A Coup d’État in Israel? : The Bitter Harvest of Colonialism
March 27, 2023 –
Today, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu fired his defense minister as a step in his attempt to consolidate power over the country, precipitating a new outbreak of protests. This is just the latest development in a struggle that has been escalating for months, pitting various sectors of Israeli society against each other. In the following analysis, our correspondent shows how this crisis has emerged out of a conflict between competing elites and their respective colonial models.
For months now, weekly mass demonstrations have taken place in Tel Aviv and other cities, drawing tens of thousands every Saturday. This is one of the biggest social movements in the history of Israel. The protests began after the inauguration of the most far-right government ever to rule this country; they quickly shifted focus to opposing a judicial reform that would consolidate power in the hands of the government at the expense of the court.
Many protesters see this measure as a coup attempt. One of the most worrying sections of the bill of the proposed reform, called the override clause, will undermine the sacred liberal concept of the separation of powers. Among other things, it would limit the Supreme Court’s ability to oppose and repeal laws that the government passes, allow the government to re-enact laws invalidated by the court, and give the government more say in appointing judges. Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has already introduced a law limiting the ways a sitting prime minister can be declared unfit for office. But to understand the social dynamics at play here in full, we need to examine the contradictions within contemporary Zionism and identify the competing approaches to managing a settler colonial society. For more context, we’ll conclude by reviewing the most recent developments in the Palestinian resistance.
Semantics: Throughout this text, when referring to the geographical region between the Jordanian river and the Mediterranean Sea, we use the word “Palestine.” When referring to the state and aspects of Jewish-Israeli society, we use the word “Israel.”
The current situation in so-called Israel is a story about an increasingly authoritarian government consolidating power, yes—but there is more to it. The process of centralization that began long ago is coming to fruition, alongside a polarization towards fascism. There are local and global reactionary alliances involved, along with a conflict between competing elites, a prime minister desperate to escape corruption allegations, and a settler colonial society that is preparing to move to the next step of apartheid and ethnic cleansing. Without this bigger picture, we cannot understand the proposed reform itself, nor the “threat to Jewish democracy” that it represents, nor why so many people from the mainstream of Israeli society have been taking the streets against it while brandishing Israeli flags.
The bill would expose already marginalized communities to the increasing power of the regime. Subordinating the court system to the government will subject many Palestinians, women, members of the LGBTQ community, migrants and asylum seekers, and others to greater risk. At the same time, the Israeli court system has always been an integral part of the apartheid regime. It has legalized one ethnic cleansing campaign after another. Uprooting Bedouin communities in the Naqab (Negev), evicting families and demolishing houses in East Jerusalem, ongoing attempts to evict and ethnically cleanse the Masafer Yatta area in the West Bank—the court has approved all of these, functioning as a rubber stamp for the regime of Jewish supremacy.
Under Israeli democracy, many communities never had any rights in the first place. Now, many in the middle class are afraid that they will lose their privileges as well. As in many colonial societies throughout history, repression does not remain limited to the initial outgroups, but expands to target more and more people.
In response, we are witnessing one of the biggest social movements in Israel in a decade, since at least the tent protests of 2011. This can be understood as a sort of resurrection of liberal Zionism, which appeared to be on its deathbed just a few weeks ago. Israel has a very strong, street-organized, and class-conscious middle class, which has consolidated itself over the past decade through the “social justice” tent movement of 2011, the various protest movements involving independent workers and small business owners during the COVID-19 lockdowns, the anti-Netanyahu Balfour demonstrations of 2020, and the current mass movement against the judicial reform. They have power in the streets, but not in parliament, as they consistently lose elections.
From the outside, it might look as if Netanyahu is not very popular. Indeed, he is a controversial and polarizing figure in Israel. But the images of mass protests show only half the picture.
There are many growing undemocratic and anti-liberal populations in Israel, and we’re not talking about anarchists here. For example, the ultra-Orthodox Haredi community, with its high birth rate, is predicted to comprise two thirds of the country’s population in a few decades. The typical electorate supporting Netanyahu is comprised of Mizrahi/Sephardic working-class people from conservative-leaning peripheral towns—not to mention the fundamentalist fanatics and fascists, pogromists, Kahanists, extreme settlers, and hilltop youth that make up the far-right. The latter are highly organized and capable of perpetrating violence through both institutional and extra-legal means. They hold prominent positions of power, they have the army on their side, they are in charge of the police force, and they are now the third largest party in government. They are making alliances with foreign reactionaries, too.
