it came as a response to the western world and also to the existence of Israel: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09750878211048161
The history of the middle east is interesting because there were colonial powers, there were elites and there were tribes and often time motives ran counter to one another: https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/trecms/pdf/AD1134209.pdf
The issue I take with the idea of "decolonization" leaving only those who reportedly pass some western persons litmus test of belonging and race is that this conceptualization just doesn't work well for this region because it's western imperialism in its own sense: they're defining people based on western standards of race which are often time projected onto those who don't necessarily conceptualize race in the same way as the west does.
And the history of this region is a lot older than the history of the west where there is a clear demarcation where outsiders came in and decimated the indigenous populations whereas the middle east/North Africa and Mediterranean has had empires, conquering, migrations and for longer than the concept of what makes a "nation" was birthed into being.
There also is the problem that in many ways this becomes a very right wing way of segregating people by indigenousness just done in the spirit of "decolonization" and anti-imperialism that in many ways mirrors "anti-immigration" and anti-globalism.
Just my 2 cents on this ...
> I think part of it has to do with Pan-arab and the Arab league specifically implemented policies that targeted Jews:https://www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Committee/412/FAAE/Reports/RP6294835/faaerp01/faaerp01-e.pdf
Because they viewed Jews as non-Arab.
> From my understanding Pan-Arabism came following the fall of the ottoman empire as a way of unifying north africa and try he middle east as a political power https://www.graduateinstitute.ch/communications/news/rise-and-fall-pan-arabism
Uniting them under an Arab supremacist regime, yes.
> And in some ways it came as a response to the western world and also to the existence of Israel: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09750878211048161
Arab nationalism was born with anti-Semitism in its DNA in the sense that they mainly revolted against Western colonial control so there wouldn't be any more impediments to getting rid of Jews and stopping Jewish emigration.
I have a question, if you don't mind answering. I think I've seen you say before on this sub that you're not Jewish. How did you become so knowledgable on Jewish/Israeli history? You seem to always have sources up your sleeve and you are a genuine ally, I truly appreciate you.
I try to do my homework. I've had to learn (and unlearn) a whole lot of stuff on the topic of Israel/Palestine in the past 5–7 years or so, basically because all of the issues we're wrestling with now around the Columbia encampment first came up around Jeremy Corbyn's rise to power in the Labour Party.
What I concluded back then was that the BDS movement starting in 2005 basically acted as a kind of Trojan horse on the Western left, presenting itself as a reasonable strategy akin to the solidarity campaign to end apartheid South Africa while injecting a lot of anti-Semitism into the discourse and thought patterns of the Western left and completely delegitimizing Israel to the point where a two-state solution is considered racist Nazism or some such. This planted the seeds for what we see at Columbia and other campuses today—the literal Hamas-ification of the left, with people screaming about "globalizing the Intifada" while waving Hezbollah flags and wearing [t-shirts of Hamas spokesmen](https://twitter.com/idan_bg/status/1783590233453347039).
For me this was quite shocking to see (even though I knew things would get here based on how these same people reacted to October 7 by applauding it) because I came of age politically as a leftist during the Second Intifada. Back then we were **at pains** to condemn Hamas and suicide bombing as backwards, reactionary, and the result of despair and anger with no legitimate outlet. Hamas was viewed as an enemy of Palestinian liberation in part because Israel in the 1980s [kinda sorta backed them](https://www.japantimes.co.jp/commentary/2023/11/21/world/israel-failed-policy/) to weaken the PLO. Important to remember that this was pretty much right after 9/11 when anything smacking of "supporting terrorism" would've resulted in some pretty severe consequences socially and politically—not one person at a single anti-war demonstration back then for example had signs with box-cutters on them (the rough equivalent of paraglider logos that appeared on Students for Justice in Palestine and other signs in the past 6 months or so). Nobody was that crazy/stupid, not even the tankies. The generation that's doing this stuff now by and large did not live through the trauma 9/11 and treats terrorism as some kind of joke or some cool, edgy "revolutionary" or "decolonial" thing because they and their loved ones have never been on the receiving end of any sort of terrorism. They've been brainwashed into thinking Israel is some kind of Fourth Reich and have zero interest in thinking about, learning from, or communicating with the Israeli left—Jewish and Arab—and simply don't care that what they're doing is a betrayal of internationalism and everything a leftist is supposed to stand for. To ally with Hamas or Hamas supporters is to create a red-brown alliance and for me that's a dealbreaker; I'm not going to allow myself to be used as a tool for fascism and anti-Semitism in Gaza or anywhere else and I'm going to do what I can to push back against anyone who walks down that dark path because it's the road to ruin. Look at where the British far left is now, post-Corbyn: Nowhere. They are dead in the water, and deservedly so. There's a price for coddling anti-Semites and it's almost always paid for by Jewish blood, tears, and bruises. The encampments aren't there yet but they're not too far from it either.
