As I contemplate my annual review of In That Howling Infinite, I am reminded, with clichéd predictability, of that well-worn Chinese curse: “may you live in interesting times”.
A torturous and seemingly endless US election campaign defied all the pundits by producing an colourful and unpredictable POTUS. In the UK, the unthinkable Brexit came to pass, dividing the polity and discombobulating the establishment. Next year is certainly going to be worth watching.
The slow and tragic death of Syria continued unabated with Russian and Turkey wading into the quagmire alongside Americans, British, French, Australians, Iran, Lebanon, Gulf tyrants, and Uncle Tom Cobley and all. Da’esh might be on the the ropes in Iraq, but the long term survival of the unitary state is doubtful. And the proxy wars of the Ottoman Succession have spread to Yemen, the poorest country in the Middle Eas as Gulf tyrants face off against Shia Iran’s alleged puppets, and, armed and abetted by British and American weaponry, South American mercenaries, and Australian officers, bomb the shit out of the place.
Whilst the grim reaper scythed through the world from Baghdad to Berlin, from Aleppo to Ankara, the Year saw the passing of a record number of icons of the seventies and eighties, two of whom who have provided a continuing soundtrack for my life, Leonard Cohen and David Bowie. We shall not see the like of them again.
In our little corner of the cosmos, we endured the longest and most boring election campaign in living memory, resulting in an outcome that only accentuates Australians’ disenchantment with a lacklustre Tory government, a depressingly dysfunctional political system, and politicians of all stripes who, blinkered by short-termism, and devoid of vision, insist on fiddling whilst the antipodean Roman burns.
Meanwhile, in our own rustic backyard, we find that we too are “going up against chaos”, to quote that wonderful Canadian songster Bruce Cockburn. For much of the year, we have been engaged in combat with the Forestry Corporation of New South Wales as it proceeds to lay waste to the state forest that surrounds us. As the year draws to a close, our adversary has withdrawn with only half of its proposed harvest completed. But it will return in 2017, and the struggle will continue – as it will throughout the state and indeed the nation as timber, coal and gas corporations, empowered by legislation, trash the common treasury with the assent of our many governments.
And yet, life on the farm remains pleasant and delightful, though dams are low and rain would be most welcome. The bird and reptilian life continues to amaze us, and an ironic corollary to the clear felling of the Tarkeeth Forest is that “refugees” are seeking shelter here. Wallabies rarely seen on our land are now quite common, whilst echidnas, and, we suspect, endangered spotted quolls have been sighted hereabouts
We took time out mid-year to revisit Israel and Palestine, and road-trip through the two countries was much an education as a holiday. We certainly got our history and archeology fix, and in travelling through the Golan and the Negev, we found respite in a stunning natural environment. But the answers to our many political questions merely threw up more questions. We have unfinished business in this divine but divided land, and will return.
In That Howling Infinite addressed all these concerns during 2016, and matters more eclectic and exotic.
And so, to the year in review:
The new year commenced with a reprise of our memorable journey to Hadrians Wall, and of the Victorian lawyer who helped preserve it for posterity, the saga of the viking Harald Hardraga and also, my subjective overview of world history. In a more lighthearted vein, I indulged in an unscholarly discussion of how film and fiction have portrayed or distorted history, and in a review of Mary Beard’s superlative history of Rome, I asked the immortal question “what have the Romans done for us?”
In April, in response to a discussion with a Facebook friend in Oklahoma, I wrote a trilogy of exotically-titled posts examining the nature of rebellion, revolution, and repression: Thermidorian Thinking, Solitudinem Faciunt Pacem Appellant, andSic Semper Tyrannis. The origin of these Latin aphorisms is explained, by the way, in the aforementioned Roman review.