The chief demand of the protest movement is democracy. For Israelis, since the beginning of Zionism, democracy has always meant for Jews only—in other words, ethnocracy. The majority of middle-class Zionists were comfortable with liberal democracy for themselves and apartheid for everyone else. But now that their own privileges are on the line, this is one step too far.
Such a development is not unprecedented. In every step of their development, liberal democracies have always excluded entire populations under their control, selectively determining who gets to be included in the “nation.” The French declaration of human rights denied the humanity of women; the constitution of the United States was written by slave owners. In the name of spreading freedom and democracy, the United States government had absolutely no problem supporting brutal dictatorships in South America and other parts of the world.
Democracies sometimes expand to include previously excluded demographics, often after an insurrection, and always as part of a project of assimilation and erasure. As the Invisible Committee put it in “To Our Friends,”
Democracy is the truth of all the forms of government. The identity of the governing and the governed is the limit where the flock becomes a collective shepherd and the shepherd dissolves into his flock, where freedom coincides with obedience, the population with the sovereign. The collapsing of governing and governed into each other is government in its pure state, with no more form or limit.
In this view, it is not surprising that various old-fashioned dictatorships in Spain, Greece, and South America had to “transition to democracy” in order to continue ruling with public legitimacy. In Israel, by contrast, years of neoliberalism and ethnocracy have created a situation in which democracy can only contract.
A confused mass of people who do not understand the monster they created, which now comes to hunt them.
Some communists, anarchists, and radical leftists are participating in the protests against Netanyahu’s attempt to consolidate power, forming anti-apartheid blocs within these massive demonstrations. The idea is to expand the scope of democracy to include everyone, not just Jews, and to bring the issue of the occupation of Palestine to the heart of the struggle. These are good intentions, though they are easily marginalized as a tiny bloc of Palestinian flags inside a massive sea of Israeli flags. The organizers of the mass demonstrations and the vast majority of the participants seem to view these blocs as an annoyance or distraction. Most protestors don’t seem to grasp the connection to the wider themes of the movement, accusing the solidarity activists of hijacking the protests for unrelated and “provocative” issues. Both sides claim to be fighting for democracy—but they are basing their arguments on radically different ideas of what democracy means.
The opposition within the opposition.
When we contemplate the massive shift towards the far right that has taken place in many parts of the West, we must bear in mind that this has occurred as a consequence of the neoliberal assault on the working class and the failure of the left to provide solutions, both of which have made it possible for fascists to gain momentum. Likewise, in societies that experienced a “socialist past” in which a repressive leftist government attacked working people, this has also driven many people to the right. And when, on top of those things, we add settler-colonialism to the equation—a situation in which the entire population, proletariat and bourgeois alike, benefits from a regime that imposes ethnic supremacy—well, you can imagine that this complicates things even further.
This is the context in which the government is presenting its judicial reform as a populist project in the Israeli class war between the Ashkenazi elite and the Mizrahim. Class is heavily tied to ethnicity and geography in Israel. The original pioneer Zionists, the European settlers that came to Middle East, had a specific vision in mind: a white, liberal, secular colony, a “villa in the jungle.” Seventy-five years later, they are watching their utopia disintegrate, becoming like many other states in the region.
As mentioned, many in Israeli society don’t hold the idea of liberal democracy dear—some for fascist and reactionary reasons, others simply because liberal democracy never had anything to offer them in the first place. Many in peripheral towns still remember that the kidnapping of Jewish Yemenite children, the repression of the sailor’s strike in Haifa, and the crushing of the revolts of Wadi Salib and the Black Panthers all took place under the regime of the democratic socialist party Mapai (Mifleget Poalei Eretz Yisrael, the Workers Party of the Land of Israel). Ethiopian Jews remember police killings and decades of racism and discrimination. And Palestinians… well, it’s obvious, but we’ll get to that below.
