Last week I gave an interview to AJ+, in which I talked a bit about the dehumanization of Palestinians and its progress over the years in Israel, to its terminal current phase (see some more on this topic here). Below you’ll find some thoughts on the Arab-Jewish aspect of things, and how self-hate relates to them.
–
One very important thing I have to say about all the videos and images of IDF soldiers mocking Palestinians and making all those displays of shaming and humiliation that we saw – mimicking Arab women crying and mourning their dead children, and showcasing their underwear like a collector of art shows their cherished items.
–
If you zoom out of the “conflict” as propagandized by Israel and its wacky supporters in the West, you realize many of those IDF soldiers are actually ethnic Arabs. Their grandmothers, or grand-grandmothers, looked and sounded exactly like those mourning women they deride (do you start to get the levels of self-hate, and self-denial?).
By making such a huge deal of public humiliation of Arab stereotypes, those soldiers are really declaring to us, to the world: I have rejected all in the name of Zionism. Look at me humiliate my own sister, my own mother, my own grandmother, my own language, my own heritage, in the name of my new, fabricated identity (“Judaism as told by Zionism”). ‘
This is a major part of the psychological dynamics at play here. In recent decades, being an Arab Jew has become very popular in Israel. Everybody adores Arab food and constantly flaunts the little Arabic they know (in the form of curse words or some very short idioms).
This process is part of the cultural rehabilitation of Mizrahi Jews, who have been brutalized, sidelined, and exploited immensely by the historically Ashkenazi Israeli establishments. But this process of restoring a place for the Arab Jew on the popular Israeli stage was hysterically apolitical: you are allowed to love Arab food and Arab music, but god forbid you will love Arabs. God forbid you will see them as human, and equally.
Arabs have been reduced to representing folklore only (Mizrahi Jews, being the political idiots they always have been in Zionism, not getting that this prejudicial view deflects heavily on them, and reduces their identity to empty performance, to a depoliticized, simulated native, fake as everything else in the colonizer’s world).
–
So this phenomenon of public shaming and humiliation can be seen as a cleansing ritual: young Israeli men, who would be considered Arabs if they were born in any other time in the past millennium, show the world that they are not. That they are, in fact, nothing but empty vessels filled exclusively by content created and approved by the Zionist state.
–
For me, the opposite process was precipitated in this genocide. As my country and my society took on a monstrous aspect, and as the West completely failed on the most basic form of morality (dying, starving, mutilated children, for god’s sake, how can anyone fail this test?), I was left with nowhere to turn to but my Arabness. I was left with nothing but memories of the kindness and gentleness of my Jewish-Arab father, and the disestablishmentarian wit of my Oud-playing Jewish-Arab uncle, and their families, and the humanity of Palestinians and Arabs I have seen and met over the years. For me, nothing else is left.