Our travels through Israel and Palestine inspired numerous real-time posts, and a several retrospectives as we contemplated what we had experienced during what was as much an educational tour as a holiday. Historical vignettes included a tribute to bad-boy and builder King Herod the Great, a brief history of the famous Damascus Gate, and its place in Palestinian national consciousness, and a contemplation on the story of King David’s Citadel which overlooked our home-away-from home, the New Imperial Hotel. Thorny contemporary issues were covered with an optimistic piece on theJerusalem Light Rail, a brief if controversial post about Jewish settlers in the Old City, the story of Israel’s ‘Eastern’ Jews, the Mizrahim, and what appears to be a potentially problematic Palestinian property boom. Th e-magazine Muftah published an article I wroteabout the conflicting claims to the city of Hebron. And finally, there is a poem recalling our visit to the Shrine of Remembrance at Yad Vashem and honouring the Righteous Gentiles who saved thousand of Jewish lives during the Shoah.
Wintertime passed with our minds on the Tarkeeth Forest. I had the pleasure discovering the history of our locality, and connecting via Facebook with the relatives of the Fells family of Twin Pines. But the latter half of the year was very much taken up with enduring and bearing witness to the clear- felling of the forest to our east. “If you go down to the woods today, you’re in for a big surprise. If you go down to the woods today, you’ll never believe your eyes”. And you’d ask “what would JRR Tolkien have thought?”
The UK And US paroxysms fascinated and exasperated the mainstream and social media in equal measure, whilst the outcome of the Brexit referendum and the presidential election has initiated an a veritable orgy of punditry. Never have so many column inches and kilobytes been spent on loud sounding nothings as the sifting through the entrails of such events as Brexit, the US election, and the Australian senate! With half a dozen elections coming up in Europe, Trump’s inauguration and the triggering of Article 50 to take Britain out the European Union, we’re gonna have to endure a lot more. I confined my posts to two insightful pieces by respected right-wing Australian commentators, Paul Kelly’s Living in Interesting Times, and Greg Sheridan’s The Loss of American Virtue, and my own reflection on the right-wing media’s strange fascination with “insiders” and “outsiders”.
Finally, in comparison to last year, this year was very light on music and poetry. But American satirist Tom Lehrer got a retrospective, and murdered Pakistani qawwali singer Madhaf Sabri, an obituary, whilst an abridged and vernacular version of John Milton’s Paradise Lost told the tale of Lilith, the first and greatest femme fatale. In the words of the gloriously-named jockey Rueben Bedford Walker III says in EC Morgan’s magnificent The Sport of Kings, the subject of my first post for 2017, “Malt does more than Milton can to justify God’s ways to man”.
On that wise note, I wish the world a Happy New Year – and may it be less interesting than this one.
In That Howling Infinite is now on FaceBook. Check it out. And just for the fun of it, here’s my review of 2015.
The great political lesson of the “black swan” 2016 year of disruption is the tearing apart of the political centre and the rise of radicals, populists and frauds from opposing ends of the political spectrum defying conventional wisdoms and up-ending weary orthodoxies. Continue reading →
When I first visited Israel in the early ‘seventies, it seemed to me a white man’s land with the look and feel of a European colony transplanted in Levantine soil. But first impressions were deceptive. Subsequent visits made it very clear to me that State of Israel is anything but monochrome, but rather, a technicolor cultural melting pot.
Back then, European Ashkenazim (literally, “German” Jews), the returnees of the diaspora, were in the majority. They had dominated politics and culture from the days of the first Zionist immigration, and through the mandate years of the Yishuv when Eastern Europeans predominated in the movement and in the fledgling military. The republic that the Ashkenazim prepared for during the Mandate and then built after 1948 was, in intent and in actuality, a white, secular, socialist outpost of Central and Eastern Europe. But then things changed utterly.
The Sephardim, Jews who had lived in Palestine for centuries, and up to a million Jews expelled from Arab countries after 1948, were, for some forty years of Israel’s existence, a disadvantaged minority. The name itself was misleading. ‘Sephardi’ originally described Jews who had been expelled from Spain in the late fifteenth century. But it came to be applied to anyone who was not Ashkenazi. These Jews of Middle Eastern origin are now generally referred to as Mizrahim – “eastern” or “oriental” Jews. They were discriminated against in many spheres of Israeli life, regarded as primitive, backward, ill-educated, and poor – and more like Arabs than Jews.
