by Uri Avnery, … with Gush Shalom
[ Editor’s Note: Uri gives us another wonderful tour of what I will call sociological complexity in Israeli society – the present case being the Eastern, Mizrahi Jews, and the Ashkenazis.
Uri got exposed to Israel’s great racial divide during the 1948 war, when he was a Mizrahi-squad leader, the immersion path to getting to know a different people, where the Mizrahi were considered blacks by the Europeans and Russians.
This is the type of story you will never find in US media, where the Disneyland-Hollywood version of Israeli history is preferred.
At the end of his article, Uri shows himself once again as the eternal optimist – that somehow, after several generations, a future Mizrahi will discover and treasure his or her historical heritage.
I would not hold my breath. I personally think something like that happening edges closer to the odds of winning the lottery, as time passes.
Having been a late bloomer in discovering my own family heritage going back just a few generations, I have had to accept its not being a “cool thing” for those behind me. I had no interest until my 40’s, because I didn’t know any details to be interested about. I don’t remember a single conversation with either side of my family about any of this, and those were the days when we it was a real treat to listen to adults discuss thing, a form of talk radio for us.
Little did I know back then that this discovery path would take me way back, down the yellow brick road of the human genome, which has become the most fascinating trip of all.
Big advances in the software in the sequencing testing speed and cost of DNA samples has brought on a slew of new discoveries – the biggest with our new Denisovan ancestor. It began with one little girl’s finger bone fragment fond in a Siberian Cave from 40,000 years ago. None of this information is proprietary. All the labs allow their discovery databases to be searched, a wonderful cooperation for humanity.
The Densovian mitochondrial DNA showed it to be distinct from the Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens. It had been in our genome all the time, but researchers did not know what to look for. Despite both Neanderthals and Denisovans being extinct, in reality they are walking around in our shoes today.
And last but not least, they found a fourth area on our genome for a yet unidentified ancestor which, due to cross-breeding between with Neanderthals and Denisovans, has passed another DNA message-in-a-bottle down to us.
This discovery spurred a land-rush hunt by anthropology professionals sifting through all existing caves, as we know now all were used by any hominids living in the area over tens of thousands of years.
The oldest and best-preserved DNA is more frequently found in these cold climate caves. More Denisovan bones were discovered in a Spanish Cave in 2013, which showed they had been widely dispersed.
Discoveries are ongoing as to what specific immunities were passed on to modern humans from these ancient ones. The cave finds have been priceless because, as scientists dig down into the older layers, they are able to date the bones they find from other organic material found with them.
I will be covering some of the major discoveries during 2018… Jim W. Dean ]
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– First published … January 06, 2028 –
I am angry with the Mizrahi elite. Very angry indeed. Mizrah is the Hebrew word for East. Eastern Jews are those who lived for many centuries in the Islamic world. Western Jews are those who lived in Christian Europe.
The words are, of course, misnomers. Russian Jews are “Westerners”, Moroccan Jews are “Easterners”. A look at the map shows that Russia is far to the East of Morocco. It would be more accurate to call them “Northerners” and “Southerners”. Too late, now.
Westerners are generally called “Ashkenazim”, from the old Hebrew term for Germany. Easterners were usually called “Sephardim”, from the old Hebrew term for Spain. But only a small part of the Easterners are actually descended from the flourishing Jewish community in medieval Spain.
In today’s Israel, the antagonism between Mizrahim and Ashkenazim is growing stronger from year to year, with vast political and social repercussions. It is no exaggeration to see this as the determining phenomenon of current Israeli society.
Before I continue, allow me to state (once again, I am afraid) my personal part in this.
My last few years in Germany, before we fled, were spent in the shadow of the ascent of the Swastika, the last half year already under Nazi rule. I came to hate Germany and everything German. So when our ship reached the port of Jaffa, I was enthusiastic. I was just ten years old, and the Jaffa of 1933 was in every respect the exact opposite of Germany – noisy, full of exotic smells, human. I loved it.