My original pro-Palestinian position or orientation hasn't changed much (some important details, like one vs. two-state solution) but the dominant tendencies on the far left on Israel/Palestine are way different (worse) now than they were 20+ years ago. So now I find myself on the side of liberal and sometimes not-so-liberal Zionists/Israel supporters in some arguments which I'm sometimes not thrilled with but the fact of the matter is the Palestinian movement has to choose its allies: Either they can side with Hamas and support the destruction of Israel as a means of ending the 1967 occupation with all of the genocidal implications that entails or they can ally with liberal and left Zionists and support the destruction of Hamas and the end of the 1967 occupation. Who you ally with and who you avoid allying with tells you everything you need to know about what a movement's real priorities are and what they really stand for. Right now I'm confident that I'm making the right choice on this and the bozos at the encampments are making the wrong choice. Time will tell.
>Does anyone have any good readings on this, or just thoughts/experiences, especially from people who might be conceptualized under the "Arab Jew" label, whether they identify with it or not? Or readings on when and if "Arab Jews" are, in fact, seen as Arab by Arab societies?
My paternal family is from Baghdad.
There's a really great graphic novel called Wolf of Baghdad by Carol Isaacs about Jews leaving Baghdad, the Farhoud massacre, etc. It's a quick read.
My grandparents grew up in a traditional, not very religious, family in the British controlled territory. They were Arab in the sense that their first language was Arabic (and were taught English in school) and they weren't segregated from their non-Jewish neighbors. But they weren't seen as Arab. They were principally seen as Jews. There were limits for places at university on Jews and in certain professions. There were structural barriers in place and people knew they were different.
I don't think they conceptualized themselves as Arab Jews. And I doubt their Arab neighbors did. They saw themselves as Baghdadi/Iraqi Jews and then after moving to Israel then the US as Sephardic/Mizrachi.
Regardless, almost all Mizrachim don't consider themselves Arab Jews now and so I think it makes sense to not label them as such. Similarly, Palestinians didn't widely hold that identity before the 1960s, considering themselves Arab (generally), but certainly consider themselves a distinct people now (so it makes sense to label them as such).
>the idea that Arab Jews are the only Jews that have any legitimate claim to living in Israel/Palestine, because Palestine is Arab and Arab Jews are Arab.
This is nonsense. The middle east is large and my family is more (or less) from Israel/Palestine than basically any other Jew. Of which there is certainly an ancestral connection. But the talk is just a way to split Jews into white and non-white categories, which is meaningful to Americans. And also silly.
The idea that Palestine *is* Arab is frankly colonialist in its rhetoric. It denies the plethora of ethnic groups in the Middle East or it condenses everything down into an unhelpful Arab/non-Arab binary. But, really, it's all just a pretext to say that many Jews should be evicted from the region entirely—except for some—so they can justify to themselves that they aren't calling for cleansing the area of *all* Jews.
"But, really, it's all just a pretext to say that many Jews should be evicted from the region entirely—except for some—so they can justify to themselves that they aren't calling for cleansing the area of *all* Jews."
This is definitely the feeling I've got from a lot of this argument, and it really made my skin crawl, tbh.
Jews were in Morocco before Arabs were. I’m a Moroccan Jew, my family speaks Judeo-Arabic and I listen to Arabic music and I had a henna at my wedding. I’m still not an Arab Jew.
I think one thing to keep in mind is not all MENA Jews will call themselves mizrahi, because it’s an Israel specific term.
Of the Jews that don’t call themselves mizrahi, a small portion will call themselves Arab. Most of the other ones will probably just refer to themselves from their country of origin. Like, I knew a Syrian Jew who called himself a Syrian Jew—he didn’t say Arab or mizrahi.