And this was indeed the case in many respects. Jewish communities had been an integral part of Arab society for centuries. From Morocco to Iran, they had lived, thrived, and prospered among the their Muslim neigbours. The Jewish communities in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran were old and populous, and indeed often predated Christianity. From high to low, they were entwined in their local politics and economics.The lower classes were as poor and as downtrodden as their Arab neighbours. The professional and mercantile middle class lived very comfortable lives, and under late Ottoman rule, and British and French suzerainty, enjoyed a cosmopolitan lifestyle.
Embedded in the heart and soul of their Arab homelands, they shared the same history, suffered the same depredations, wore the same clothes, ate the same food, made and listened to the same music. Many of their values and cultural norms had more in common with the east than the west.
Oriental Jewish culture was based on three pillars: the community, the synagogue and the father. Faith was the cornerstone and family paramount, and with these, the authority of the rabbi and the head of the household. Piety was respected, chastity honoured, modesty and decorum observed, and marriages arranged. Religion, tradition and patriarchy preserved the community for a millennium. It did not experience European-style secularization, western enlightenment, or a revolt against religion. Even when modernization came, the father and the rabbi remained dominant.
There was harmony between Arab and Jew. Life had order, meaning, and a timeless rhythm. No one imagined that one day, they would have to abandon their lives, their homes and possessions and the graves of their ancestors. Never did they contemplate having to flee, in fear of their lives from the people among whom they had lived for generations, and seek refuge in a fledgling European, secular, modern state on the edge of the Mediterranean.
After 1948, the relatively charmed existence of oriental Jews in North Africa, the Levant, and Mesopotamia ended, and thousand year old communities disintegrated. A million Jewish Arabs were uprooted, their world destroyed, their culture ruined, their homes lost.
In an ironic twist, their Aliyah (literally “ascent” to Eretz Israel) confounded the Zionist model. Israel was created to be the home of European Jewry – until the Shoah brought those Jews to the brink of extinction. Young Israel had to populate or perish, and whilst designed for a European population and culture, it had no choice but to accommodate an oriental one. .
In yet another ironic twist, the creation of the State of Israel doomed the Jews of the Middle East by making mortal enemies of its Arab neighbours. But by giving these exiles refuge, Israel saved them from a life of repression, misery and backwardness in an unstable and violent Middle East. And yet, even as their numbers rose from under ten percent of the population to over fifty today, they were looked down upon, humiliated, discriminated against, neglected, and indeed, ignored by the secular Ashkenazi establishment. They were the Israeli “other”.
Destitute and grieving for their lost world and their old identities, and for the manner in which their longtime Arab compatriots turned on them, they were like flotsam on the shore of a new land. But it was an unfamiliar world, a world made for and ruled by European Zionists with an ethos alien to their own. This was a pioneer society, spartan yet permissive, that valued the individual and his or her contribution to the new state’s collective enterprises above the ties of family, custom and congregation. And for sound if not satisfactory reasons: the ties that bound European Jews to their centuries-old communities had been severed in the killing fields of Mitteleuropa – so many had few or no surviving relatives and friends from the prewar days – and new loyalties forged in the displaced persons camps of Europe, the mass Aliyah into disputed Palestine, and the cauldron on the Independence War.
The immigrant nation of Israel was conceived as a melting pot. The goal of the education system, the exclusive use of a reinvented and modernized Hebrew, and mandatory national service in the IDF, was to assimilate all who made Aliyah as Israelis. To make them Ashkenazis, in fact. The Ashkenazi social engineers encouraged European Jews to get over the Diaspora and the Shoah, and the struggle for independence and national survival, and to get on with the challenges of nation building. These orphans of Europe neither appreciated nor accommodated the eastern Jews’ attachment to their Arab identity, tradition, and culture. And indeed, may have resented, both consciously and subliminally, the fact that these Arab Jews had not come through the Holocaust or fought in the War of Independence
In the national project, the easterners were banished to existential shadow lands. Isolated, marginalized, dispersed, and cut off from their roots and heritage, their rabbis and synagogues, they were consigned to arid development towns in the Negev, to remote villages, and to the impoverished suburbs of the major cities. The state provided refuge, housing, schooling, and jobs. But it took away community, honour and tradition, the social and normative structures that kept Jews together in the eastern diaspora. They were given few tools to deal with the new world of physical and economic hardship, no authority, no bearings, no compass, no meaning. They took low paid, menial jobs, and a lost generation of youngsters drifted into crime and gang culture, drugs and prostitution.