As I learned later, most of the early Zionist “pioneers” who arrived in Arab Jaffa hated it on sight, because they identified themselves as Europeans. Among them was the founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl himself, who did not want to go to Palestine in the first place. On his only visit here, he hated its Oriental character. He vastly preferred Patagonia (in the Argentine).
Fifteen years later, during Israel’s war of independence, I was promoted to the lofty rank of squad-leader and had the choice between new immigrant recruits from Poland or Morocco. I chose the Moroccans and was rewarded by them with my life: when I was lying wounded under fire, four of “my Moroccans” risked their lives to get me out.
It was then that I got a foretaste of things to come. Once, when we got a few precious hours of leave, some of my soldiers refused to go. “The girls in Tel Aviv don’t go out with us,” they complained, “for them we are blacks.” Their skin was just a little bit darker than ours.
I became very sensitive to this problem, when everybody else still denied its very existence. In 1954, when I was already the editor-in-chief of a news-magazine, I published a series of articles that caused a huge stir: “They (expletive) the Blacks”. Those Ashkenazim who did not hate me before, started to hate me then.
Then came the riots of “Wadi Salib”, a neighborhood in Haifa, where a policeman shot a Mizrahi. My paper was the only one in the country to defend the protesters.
A few years later the small group of Mizrahim started an unruly protest movement, expropriating the American term “Black Panthers”. I helped them. Golda Meir famously exclaimed: “They are not nice people”.
Now, many years later, a new generation has taken over. The Internal conflict dominates many aspects of our life. The Mizrahim make up about half the Jewish population of Israel, the Ashkenazim form the other half. The division has many manifestations, but people don’t like to talk about them openly.
For example, the great majority of Likud voters are Mizrahim, though the party leadership is predominantly Ashkenazi. The opposition Labor Party is almost completely Ashkenazi, though they just elected a Mizrahi leader, in the vain hope that this will help them to overcome the profound alienation of the Mizrahim.
My opposition to the treatment of the Mizrahim was primarily a moral one. It sprang from the desire for justice. It also sprang from my dream that all of us, Ashkenazim and Mizrahim, would eventually be submerged in a common Hebrew nation. But I must confess that there was another motive, too.
I have always believed – as I believe now – that there is no future for Israel as a foreign island in the Oriental sea. My hopes go much further than just peace. I hope for Israel’s becoming an integral part of the “Semitic region” (an expression I invented long ago).
How? I have always entertained a monumental hope: that the second or third generation of Mizrahim will remember its heritage, the times when Jews were an integral part of the Muslim world. Thus they would become the bridge between the new Hebrew nation in Israel and its Palestinian neighbors, and indeed the entire Muslim world.
Being despised by the Ashkenazim as “Asiatic” and inferior, would it not have been natural for the Mizrahim to reclaim their glorious heritage, when the Jews in Iraq, Spain, Egypt and many other Muslim countries were fully integrated partners in a flourishing civilization, at a time when Europeans were mainly barbarians?
Jewish philosophers, mathematicians, poets and medical doctors were partners of that civilization, side by side with their Muslim counterparts. When the persecution and expulsion of Jews and the inquisition were facts of life in Europe, Jews (and Christians) enjoyed full rights in the Muslim world.
They were accorded the status of “Peoples of the Book” (the Hebrew Bible) and fully equal, except for being exempted from army service and paying a tax instead. Anti-Jewish incidents were rare.
When all the Jews were expelled from Christian Spain, only a small minority immigrated to Amsterdam, London and Hamburg. The vast majority went to Muslim countries, from Morocco to Istanbul. Curiously enough, only a handful settled in Palestine.
However, when masses of Oriental Jews arrived in Israel, my hopes were dashed. Instead of becoming the bridge between Israel and the Arab world, they became the most ardent Arab-haters. The centuries of Muslim-Jewish culture were erased, as if they had never existed.
Why? Being despised by the “superior” Ashkenazim, the Mizrahim started to despise their own culture. They tried to become Europeans, more anti-Arab, more super-patriot, more right-wing.