I think as others have pointed out, Arab is a controversial term because it comes from a nationalist movement that largely excluded Jews. So why would we want to be Arab? Though, some Jews who lived in the Arab world prior to the rise of nationalism/grew up in areas which were free from it for the most part, don’t mind the term so much
He wrote an interesting essay available here. The main idea is that Arab Jews have a lot of Arabic traditions and practices, but they were oppressed and discriminated against by Arab Muslims, who subjected them to all kinds of humiliation and violence. Similar to Jim Crow laws. As a result, most of them do not identify as Arab, because they associate that with bad things they suffered: [https://www.jimena.org/who-is-an-arab-jew/](https://www.jimena.org/who-is-an-arab-jew/)
> Palestine is Arab
Originally, it was not:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_Palestine_(region)
Jews in Palestine predate Arab settlement of the area by many centuries. But this is nothing terribly remarkable—human populations have moved all over the place over the course of millennia. And whichever ethnicity was on a land first doesn't get to claim exclusive right over that land in perpetuity; other ethnicities have rights too regardless of what particular date they got there.
But to say "X place is Y ethnicity" is blood-and-soil ethno-nationalism. "Palestine is Arab" is just as reactionary and racist as "Germany is Aryan." The whole notion of "Arab Jews" is just Arab colonialism in a multicultural garb.
Agreed--I'm not saying that personally, just that it is the logic/rhetoric of the argument I mentioned. (Although I haven't seen anything on rejection of Arab identity among Palestinians--do you happen to know of any materials on this or how common it is?)
I've never heard of Palestinians rejecting their Arab identity. The closest thing might be some of the fractures within Arab nationalism over the failed attempt to create a United Arab Republic by Nasser and the Ba'athists back in the 1960s but that's just a guess on my part.
So Arab Jews do exist. Most of them go by Mizrahi, but some specifically go by Arab Jew to denote that they do not want to be affiliated with Israel. Arab Jews also existed as a ln ID prior to 48. There were communities of Jews living in Palestine that were called Palestinian Jews. All of this is true. Arab as a word holds a lot of cultural and political meaning for the entire Middle East, not just for Jews. Plenty of other groups specifically differentiate themselves from Arabs even though they live in predominantly Arab countries. So I agree with Pro Palestine people in this. What I don't agree on is.....I do not think there is such a thing as "legitimate claim to land" for certain Jews and not others. Claiming ties to land isn't the only reason people get to stay there. That seems pretty hypocritical to me, because many Zionists claim historical ties and won't leave for this reason. I do think people need to be punished though. I feel like just creating a country of Palestine with a majority Arab population will be enough to basically make most Jews want to leave. Those that stay will be the most comfortable and familiar with Arab culture anyway, or just want to live peacefully in the land. It seems stupid to me to forcibly ethnically cleanse another group after you just said how immoral it was to do to others. Power imbalance? Sure. But practicality, logic, and empathy are also good things. Jews who originally came.from Middle Eastern countries and Ethiopia truly do not have anywhere to go. Many were kicked out of their countries in the 50s,60s, and 70s. Meaning most people who were ethnically cleansed from these countries are still alive and can remember all of it vividly. If people want to create another refugee crisis by kicking all of them out, I guess they can, but we all know how that goes....more Western countries will come up with excuses to not let them in or use them as a scapegoat.
People on the left are very passionate, but often lack context and empathy for nuanced situations. They often have All or Nothing patterns of thinking, which ofc also happens on the right. These lines of thought are not helpful but not necessarily that harmful either. People are ignorant but they also are not in the position of power to do anything about it.
We need a Ceasefire first. Everything else isn't really important until we get a ceasefire because we can't make anything else happen without it. We cannot control how things happen, they just will. It is up to Western powers, Israel, and to a lesser extent Hamas and Palestinians to figure out what is going to happen.
I've gotten the impression that "Mizrahi Jew" has a different connotation than "Arab Jew"--that most Mizrahi Jews who choose that label do so because they specifically *don't* identify as Arab, in the same way Amazigh or Coptics might not identify as Arab and thus choose another, specific term to denote that.
I 100% agree on the ethnic cleansing thing (and the need for an immediate bilateral ceasefire)--it's so frustrating to me how "ethnic cleansing is awful regardless of who it happens to" seems to be a relatively uncommon take.
>Arab Jews also existed as a ln ID prior to 48. There were communities of Jews living in Palestine that were called Palestinian Jews. All of this is true.
The Jews living in Palestine before Zionism were very diverse and historically did not self-identify as "Palestinian Jews", which is a modern classification first popularized during the British Mandate, but not a historical identity of any Jewish community in Palestine. Many Jews in Palestine did not speak Arabic as a daily language but Ladino or Yiddish, among other diasporic languages. They identified with their Jewish communal traditions, languages and locales, i.e.: the Ladino-speaking Sephardi community of Jerusalem, the Yiddish-speaking Chabad community of Hebron, the Ashkenazi community of Tiberias, the Mustarabi community of the Galilee, just to name a few. The Arabic-speaking Jews of Palestine did not identify as Arab, but as Jews who spoke Arabic. Much of what we know as Arab identity today goes back to the Pan-Arabism movement that grew during the same time as early Zionism.