But what’s happening here is not simply a grassroots revolt against democracy. One of the chief organizations behind this coup attempt is Kohelet Policy Forum, a far-right research institute and think tank with considerable influence on government policy and financial backing from foreign tycoons. An investigation conducted by Israeli media channel 12 concluded that the forum had a major role in proposing the current reform as well as the Nation-state bill of 2018, and in promoting MK Betzalel Smotrich—the far-right politician who is the leader of the Religious Zionist political list—to the Civil Administration. Describing their ambitions to “secure Israel’s future as the nation-state of the Jewish people, to strengthen representative democracy, and to broaden individual liberty and free-market principles in Israel,” Kohelet Policy Forum has promoted various nationalist and neoliberal causes, including the privatization of health and education, the abolition of welfare institutions, opposition to raising the minimum wage, the annexation of the West Bank, the appointment of conservative judges, and the deportation of asylum seekers. During COVID-19, they opposed providing aid to small businesses and increasing the number of hospital beds.
Moshe Kopel, the chairman of this forum, lives in Efrat, a Jewish settlement in the West Bank. Kohelet forum receives tens of millions of shekels annually, mainly from two sources: Jeff Yass, a conservative and right-“libertarian” American billionaire who also donates to the Republican party, and his partner, billionaire Arthur Dantchik. It is nothing new for far-right “research institutes” backed by foreign, neoliberal, and reactionary donors to seek to initiate a coup in order to shape a country’s politics according to their own interests.
This is the context in which we should understand right-wing populist discourse to the effect that the leftist hegemony’s last remaining stronghold is the judiciary system, which must be superseded by “the people.”
Rhetoric about a leftist deep state controlling the court and the media against the sovereignty of the people will sound familiar to comrades from other parts of the world, who may be surprised that Zionists would import what are usually anti-Semitic talking points. This is less unusual when we consider how white nationalists and other far-right groups have embraced Israel.
Israeli flags are regularly displayed at English Defense League protests in the UK and by supporters of Trump and Bolsonaro in the Americas. They were displayed during the Capitol riot in Washington, DC on January 6, 2021 and the Brazilian Congress riots on January 8, 2023. Zionists maintain ties with Evangelical Christians in the US, just as Netanyahu maintains relations with far-right reactionary parties such as the regimes of Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Giorgia Meloni in Italy. Likewise, Israel signed the Abraham Accords with authoritarian dictatorships throughout the region, including Morocco, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Sudan. In the words of Noam Chomsky, we are facing a reactionary international in which Israel plays a huge role.
Facing the reactionary international.
Within Israel, the alliance between reactionary working-class populations and self-seeking billionaires is driving Netanyahu’s power grab, while middle-class protesters seek to defend their privileges without taking the oppressed and excluded into consideration.
It wasn’t always this way. Previous proletarian movements in Israel made the connection between their own situation and Zionist colonialism and expressed solidarity with Palestinians. In 1959, the Wadi Salib revolt in Haifa demanded an end to military rule over Palestinians, among other things. In the 1970s, the Black Panthers in Jerusalem made connections with Palestinians, understanding the Mizrahi and Palestinian struggles as interrelated. They went as far as meeting with the Palestinian Liberation Organization.
For many in Israel, the election of 1977 was a turning point, drawing the working class into the clutches of the right wing. That year, the right-wing Likud party won for the first time, breaking the hegemony of the Mapai party.
It might be a good idea to try to resurrect the spirit of the mid-20th century movements, although hardly anything remains of that legacy. Nationalist emotions have proven to be stronger drive; a liberal “identity politics” of shallow representation has replaced an emancipatory, potentially post-colonial vision for the region. Alfredo Bonanno claimed that an intifada starting from the Israeli people might be the ideal solution. Probably so—but currently, we are headed rapidly in the opposite direction.
Zionism is at a crossroads, however. What will come of the recent political awakening remains to be seen.
Michelle Bolsonaro, evangelical Christian and wife of former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, casting her vote in 2022 while wearing a shirt displaying the Israeli flag.
An effective settler-colonial project of ethnic cleansing is never easy to implement, and Zionists have always disagreed among themselves regarding how best to pursue it. The strategies and tactics of the ongoing Nakba [“the disaster,” i.e., the displacement, dispossession, and killing of Palestinians starting from 1948] have changed over time; the regime adapts, but the drive toward ethnic cleansing persists. There have been many attempts at ethnic cleansing since 1948, chiefly via military rule and assimilation.
