Gaza and Israeli Fascism: The Mizrahi Predicament – A speaking tour with Prof. Smadar Lavie
The Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign has organised a speaking tour with Prof. Smadar Lavie, an Israeli anthropologist and social justice activist. The topic of the tour is ‘Gaza and Israeli Fascism: The Mizrahi Predicament’, looking at how intra-Jewish racism in Israel influences policies and attitudes toward Palestinians.
Tour dates:
SAT 30th Aug – Cork: 4pm, Beckett Room, Metropole Hotel, Cork
MON 8th Sept – Limerick: 8pm, Pery’s Hotel, Glentworth Street
TUE 9th Sept – Ennis: 7.30pm, Temple Gate Hotel, The Square
CANCELLED due to unavoidable circumstances FRI 12th Sept – Armagh: 8pm, Sherrysfield Community Complex, Cathedral Road
SAT 13th Sept – Lurgan: 3pm, Ashburn Hotel, 81 William Street
MON 15th Sept – Derry: 8pm, Sandinos, Water Street
TUE 16th Sept – Galway: 7.30pm, Cairnes Theatre, Concourse, NUI Galway, University Road
WED 17th Sept – Dublin: 7.30pm, Abbey Room, Wynn’s Hotel, 39 Lower Abbey Street, Dublin 1
SAT 11th Oct – Belfast: 2pm, Belfast Unemployed Resource Centre, 45/47 Donegall Street, Belfast
Tour Description
One problem caused by the shallow mainstream media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that most people are unaware of the causal relationship between this conflict and intra-Jewish racism.
In Israel, racism exists between Jews of European origin (also known as Ashkenazim) and Jews from North Africa and the Middle East (also known as “Mizrahim”, the Hebrew for “Easterners”). Even though the Mizrahim form the majority of the Israeli Jewish population, they do not control the policies of the Israeli state, which are still driven by a ruling elite which comes from the Ashkenazi minority. It is worth noting that it was this Ashkenazi elite, rather than the Mizrahim, who planned and executed the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
This talk will suggest that the 2014 Israeli War on Gaza was partly motivated by a desire among the ruling elite to pre-empt a summer outbreak of violent protests, mainly by Mizrahim, against the effects of the neo-liberal economic policies introduced by the Ashkenazi elite.
In striving to prove themselves to be just as Israeli as the Ashkenazi elite, many Mizrahim have become the strongest supporters of Israeli ultra-nationalism and, therefore, of the 2014 war. Thus, there is the paradox that a war which was partly intended to squelch Mizrahi protest, a war in which most of the Israeli casualties, both civilian and military, are Mizrahim, is a war that is strongly supported by most Mizrahim.
The tragedy is that the Palestinians are, yet again, paying the price of these intra-Jewish ethnic tensions: in this war, the main victims are the people of Gaza, who have suffered a man-made disaster worse than anything else that has happened to the Palestinians since the Nakba in 1948.
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Prof. Smadar Lavie is a Mizrahi Jewish anthropologist who was a co-founder of Ahoti, the feminist-of-colour movement in Israel. A winner of several prominent prizes in the disciplines of Anthropology and Women’s Studies, she is affiliated with both University College Cork and the University of California at Berkeley. Her most recent book deals with the predicament of Mizrahi women in Israel; it is called “Wrapped in the Flag of Israel: Mizrahi Single Mothers and Bureaucratic Torture”.