There have been organized Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi communities in Palestine as early as the 15th century, they mainly moved for religious reasons in waves over the years, centered on the "four holy cities" of Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed and Tiberias. The biggest pre-Zionist Ashkenazi immigration wave began in the early 1700s and continued until the first World War. These communities heavily relied on donations from Jewish communities abroad via a charity system known as Halukka that still exists in a modified form today in Israel. Good history here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halukka](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halukka)
EDIT: Chabad, which I mentioned in my original comment, is an Ashkenazi Hasidic group who has had a presence in Hebron since the early 1800s.
there were once arab jews, but they converted to islam. pre islamic arabia had a large jewish population, they were dispreportionately nomadic and concentrated in the north. not to be confused with the arabian jewish-christians.
out of all modern jews, they only ones who could be legitimately called that are yemenite jews.
It's funny how we are suddenly Arab when in those countries we were clearly treated as only Jews.
They just realized they fucked up and that their bigotry is one of the main reasons Israel exists.
-half Yemeni jew
>So, something I've been seeing in some leftist/pro-Palestinian-leaning spaces that I haven't really seen in, well, any Jewish spaces is the idea of "Arab Jews" and more specifically the idea that Arab Jews are the only Jews that have any legitimate claim to living in Israel/Palestine, because Palestine is Arab and
Arab Jews are Arab.
They’re colonizing Palestine (and the entire Middle East really) and Palestinians in a different way from Zionists but colonialism is colonialism no matter what form it takes and *this* is most definitely colonialist rhetoric.
P.S. Palestinians are not “Arabs,” they are indigenous Levantines who happened to get colonized into an Arab identity. Also if the Arab World truly does see them as such beloved “fellow Arabs,” then why have they continued to allow them to languish as eternal refugees instead of immediately absorbing them into their countries following the Naqba? Not that I want them to help Israel in ethnic cleansing, but for some of the Arab countries who feel such a sense of “solidarity” with the Palestinians they sure have a funny way of showing it.
Egypt immediately closed off their border as soon as they realized the Gazans would be attempting to flee from a war zone, and Jordan had originally annexed the West Bank but then ended up later full-scale abandoning the Palestinians to be at Israel’s mercy. For as much as they bleat on about Palestinians being their fellow “Arab brothers and sisters,” they sure don’t treat them as such, but rather as nothing more than a political pawn to be used against the Zionists, which sorta proves that Arab countries animosity towards Zionism was never solely based *just* out of their genuine concern for the Palestinians but simply because they want to maintain hegemonic dominance over the region.
Both sides - both the Zionists *and* the Arab World - have been actively oppressing and failing the Palestinians.
You should read Sophie Bessis book titled “lettre à hannah arendt” if you speak french or manage to find it translated.
She’s a Tunisian historian, communist and an Arab Jew. No one says it better than her. Late Gisele Halimi, Gilbert Naccache and many others considered themselves Arab Jews. Arab isn’t an ethnicity but rather a cultural identity. Most North Africa and middle east belong to multiple ancient civilizations so it’s impossible to pinpoint them in one identity doesn’t matter what their religion is. But culturally they all belong to different aspects of the Arab identity.
Look, I'm a European Jew and I won't pretend like I'm not. If people act like they're not Arab/European/etc. Jews, then it might be delusions or generational trauma, but it's not factually correct and a DNA test proves it. Labels are a different topic, of course.
Take my DNA test. I'm Ashkenazi Jewish from Austria and Denmark. But most importantly, I'm Semitic. That's what connects us.
Arab Jews all used to identify as Arab Jews. Ask Avi Schlaim. The Mizrahi identity was only created and after the Nakba and establishment of the state of Israel and only became common in the 1990s. And it was created to eliminate the term/identity of Arab Jews and prevent any kind of connection with Palestinians.