When you can’t drive people off their land and deport them, sometimes the closest thing to that is to do the opposite: imprison them on their land, turn their villages and towns into ghettos, monitor and restrict their movement, surround them with checkpoints and walls, and prevent mixing between the settlers and the natives at any cost. For the remainder, a project of assimilation is necessary. Thus, many Palestinians became “Israeli Arabs,” stripped of their identity and roots.
The messianic settler movement complicated this approach, because they insisted on settling in the territories occupied in 1967, among the indigenous Palestinians, against the wishes of the government at that time. The ruling parties of Israel opposed the idea of Jewish settlers in the West Bank: if you want to build a prison, it makes no sense for the prison guards to live with the prisoners. This is why Ariel Sharon evicted Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip in 2005 in order to turn it into a closed prison and bomb the population from time to time.
And this is where the other faction of Zionism enters the picture. To put it in simple terms, the liberal Zionist current takes an approach to the indigenous population that is strictly based in control and assimilation: the cultural erasure of collective identity, especially of material ties to place and to traditional lifestyles, and an open-air prison model for ethnic cleansing. Right-wing Zionism, on the other hand, takes the annihilation approach, seeking to replace the indigenous population. Just like mainstream liberal Zionism, they have developed an arsenal of tactics and strategies via which to pursue that goal, and various factions have emerged grouped around each of these. One of these factions, the messianic Kahanist settlers, is coming to power now because Netanyahu desperately needs them in his coalition in order to form a government. They have different ideas for population control and ethnic cleansing than David Ben-Gurion and the pioneer Zionists had in mind, and they are much less committed to the framework of liberal democracy.
Very little has been written in academic research about far-right Zionism, as it was considered a fringe phenomenon until quite recently. But things are changing rapidly. In the dialectic between Judaism and democracy, Netanyahu was happy to keep the line blurred, just as Israeli society in general has done so far. But the settlers in Netanyahu’s coalition government have precipitated a conflict, strongly prioritizing their notion of Judaism over democracy. The Religious Zionist list, a far-right political group consisting of the Kahanist Jewish Power party and a few other fundamentalist religious and far-right parties, is now the third biggest party in the new government, and Itamar Ben-Gvir, a veteran Kahanist activist, has become the new minister of internal security, which gives him authority over the police.
This has already affected the policing of the current protest movement. Ben-Gvir instructed the police to use force to suppress any attempt to block roads or “create anarchy.” During one of the “resistance days” in Tel Aviv, police threw stun grenades at protesters and injured some of them—quite a rare occurrence in Tel Aviv. Many alleged that the order to do so came directly from Ben-Gvir. Also, reportedly, the Tel Aviv district police commander was fired after Ben-Gvir got angry with the police for being too soft on demonstrators and not following his order to prevent them from blocking the roads. Ben-Gvir later denied that this was the reason for the firing, but the timing was suspicious.
Ben-Gvir watches the demonstration from the police department in Tel Aviv as cops throw stun grenades at protesters trying to block roads.
The basic idea of religious Zionism is that the establishment of the state of Israel represents the beginning of the redemption process—a messianic process happening before our eyes, God’s consent to return from exile. The state isn’t perfect, as it is liberal and secular, but religious Zionists are willing to use it a tool in pursuit of their goal: a theocratic monarchy under Halakha law. The fate of Palestinians in this future government is clear: temporary residence without rights or else forced transfer.
Far-right religious Zionist currents have taken root in many Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Their militias work in full coordination with the Israel Defense Forces to carry out acts of terror and pogroms against the Palestinian population, such as the latest pogrom in Huwara (described below). Betzalel Smotrich, the leader of their electoral list, has already declared that “Huwara should be erased.” Many people in “mixed” cities are anxiously awaiting the next round of pogroms and the return of lynch mobs, this time with the Kahanists as the new bosses of the police.
The realization of their vision would unleash the worst hell on earth that this piece of land has seen in centuries. Zionism has created a monster that it is not sure it can handle. Whether the ambitions of this faction are realistic or not is not the main issue. What we’re dealing with here is a dedicated counterrevolutionary movement that has attained power by exploiting the contradictions of Israeli society and the political crisis of the past couple years—including the fact that Israel has had five elections in less than four years and that, facing corruption allegations, Netanyahu was desperate to establish a coalition government.
The links between Kohelet Policy Forum and the Religious Zionist politicians within the current government are clear. They see MK Smotrich as their gateway to the government.