(Though one Mizrahi friend once told me: We don’t want to be a bridge. A bridge is something people trample on.)
Yet no one can escape from himself. Most Mizrahim in Israel speak with an Arab accent. They love Arab music (presented as “Mediterranean” music), and have no love for Mozart and Beethoven. Their features are different from European ones. All the more reason to hate the Arabs.
The erasing of the Eastern-Jewish culture is all-encompassing. Israeli children of Eastern descent have no idea of the great writers and philosophers of their heritage.
They don’t know that the Christian Crusaders who conquered the Holy Land butchered Muslims and Jews alike, and that Jews defended Jerusalem and Haifa shoulder to shoulder with their Muslim neighbors.
Rabbi Moses Maimonides – the great Rambam – is well known, but only as an important rabbi, not as the friend and personal physician of Saladin, the greatest of Muslim heroes. The many other medieval Sephardic intellectuals are hardly known at all. None of them appears on our paper money.
Yet I am an optimist, in this respect also.
I believe that a new Mizrahi intelligentsia will search for its roots. That with the rise of its social status, social complexes will give way to a normal patriotism. That a fourth or fifth generation will come forward and struggle not only for equality, but also for peace and integration in the region.
As our Arab friends would say: Inshallah.
*
Jim W. Dean is VT Editor Emeritus. He was an active editor on VT from 2010-2022. He was involved in operations, development, and writing, plus an active schedule of TV and radio interviews. He now writes and posts periodically for VT.
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Remember that many of the immigrants from the British Isles to South also came as slaves – the difference being that their servitude had a legal termination (usually 7 years), while the sub-Saharan Africa slaves were of course slaves for life. The elites set the two groups against each other to prevent a successful uprising for economic justice (i.e. the divide and conquer Jim Dean mentions).
While the subject is Trolls.
I admit that I am aware that Facebook is an operation by the “intelligence” “community”.
I use my account to counter their work by posting VT articles and information on 9/11 research as well as Central Banking.
On the advisement by Jim Dean I always strive to use complete sentences, too.
I am a VT Troll.
😉
It’s been a long time since one of these people found us. There is even a chance he is an ADL plant so they can copy and paste his comments for their use as an example of the type of people attracted to VT. This is a long used media psy ops tactic which the Zios have used extensively. But filters have helped us squeeze most of it out. FB has been a problem as you can close people off your page by clicking the spam tab, but they can keep posting. FB seems to have no problem with its huge number of fake FB pages as they generate revenue from the traffic.
Dear commenters, Richard D. is being removed for violations of the comment board, spamming, by multiple replying to his own comments, as a way of publishing something the size of an article, attempting to take it over for his views, by making reader wade through his comments to get to others. We of course, do not exist to volunteer our efforts to serve such people. Russel’s comments from FB have been deleted for the same reason, and blocked. We wish them both god speed in enjoying themselves in the many chat room sites which are designed for such things to draw that kind of traffic. But the comment boards are for commenting, not running jihad campaigns, particularly as anonymous posters.
I really don’t care for anyone coming from Israel and telling everyone why they are angry, replete with numerous historic justifications. It’s anger everywhere that is the problem and fuels the same old violence century after century. You would think that the anger mongers would get tired of their insanity and want for something totally different. Take all the wars and injustices pile them up and consume with the fire of forgive and forget. This is the only way to go on and leave the past to where it belongs; in the dustbin of the Dark Ages. Who cares what your or my grandfather or country did in the worthless past. The perpetuation of historic vengeful scores to settle, is insanity.
Very well put.
If your are angry Mr. Dean, then I am sure that you can understand how the Africans and African Americans who have watched their history and culture usurped and used by the European culture to negate everything the Africans have done in history and for society as a whole, must feel. History not being the only thing stolen, their melanin science that speaks to more than just skin pigmentation stolen to represent only skin pigmentation when it means so much more, and so many many more discoveries that have related to not only their culture, but how their culture has been interwoven throughout Europe by whitewashing their history to make it fit the dominant culture. I think it is a little late to cry, “poor me.”