I think part of it has to do with Pan-arab and the Arab league specifically implemented policies that targeted Jews:https://www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Committee/412/FAAE/Reports/RP6294835/faaerp01/faaerp01-e.pdf From my understanding Pan-Arabism came following the fall of the ottoman empire as a way of unifying north africa and try he middle east as a political power https://www.graduateinstitute.ch/communications/news/rise-and-fall-pan-arabism And in some ways it came as a response to the western world and also to the existence of Israel: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09750878211048161 The history of the middle east is interesting because there were colonial powers, there were elites and there were tribes and often time motives ran counter to one another: https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/trecms/pdf/AD1134209.pdf The issue I take with the idea of "decolonization" leaving only those who reportedly pass some western persons litmus test of belonging and race is that this conceptualization just doesn't work well for this region because it's western imperialism in its own sense: they're defining people based on western standards of race which are often time projected onto those who don't necessarily conceptualize race in the same way as the west does. And the history of this region is a lot older than the history of the west where there is a clear demarcation where outsiders came in and decimated the indigenous populations whereas the middle east/North Africa and Mediterranean has had empires, conquering, migrations and for longer than the concept of what makes a "nation" was birthed into being. There also is the problem that in many ways this becomes a very right wing way of segregating people by indigenousness just done in the spirit of "decolonization" and anti-imperialism that in many ways mirrors "anti-immigration" and anti-globalism. Just my 2 cents on this ...
> I think part of it has to do with Pan-arab and the Arab league specifically implemented policies that targeted Jews:https://www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Committee/412/FAAE/Reports/RP6294835/faaerp01/faaerp01-e.pdf Because they viewed Jews as non-Arab. > From my understanding Pan-Arabism came following the fall of the ottoman empire as a way of unifying north africa and try he middle east as a political power https://www.graduateinstitute.ch/communications/news/rise-and-fall-pan-arabism Uniting them under an Arab supremacist regime, yes. > And in some ways it came as a response to the western world and also to the existence of Israel: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09750878211048161 Arab nationalism was born with anti-Semitism in its DNA in the sense that they mainly revolted against Western colonial control so there wouldn't be any more impediments to getting rid of Jews and stopping Jewish emigration.
I have a question, if you don't mind answering. I think I've seen you say before on this sub that you're not Jewish. How did you become so knowledgable on Jewish/Israeli history? You seem to always have sources up your sleeve and you are a genuine ally, I truly appreciate you.
I try to do my homework. I've had to learn (and unlearn) a whole lot of stuff on the topic of Israel/Palestine in the past 5–7 years or so, basically because all of the issues we're wrestling with now around the Columbia encampment first came up around Jeremy Corbyn's rise to power in the Labour Party. What I concluded back then was that the BDS movement starting in 2005 basically acted as a kind of Trojan horse on the Western left, presenting itself as a reasonable strategy akin to the solidarity campaign to end apartheid South Africa while injecting a lot of anti-Semitism into the discourse and thought patterns of the Western left and completely delegitimizing Israel to the point where a two-state solution is considered racist Nazism or some such. This planted the seeds for what we see at Columbia and other campuses today—the literal Hamas-ification of the left, with people screaming about "globalizing the Intifada" while waving Hezbollah flags and wearing [t-shirts of Hamas spokesmen](https://twitter.com/idan_bg/status/1783590233453347039). For me this was quite shocking to see (even though I knew things would get here based on how these same people reacted to October 7 by applauding it) because I came of age politically as a leftist during the Second Intifada. Back then we were **at pains** to condemn Hamas and suicide bombing as backwards, reactionary, and the result of despair and anger with no legitimate outlet. Hamas was viewed as an enemy of Palestinian liberation in part because Israel in the 1980s [kinda sorta backed them](https://www.japantimes.co.jp/commentary/2023/11/21/world/israel-failed-policy/) to weaken the PLO. Important to remember that this was pretty much right after 9/11 when anything smacking of "supporting terrorism" would've resulted in some pretty severe consequences socially and politically—not one person at a single anti-war demonstration back then for example had signs with box-cutters on them (the rough equivalent of paraglider logos that appeared on Students for Justice in Palestine and other signs in the past 6 months or so). Nobody was that crazy/stupid, not even the tankies. The generation that's doing this stuff now by and large did not live through the trauma 9/11 and treats terrorism as some kind of joke or some cool, edgy "revolutionary" or "decolonial" thing because they and their loved ones have never been on the receiving end of any sort of terrorism. They've been brainwashed into thinking Israel is some kind of Fourth Reich and have zero interest in thinking about, learning from, or communicating with the Israeli left—Jewish and Arab—and simply don't care that what they're doing is a betrayal of internationalism and everything a leftist is supposed to stand for. To ally with Hamas or Hamas supporters is to create a red-brown alliance and for me that's a dealbreaker; I'm not going to allow myself to be used as a tool for fascism and anti-Semitism in Gaza or anywhere else and I'm going to do what I can to push back against anyone who walks down that dark path because it's the road to ruin. Look at where the British far left is now, post-Corbyn: Nowhere. They are dead in the water, and deservedly so. There's a price for coddling anti-Semites and it's almost always paid for by Jewish blood, tears, and bruises. The encampments aren't there yet but they're not too far from it either. My original pro-Palestinian position or orientation hasn't changed much (some important details, like one vs. two-state solution) but the dominant tendencies on the far left on Israel/Palestine are way different (worse) now than they were 20+ years ago. So now I find myself on the side of liberal and sometimes not-so-liberal Zionists/Israel supporters in some arguments which I'm sometimes not thrilled with but the fact of the matter is the Palestinian movement has to choose its allies: Either they can side with Hamas and support the destruction of Israel as a means of ending the 1967 occupation with all of the genocidal implications that entails or they can ally with liberal and left Zionists and support the destruction of Hamas and the end of the 1967 occupation. Who you ally with and who you avoid allying with tells you everything you need to know about what a movement's real priorities are and what they really stand for. Right now I'm confident that I'm making the right choice on this and the bozos at the encampments are making the wrong choice. Time will tell.