So, to sum up: far-right religious fundamentalist currents funded by US conservatives and legitimized by neoliberal ideology are promoting a coup to weaken the judiciary system of a settler colonial entity established by ethnic cleansing. This would give the government a stronger grip on power, enabling it to advance to the next stage of authoritarianism.
MK Betzalel Smotrich in a speech in Paris this month, in which he denied the existence of the Palestinian people. On his podium, you can see a map of “Greater Israel,” which includes the territory of Jordan. Smotrich also said that Huwara should be “wiped out.”
It’s hard to predict what’s ahead, but we are haven’t seen the worst of it yet. We’re headed toward hard times, especially when we consider how climate change will impact this region over the next couple of decades, exacerbating ethnic conflicts and wars over resources. We should prepare for the possibility that future intifadas will be driven by basic needs such as access to drinkable water and food.
Let this be a lesson to everyone. We are paying dearly for the failures of liberal democracy and the left, as well as for the decision to establish a colonial nation-state to try to solve the problems of oppressed people. Already, in 1938, Emma Goldman declared,
“I have for many years opposed Zionism as the dream of capitalist Jewry the world over for a Jewish State with all its trimmings, such as Government, laws, police, militarism and the rest. In other words, a Jewish State machinery to protect the privileges of the few against the many.”
We should have listened back then, when there was still time. Now, we need to brace ourselves. The coming crisis cannot be averted. It is the context in which we will fight the struggles to come.
So many things had happened in Palestine since last we wrote from this part of the world. As of now, at least 80 Palestinians have been killed since the beginning of 2023. It’s hard to keep up with all the raids, massacres, and pogroms. I will focus on the massacre in Nablus as one of many Israeli counter-insurgency techniques against the Lion’s Den, which represents a new phase of resistance among the youth of the West Bank, and on the pogrom in Huwara, which was a turning point for many people.
On February 22, IDF soldiers raided the town of Nablus, killing eleven people in the course of an operation intended to target militants from the Lion’s Den. This was part of “Wave Breaker,” a counter-insurgency military operation begun in 2022 to crush the new wave of Palestinian militancy. The Lion’s Den is the name of a Palestinian guerilla group based in Nablus that represents a new phenomenon in Palestinian militancy. Unaffiliated with the longstanding traditional factions, and therefore beyond the control of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Fatah, Popular Front, or other groups, their decentralized, non-hierarchical, and unpredictable structure has proved to be a challenge for the IDF. Along with similar groups like Balata Battalion and Jenin Brigade, they represent locally-based cells of resistance that utilize guerilla warfare against nearby military checkpoints and settlements and protect their towns and villages against invasions.
This stems from a wider phenomenon of Palestinian youths who, starting from the knife intifada of 2015, have been gradually taking matters into their own hands, acting independently of the old factions, parties, and organizations. This complicates things for Israel, which has been forced to innovate in its repressive mechanisms as well. In 2022, a “security official” remarked:
“The shooters leave Nablus spontaneously, without a clear organizational structure or hierarchy… There are no orders from top to bottom as we know terrorist infrastructures. They don’t have an organized infrastructure, this challenges us. If we had the option, we would act against them individually, but it is almost impossible.”
This justifies raids, sieges, and collective terror targeting entire populations. In the age of formal organization, it was enough to target specific individuals, but now, anyone is a suspect, which allows for more indiscriminate violence.
One and the same: settlers alongside soldiers in another pogrom in Hebron, November 2022.
On the evening of February 26, dozens of settlers with Molotov cocktails marched toward the villages Huwara and Zaa’tara in the Nablus area of the West Bank. They began setting fire to homes, vehicles, and shops. This took place under the watchful eyes of IDF soldiers, who did nothing to stop the rioters.
It’s a common practice for IDF soldiers to allow settler pogromists to terrorize the local population, only taking action against Palestinians who try to defend themselves. For local Palestinians, there’s hardly a distinction between “military” and “civilian,” as they work together with full coordination and represent the same force.
Over 70 homes were set on fire, with families still inside at least nine of them. They were evacuated as their homes burned to the ground, along with hundreds of cars, shops, ambulances, and livestock. By the end of the pogrom, hundreds had been injured. One Palestinian died: Sameh Al-Aqtash from the village of Zaatra.
