"In reviewing some of the Mizrahi-Sephardi literature, I was amazed to see how little of it, In particular those articles that address racism in Israel, also take up the problem of Zionism. Many of the articles that I read, including surprisingly, most of the Israeli feminist articles on Mizrahi women in Israel, took the existence of Israel as a given, leaving Palestinian losses at the hands of the Israeli state unquestioned while addressing the systematic exclusion of Mizrahim from positions of power in the Israeli public sphere.
Against the rise of the Shas party and the ongoing desire on the part of Ashkenazi intellectuals to conflate Mizrahi political agency with the extreme Right, I believe it is crucial that Arab Jews begin to excavate the history and possibility of a radical Mizrahi identity, one that both rescues and protects the cultural legacies of those whose ancestors and families lives in Arab countries while simultaneously opposing the ongoing oppression of Palestinian peoples.
…
However much we can learn from this history we cannot ignore the past six decades in which Mizrahim have not only paid an enormous cost, culturally and spiritually, but also participated in the survival of the Israeli state. Without indulging in nostalgia or denial, it seems necessary to find spaces (critical, geographic, cultural and spiritual) where new Mizrahi identities (Israeli, European, in the Americas and elsewhere) may be allowed to flourish, both locally and transnationally, that is, in conversation with each other across national borders."
Against the rise of the Shas party and the ongoing desire on the part of Ashkenazi intellectuals to conflate Mizrahi political agency with the extreme Right, I believe it is crucial that Arab Jews begin to excavate the history and possibility of a radical Mizrahi identity, one that both rescues and protects the cultural legacies of those whose ancestors and families lives in Arab countries while simultaneously opposing the ongoing oppression of Palestinian peoples.
…
However much we can learn from this history we cannot ignore the past six decades in which Mizrahim have not only paid an enormous cost, culturally and spiritually, but also participated in the survival of the Israeli state. Without indulging in nostalgia or denial, it seems necessary to find spaces (critical, geographic, cultural and spiritual) where new Mizrahi identities (Israeli, European, in the Americas and elsewhere) may be allowed to flourish, both locally and transnationally, that is, in conversation with each other across national borders."
— “History’s Traces” by Kyla Wazana Tompkins in Arab and Arab American Feminisms.