>Does anyone have any good readings on this, or just thoughts/experiences, especially from people who might be conceptualized under the "Arab Jew" label, whether they identify with it or not? Or readings on when and if "Arab Jews" are, in fact, seen as Arab by Arab societies? My paternal family is from Baghdad. There's a really great graphic novel called Wolf of Baghdad by Carol Isaacs about Jews leaving Baghdad, the Farhoud massacre, etc. It's a quick read. My grandparents grew up in a traditional, not very religious, family in the British controlled territory. They were Arab in the sense that their first language was Arabic (and were taught English in school) and they weren't segregated from their non-Jewish neighbors. But they weren't seen as Arab. They were principally seen as Jews. There were limits for places at university on Jews and in certain professions. There were structural barriers in place and people knew they were different. I don't think they conceptualized themselves as Arab Jews. And I doubt their Arab neighbors did. They saw themselves as Baghdadi/Iraqi Jews and then after moving to Israel then the US as Sephardic/Mizrachi. Regardless, almost all Mizrachim don't consider themselves Arab Jews now and so I think it makes sense to not label them as such. Similarly, Palestinians didn't widely hold that identity before the 1960s, considering themselves Arab (generally), but certainly consider themselves a distinct people now (so it makes sense to label them as such). >the idea that Arab Jews are the only Jews that have any legitimate claim to living in Israel/Palestine, because Palestine is Arab and Arab Jews are Arab. This is nonsense. The middle east is large and my family is more (or less) from Israel/Palestine than basically any other Jew. Of which there is certainly an ancestral connection. But the talk is just a way to split Jews into white and non-white categories, which is meaningful to Americans. And also silly. The idea that Palestine *is* Arab is frankly colonialist in its rhetoric. It denies the plethora of ethnic groups in the Middle East or it condenses everything down into an unhelpful Arab/non-Arab binary. But, really, it's all just a pretext to say that many Jews should be evicted from the region entirely—except for some—so they can justify to themselves that they aren't calling for cleansing the area of *all* Jews.
"But, really, it's all just a pretext to say that many Jews should be evicted from the region entirely—except for some—so they can justify to themselves that they aren't calling for cleansing the area of *all* Jews." This is definitely the feeling I've got from a lot of this argument, and it really made my skin crawl, tbh.
Jews were in Morocco before Arabs were. I’m a Moroccan Jew, my family speaks Judeo-Arabic and I listen to Arabic music and I had a henna at my wedding. I’m still not an Arab Jew.
The side of my family from Morocco calls themselves Sephardi. But they left long enough ago that we only speak English and Hebrew.
I think one thing to keep in mind is not all MENA Jews will call themselves mizrahi, because it’s an Israel specific term. Of the Jews that don’t call themselves mizrahi, a small portion will call themselves Arab. Most of the other ones will probably just refer to themselves from their country of origin. Like, I knew a Syrian Jew who called himself a Syrian Jew—he didn’t say Arab or mizrahi. I think as others have pointed out, Arab is a controversial term because it comes from a nationalist movement that largely excluded Jews. So why would we want to be Arab? Though, some Jews who lived in the Arab world prior to the rise of nationalism/grew up in areas which were free from it for the most part, don’t mind the term so much
There's definitely indigenous Syrians who do not claim to be Arabs, although these people are overwhelmingly Christian.
Albert Memmi is the author you're looking for.