It’s unclear how things will play out from here, but we can expect repression to intensify. At the same time, people will continue developing innovative new ways of resisting, adapting to circumstances and moving forward. The effect of the authoritarian power grab on this already dire situation remains to be seen.
The aftermath.
The struggle continues.
Darkness in the Holy Land
An introduction to the Haggadah of the Black Panthers in Israel.
THIS HAGGADAH WAS WRITTEN in the first days of the Black Panthers uprising in Israel, a protest movement we founded in 1971 in the Musrara neighborhood of Jerusalem, composed of Jewish young people from Arab and Muslim countries. From the beginning, we understood that mainstream journalists were cut from the same cloth as the establishment and would not accurately represent us, so we worked hard to spread our message through graffiti and to tell our story in our own words by publishing newspapers, flyers, and posters. The Haggadah of the Black Panthers in Israel was written for Pesach in 1971 and expresses a clear message: When we came to Israel we encountered racism, oppression, and apartheid. We felt as if we had descended into the darkness of Egypt. It was in exile that we were free.
We wrote the Haggadah in the dark tin shack where I lived on Ha’Ayin Het Street in Jerusalem, which also served as our headquarters (before 1948, it had been a bus and taxi station for travel to Ramallah). That day, five of us from the Black Panther leadership gathered there as I read aloud from the traditional text, stopping every so often to throw around ideas for what we should write. Rafi Marciano sat on the floor and typed the words letter by letter on a typewriter we had stolen from the Jerusalem offices of the Independent Liberals, one of the wealthiest political parties in Israel at the time. This was the first time that any of us had ever used a typewriter and we struggled to find the letters, which seemed to us to be arranged randomly on the machine. So we stood around Rafi, directing him: “Aleph on the top line on the left! Gimel on the middle line on the left!” We worked on the Haggadah for five or six hours continuously, until it began to get dark. When we finished, we had six typed pages and we were pleased with the result. We typed directly onto stencil paper so we could print copies using a mimeograph, a machine we had also stolen from the Independent Liberals. After printing out lots of copies of the Haggadah, we went around selling them and, to our amazement, we got a lot more money than we asked for in donations to the struggle.
AFTER ISRAEL BECAME A STATE IN 1948, the Zionist establishment ushered hundreds of thousands of Jews from Eastern Europe into the center of the country, divvying up housing, jobs, and the lands of Palestinian refugees who had been expelled. As they finished dividing the spoils among themselves, they kept my family and thousands of other North African families in transit camps in Algeria, France, and Israel in horrible conditions. As if to justify their actions, the political establishment sent one of their court journalists, Arye Gelblum, to camps where Jews from Arab countries were being held in order to “report” on what kinds of people were arriving in the new state. This is what Gelblum wrote in Haaretz in 1949:
The primitiveness of these people is unsurpassable. They have almost no education at all, and what is worse is their inability to comprehend anything intellectual. As a rule, they are only slightly more advanced than the Arabs, Negroes, and Berbers in their countries. It is certainly an even lower level than that of the former Palestinian Arabs. Unlike the Yemenites, they lack roots in Judaism. On the other hand, they are entirely dominated by savage and primitive instincts. How many incidents does it take, for example, to train them to stand in line for the food in the dining hall without creating a riot? [. . .] But above all there is one equally grave fact and that is their total inability to adjust to the life in this country, and primarily their chronic laziness and hatred for any kind of work. Almost without exception, they are both unskilled and destitute.
My family—which hailed from a strong and proud 2,000-year-old community in Morocco where we lived with stability, dignity, and good relations with our neighbors—is suddenly described as dangerous, primitive, and lazy. This was not the opinion of one single journalist. All of the newspapers at the time were party newspapers, and the parties were under the influence of then-Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, the World Zionist Organization, the Jewish Agency, and other institutions. Articles from Gelblum and those like him were written in order to poison the atmosphere toward Jews from Arab and Muslim countries—most of whom had not yet arrived in Israel—and created a self-fulfilling prophecy: They portrayed us as parasites, spreaders of disease, immoral, and without culture in order to justify their policies of racist separation and discrimination.