I save my African sympathies for their women. The average black woman will be raped three times in her lifetime, a statistic that liberal media refuses to publish, like here in the US although the interracial rape stats are published each year by the government, mass media pretends they have never seen them. The black on white rape rate is 50 times the vice versa, and B on W violent assaults, the rate (figuring in the their respective population percentages, has been as high as 100 to 1, and the discounts robberies…just wanton attacks, and often with multiple assailants. This of course is a race war, and unmentioned in the national discourse. During my heritage tv days I quietly went around to some one the older main line civil rights churches to show them these stats. They were shocked out of their minds, and had never heard of them. I wanted to test their interest in breaking the black out on this, and take the lead in its having to be publicly addressed. I had suggested during the legislature a “Let’s say no to rape” rally out in the street, with a permit. We would lay 50 while woman down, and the one black one, as a very physical way of presenting it. They said “No way, Jose”. I learned something about them that day.
In response to Mr. Dean’s post, what you should have learned about the African/African American is that they do not feel the same sense of entitlement that you do for all the obvious reasons. They have not colonized countries or led wars and genocide against people on the same scale as the European. Of course, I can see where the same thing holds true today. To test them solely on the basis that they do not feel your sense of entitlement is not a test at all, since this is your economic system, your politics, etc in which their limited ability to get their share of it can be attested to even today. And since this is a man’s world (barring my political incorrectness) I do not see why you have no empathy for the male of their species. I cannot agree with your “sympathies” for their women only while having none for the male since we all know without the male the continuance of theirs and any species would be null and void. Or are we back to the Darwinian belief of “natural selection.” If that is the case, then might I add if not for the African, would you even be here to lay claim to the belief in natural selection, since “they” were chosen (according to science and history) to be the “first” people. And if what you are attesting to occurred in the 60s timeframe, should their response really have surprise you? Or did I misinterpret your response?
Richard D is having his login cancelled for multiple violations of the comment board, spamming being just one of them. This does not happen instantly but he will be gone. It’s amazing how there are some people who thing they can hold the rest of us hostage.
Ian was ill during December and recovering at home now, on a light schedule. Thanks for your concern.
Richard, I beg to differ, and we are well versed on this subject. I would be willing to bet you that Israeli has a higher percentage of Jews than than the US, although I would not use the word “infested”, one that a Zionist extremist pretending to be a Jew hater would use in a comment posting to tag a website as an anti-semetic one. The roughly 30% of our staff and sources who are Jews would beg to differ with your tired “broad brush” remarks, the kind we rarely see here. I have worked closely with the anti-Zionist Neturie Karta Jews in the past.
We have a president with record low ratings, but that does not change the damage he can do, or the huge amount of work and coalition building it will take to reverse it. Of course you would never be involved in a coalition as you prefer playing the “bad boy” routine, as I think you find it more fun. There are more Christian Zionists here in the US than their are Jews in Israel, and they donate more money, some of it even going to settler terrorist groups which our government, Dem or Repub, has never sought to block in any way, possibly not wanting to lose their political support. Gosh, can you imaging that? This is a complex, deeply entrenched problem, with powerful interests involved. The Deep State term is routinely used in mass media now when they were afraid to before, that using it you would get you tagged as a conspiracy theorist. It took a lot of hard work to change that dynamic. None of these major problems will be fixed without similar efforts and coalitions.
Good ole divide and conquer, an American version of it in the South, and a different one in the rest of the country when it went through the flooding in of immigrants in destabilizing numbers to keep labor costs low, a topic that our children begin being lied to about, and having that tied into a modern version of it going on now, as it always has.
Truer words have not been posted on this site today.
I urge Uri to watch this video and then comment if he is angry at Israel or
Americans should be angry at Israel or America for being so stupid:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ueI5clCKFTY
America, Israel’s Whore
Either this is real chutzpah or Americans are the biggest fools on planet Earth.
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