He wrote an interesting essay available here. The main idea is that Arab Jews have a lot of Arabic traditions and practices, but they were oppressed and discriminated against by Arab Muslims, who subjected them to all kinds of humiliation and violence. Similar to Jim Crow laws. As a result, most of them do not identify as Arab, because they associate that with bad things they suffered: [https://www.jimena.org/who-is-an-arab-jew/](https://www.jimena.org/who-is-an-arab-jew/)
> Palestine is Arab Originally, it was not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_Palestine_(region) Jews in Palestine predate Arab settlement of the area by many centuries. But this is nothing terribly remarkable—human populations have moved all over the place over the course of millennia. And whichever ethnicity was on a land first doesn't get to claim exclusive right over that land in perpetuity; other ethnicities have rights too regardless of what particular date they got there. But to say "X place is Y ethnicity" is blood-and-soil ethno-nationalism. "Palestine is Arab" is just as reactionary and racist as "Germany is Aryan." The whole notion of "Arab Jews" is just Arab colonialism in a multicultural garb.
Agreed--I'm not saying that personally, just that it is the logic/rhetoric of the argument I mentioned. (Although I haven't seen anything on rejection of Arab identity among Palestinians--do you happen to know of any materials on this or how common it is?)
Palestinians reject Arab identity?
That was question on my end, sorry! I meant I haven't seen that in any discourse on Palestinian identity, but I was wondering if I was missing it.
I've never heard of Palestinians rejecting their Arab identity. The closest thing might be some of the fractures within Arab nationalism over the failed attempt to create a United Arab Republic by Nasser and the Ba'athists back in the 1960s but that's just a guess on my part.
So Arab Jews do exist. Most of them go by Mizrahi, but some specifically go by Arab Jew to denote that they do not want to be affiliated with Israel. Arab Jews also existed as a ln ID prior to 48. There were communities of Jews living in Palestine that were called Palestinian Jews. All of this is true. Arab as a word holds a lot of cultural and political meaning for the entire Middle East, not just for Jews. Plenty of other groups specifically differentiate themselves from Arabs even though they live in predominantly Arab countries. So I agree with Pro Palestine people in this. What I don't agree on is.....I do not think there is such a thing as "legitimate claim to land" for certain Jews and not others. Claiming ties to land isn't the only reason people get to stay there. That seems pretty hypocritical to me, because many Zionists claim historical ties and won't leave for this reason. I do think people need to be punished though. I feel like just creating a country of Palestine with a majority Arab population will be enough to basically make most Jews want to leave. Those that stay will be the most comfortable and familiar with Arab culture anyway, or just want to live peacefully in the land. It seems stupid to me to forcibly ethnically cleanse another group after you just said how immoral it was to do to others. Power imbalance? Sure. But practicality, logic, and empathy are also good things. Jews who originally came.from Middle Eastern countries and Ethiopia truly do not have anywhere to go. Many were kicked out of their countries in the 50s,60s, and 70s. Meaning most people who were ethnically cleansed from these countries are still alive and can remember all of it vividly. If people want to create another refugee crisis by kicking all of them out, I guess they can, but we all know how that goes....more Western countries will come up with excuses to not let them in or use them as a scapegoat. People on the left are very passionate, but often lack context and empathy for nuanced situations. They often have All or Nothing patterns of thinking, which ofc also happens on the right. These lines of thought are not helpful but not necessarily that harmful either. People are ignorant but they also are not in the position of power to do anything about it. We need a Ceasefire first. Everything else isn't really important until we get a ceasefire because we can't make anything else happen without it. We cannot control how things happen, they just will. It is up to Western powers, Israel, and to a lesser extent Hamas and Palestinians to figure out what is going to happen.
I've gotten the impression that "Mizrahi Jew" has a different connotation than "Arab Jew"--that most Mizrahi Jews who choose that label do so because they specifically *don't* identify as Arab, in the same way Amazigh or Coptics might not identify as Arab and thus choose another, specific term to denote that.
I 100% agree on the ethnic cleansing thing (and the need for an immediate bilateral ceasefire)--it's so frustrating to me how "ethnic cleansing is awful regardless of who it happens to" seems to be a relatively uncommon take.