When we finally came to Israel on May 14th, 1950, they brought us to a ma’abara, a transit camp, in Pardes Hanna, located between Haifa and Netanya. We lived in conditions we’d never encountered before. People sat around listlessly in US Army tents made of canvas and there were two to three people to each military-style cot. The camp was locked down—no one could enter or leave without special permission—and we were under constant surveillance. There was not enough food and no one could work. People also started hearing stories about kidnapped children. (It would take decades to uncover the horror of what came to be known as the Yemenite, Mizrahi, and Balkan Children Affair, in which mostly Yemenite Jewish children were taken from their parents by the Israeli government—who often told the parents that the child died—and given to Ashkenazi parents.) The lack of basic infrastructure caused outbreaks of disease, and there was no one to properly treat the sick. Every day, people from the Jewish Agency circulated in the camp looking for Jews from Eastern Europe, who they took to more supportive environments. There were many who tried to go back to Morocco, but they quickly learned that the State of Israel had declared all Muslim countries to be “enemy countries.” This, even as European countries, including those that had only recently perpetrated the most horrible crimes against Jews and against humanity, were not given such a designation. We found out much later that Israeli officials went so far as to intercept and censor letters that Moroccan Jews sent back home to warn their family members about the conditions awaiting them in the new Jewish state.
In October 1950, my family joined with several other families and escaped the transit camp to Jerusalem. We landed in the Musrara neighborhood, which at the time was located in the new and dangerous “seam zone,” along the armistice line between Israel and Jordan. We took shelter in homes that belonged to Palestinians who were expelled in the 1948 war. We lived without electricity or running water, often ten to a single room, and we lacked access to adequate schools and basic sanitation. Meanwhile, the government would settle and support groups of 30–40 Jewish families from Eastern Europe on kibbutzim, sitting on thousands of dunams of open land.
The political establishment’s policies of separation between European Jews and Jews from Arab and Muslim countries helped forge a new category of Jews, “Mizrahi Jews,” who they stereotyped as racially and culturally inferior to Ashkenazi Jews. Authorities even included “country of origin” on Israeli identity cards to make it easier for officials to separate Ashkenazim from Mizrahim.
Within a short time, Mizrahi Jews made up more than half of the overall population, and large numbers of us were unemployed. If you had told us before we left the Arab world how we would be living in the new Jewish state, we would never have believed it! In every other country we came to—be it France, Belgium, the US, or elsewhere—our children filled the schools and universities. But here in Israel our children filled the prisons and juvenile detention centers. In Ashkenazi neighborhoods, the state provided all the necessary services, but in our neighborhoods the state sent only the police, who would provide us with beatings and arrests. As a nine-year-old, if I dared cross the “border” to Ashkenazi neighborhoods like Rechavia or Beit HaKerem, police would arrest me for “criminal loitering” (this was legal because Israel kept many emergency ordinances from the British Mandate period on the books, which are still used against Palestinians to this day).
Then, as today, when the periphery moves, the Mizrahim are moved with it.
After Israel occupied East Jerusalem in 1967, the barbed wire fences that separated Musrara from the Old City disappeared, and we immediately connected with our Palestinian neighbors. We spoke the same language, listened to the same music, and came from the same Arab culture. We soon established all kinds of joint businesses like coffee shops and clubs. At the same time, students—most of them Ashkenazim from Israel and the United States—started coming through our neighborhoods on their way to and from the Mount Scopus campus of Hebrew University. We would meet the students and our other friends in coffee shops and on the roofs of our buildings and homes, which were some of the only places we could avoid the watchful eyes of our parents, or the police. We created personal and political connections this way. The disappearance of the barbed wire fences also meant that our neighborhoods, which before the war were dangerous border areas, had become prime real estate seemingly overnight. Then-mayor of Jerusalem Teddy Kollek started a campaign of gentrification to purify the neighborhoods of Mizrahim and Palestinians on both sides of the old border, offering housing to young Ashkenazi couples and new immigrants from the Soviet Union. Childhood friends were suddenly evicted from their homes and had to move to the outskirts of Jerusalem. Then, as today, when the periphery moves, the Mizrahim are moved with it.
WE HEARD ABOUT THE BLACK PANTHERS in the US from the newsreels shown in movie theaters and from Americans we met at the time. We immediately felt a connection. We had always known we were Black. The establishment told us that we fill the prisons because we are “shvartze chaye”—black animals. We understood that they were deriding us, and at the time we directed the anger we felt inward and against one another. But we saw the Black Panthers in the US—their assertiveness against the same police violence that we were experiencing, how their leadership turned private anger into a collective resource. We saw their raised fists and their emblem of a panther with bared teeth and outstretched claws. So we said, “Okay, we can work with ‘shvartze chaye.’ But instead of terrorized street cats, we will become fierce panthers.”
Over time, our identification with the Black Panthers in the US only grew stronger. Then, in early 1971, while Mayor Kollek was busy violently evicting Mizrahim and Palestinians from the former seam areas, he invited a journalist to interview a group of street youth who were in contact with social workers. He was probably expecting some friendly coverage about how much he was doing to “help” the neglected neighborhoods. That journalist wound up with a group of young people that included Sa’adia Marciano, Rafi Marciano, Charlie Biton, David Levi, my brother Eliezer Abergel, and others, all future leaders of the Black Panthers, and all 16 to 23 years old at the time. At the end of their meeting, the journalist asked the young men, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” They answered, “We are all Black Panthers.” The movement didn’t exist yet, but this was our heart’s desire. That statement made headlines, and suddenly, people started asking, “Where are the Panthers?” So we decided to put out a flyer saying “Enough! Enough of ten people living in one room! Enough of getting beaten by the police!” and so on.
We hadn’t even distributed the flyer outside the neighborhood before the police raided Musrara and arrested the people passing them out. We decided to organize a protest the next day in front of the municipal building and central jail in the Russian Compound where they were being held to demand that the authorities release them. What made that day different from all other days? On all other days, the police would do whatever they wanted to us and turn us against each other. But on that day, the authorities’ panicked response turned the idea of the Black Panthers into a reality, by turning solidarity into a necessity.
The authorities’ panicked response turned the idea of the Black Panthers into a reality, by turning solidarity into a necessity.
In arresting the activists, they were also trying to arrest the words: Enough police violence, enough unemployment, enough of ten people living in one room, enough of not having an education, enough of not having a future, enough racism, enough apartheid, enough, enough, enough. But we had an even greater desire to express the words in our hearts, bonding us together so we could challenge the system. That was why it was so important to the authorities to try to prevent that first flyer from being distributed. They knew these words would be a source of hope for those who had lost it.
We repeated these words in our Haggadah, written the day before Passover began in 1971, and about a month after we distributed our first flyer. As you read it, you will notice that we put then-Prime Minister Golda Meir in place of Pharaoh. This was no hasty comparison, but an accurate description of reality. It was within Meir’s power to free us from oppression, but instead she tried to stifle our voices as we cried out. The establishment labeled us criminals, framed us for crimes we didn’t commit, and beat us mercilessly. The police even sent intelligence agents to infiltrate our ranks and put drugs in our neighborhoods. When these tactics failed to weaken us, the authorities tried to discredit us by accusing us of promoting extremist ideologies, calling us “traitors” who support and help Israel’s enemies. We didn’t shrink from this characterization because we understood that anyone who fights for their rights in Israel will sooner or later be declared an antisemite by the establishment. We were also not discouraged from making connections with our Palestinian friends because we wanted to build solidarity with every oppressed group. In the mid-1970s, we were the first Israeli group to meet publicly with leaders from the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in France, which was illegal at the time.
Alongside the stick, the authorities also tried to tempt us with the carrot. I will never forget what Meir said during our famous meeting with her in 1971: “Tell me what your personal problems are and we will solve them. Leave the problems of the general public to the government.” She was trying to get us to give up our universal demands in exchange for personal favors—to turn us into collaborators, depriving us of the moral authority to represent the oppressed population. This has been the Israeli government’s dominant approach toward the Mizrahi struggle since the state’s founding. The cooperation they proposed would have significantly improved our personal situations and that of our families, but we understood that there are no shortcuts in the struggle for real social change. Like Sa’adia Marciano, one of the leaders of the Black Panthers, said, “Either the cake will be for everyone, or there will be no cake.”
Unlike in the Exodus story, we did not have a Moses, and we had no angels at our side. The Israelites came out of slavery into freedom, but the vast majority of Jews in Israel from Arab and Muslim countries are still enslaved, despite our many achievements over the years. Our cry echoes, still. To this day, the oppressed of our country continue to raise the Black Panther fist in solidarity with that group of young people who dared to say “Enough!”
Haritan assisted Abergel in writing this article.