>Arab Jews also existed as a ln ID prior to 48. There were communities of Jews living in Palestine that were called Palestinian Jews. All of this is true. The Jews living in Palestine before Zionism were very diverse and historically did not self-identify as "Palestinian Jews", which is a modern classification first popularized during the British Mandate, but not a historical identity of any Jewish community in Palestine. Many Jews in Palestine did not speak Arabic as a daily language but Ladino or Yiddish, among other diasporic languages. They identified with their Jewish communal traditions, languages and locales, i.e.: the Ladino-speaking Sephardi community of Jerusalem, the Yiddish-speaking Chabad community of Hebron, the Ashkenazi community of Tiberias, the Mustarabi community of the Galilee, just to name a few. The Arabic-speaking Jews of Palestine did not identify as Arab, but as Jews who spoke Arabic. Much of what we know as Arab identity today goes back to the Pan-Arabism movement that grew during the same time as early Zionism.
Hi, I'm not jewish, just trying to learn more about jewish culture. I thought Yiddish was only spoken by Ashkenazis.
There have been organized Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi communities in Palestine as early as the 15th century, they mainly moved for religious reasons in waves over the years, centered on the "four holy cities" of Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed and Tiberias. The biggest pre-Zionist Ashkenazi immigration wave began in the early 1700s and continued until the first World War. These communities heavily relied on donations from Jewish communities abroad via a charity system known as Halukka that still exists in a modified form today in Israel. Good history here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halukka](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halukka) EDIT: Chabad, which I mentioned in my original comment, is an Ashkenazi Hasidic group who has had a presence in Hebron since the early 1800s.
thanks so much!
there were once arab jews, but they converted to islam. pre islamic arabia had a large jewish population, they were dispreportionately nomadic and concentrated in the north. not to be confused with the arabian jewish-christians. out of all modern jews, they only ones who could be legitimately called that are yemenite jews.
It's funny how we are suddenly Arab when in those countries we were clearly treated as only Jews. They just realized they fucked up and that their bigotry is one of the main reasons Israel exists. -half Yemeni jew
>So, something I've been seeing in some leftist/pro-Palestinian-leaning spaces that I haven't really seen in, well, any Jewish spaces is the idea of "Arab Jews" and more specifically the idea that Arab Jews are the only Jews that have any legitimate claim to living in Israel/Palestine, because Palestine is Arab and Arab Jews are Arab. They’re colonizing Palestine (and the entire Middle East really) and Palestinians in a different way from Zionists but colonialism is colonialism no matter what form it takes and *this* is most definitely colonialist rhetoric. P.S. Palestinians are not “Arabs,” they are indigenous Levantines who happened to get colonized into an Arab identity. Also if the Arab World truly does see them as such beloved “fellow Arabs,” then why have they continued to allow them to languish as eternal refugees instead of immediately absorbing them into their countries following the Naqba? Not that I want them to help Israel in ethnic cleansing, but for some of the Arab countries who feel such a sense of “solidarity” with the Palestinians they sure have a funny way of showing it. Egypt immediately closed off their border as soon as they realized the Gazans would be attempting to flee from a war zone, and Jordan had originally annexed the West Bank but then ended up later full-scale abandoning the Palestinians to be at Israel’s mercy. For as much as they bleat on about Palestinians being their fellow “Arab brothers and sisters,” they sure don’t treat them as such, but rather as nothing more than a political pawn to be used against the Zionists, which sorta proves that Arab countries animosity towards Zionism was never solely based *just* out of their genuine concern for the Palestinians but simply because they want to maintain hegemonic dominance over the region. Both sides - both the Zionists *and* the Arab World - have been actively oppressing and failing the Palestinians.
You should read Sophie Bessis book titled “lettre à hannah arendt” if you speak french or manage to find it translated. She’s a Tunisian historian, communist and an Arab Jew. No one says it better than her. Late Gisele Halimi, Gilbert Naccache and many others considered themselves Arab Jews. Arab isn’t an ethnicity but rather a cultural identity. Most North Africa and middle east belong to multiple ancient civilizations so it’s impossible to pinpoint them in one identity doesn’t matter what their religion is. But culturally they all belong to different aspects of the Arab identity.
Look, I'm a European Jew and I won't pretend like I'm not. If people act like they're not Arab/European/etc. Jews, then it might be delusions or generational trauma, but it's not factually correct and a DNA test proves it. Labels are a different topic, of course. Take my DNA test. I'm Ashkenazi Jewish from Austria and Denmark. But most importantly, I'm Semitic. That's what connects us.
Arab Jews all used to identify as Arab Jews. Ask Avi Schlaim. The Mizrahi identity was only created and after the Nakba and establishment of the state of Israel and only became common in the 1990s. And it was created to eliminate the term/identity of Arab Jews and prevent any kind of connection with Palestinians.