Decades later, these “forgotten people” rose up against the (self)chosen race in a political and cultural revolution that saw “downstairs” gate crash the “upstairs” party. In the political turmoil that followed the Yom Kippur war, they found a political voice and demanded a seat at the top table. They backed Likud against “born to rule”, secular, Ashkenazi Labour, and precipitated a new political dispensation based on faith and values-based political parties and shifting and opportunistic coalitions. They were the working class, the factory hands, the tradies, and the small business owners. They were the parvenus, the usurpers, the nouveau riche, rising about their station, and as such, were scorned and maligned by many Ashkenazim. But they were now the majority. Through immigration and natural increase, their numbers grew, and with it, their political clout. One no longer heard the term ‘Sephardi’ – but rather, ‘Mizrahim’, literally ‘easterners’ – the descendants of Jews from Middle Eastern countries. Their values, interests and expectations were different to those held by the secular, liberal-minded Ashkenazim.
The Garibaldi of this Mizrahim Risorgimento was the charismatic Moroccan Jew Ariyeh Deri who formed the ultra-Orthodox Shas party – Shomrei Sfarad, literally, “(Religious) Guardians of the Sephardim”. Through the late nineties and into the twenty first century, Shas has become a pivotal political player. In the hurly-burly of Israeli coalition politics, its Mizrahi constituency has delivered parliamentary numbers that can make or break governments, and through the torturous wheeling and dealing, it influences policies as diverse and as critical as education and defense.
One of Binyamin Netanyahu’s key people in the current right-wing government is his Minister of Culture Miri Regev, whose family came from Morocco, a former brigadier general in the IDF, where she served as chief spokesperson during the Gaza pullout. She is a member of Likud, not Shas, and Netanyahu needs her backing in order to maintain his support among the Mizrahim. Regev likes to rail against what she calls “the haughty left-wing Ashkenazi elite” and once proudly told an interviewer that she’d never read Chekhov and didn’t like classical music. She has sought to give greater prominence to Mizrahi culture and to deprive “less than patriotic” artists of government subsidies. Many of the government’s recent actions appear designed to address the traditional disenfranchisement of the Mizrahim and of citizens living in the country’s “periphery” (that is, far from the central Tel Aviv–Jerusalem corridor), whilst other measures are aimed at promoting social mobility amongst these “outsiders”.
A changing world
Which brings me back the present and to my return to Israel after an absence of thirty years.
The dazzling sunlight reflected off the limestone brickage was the same. The history literally oozing from the stones was still exhilarating and addictive. The dry heat of summer in Jerusalem was as ever cleansing and enervating. The sociability, conviviality, argumentativeness, and at times obstreperousness of Israelis was the same. But Israel, as a society, had changed – and not just the cosmopolitan cafe and restaurant strips, the vibrant arts scene, the high-tech, wired-to-the-world communication systems, and the ever-present security presence.
Israel’s complexion has changed. Over half of the Israeli population are now Mizrahim (and some twenty percent are Arabs), and Russians and Ethiopians have come in by tens of thousands. There is intermarriage between Jews of all colours and cultures, and the place has taken on a coffee-coloured hue. Israel became the multicultural country it is now.
And it is changing still. As more and more foreign workers come in to work here – one of the consequences of the lock-down and separation that followed the 2002 Intifada, as Chinese and Southeast Asians replaced Palestinian Arabs in many sectors of the booming economy, there will be an increasing number of Israelis taking Filipina, Thai and Indonesian brides..
On our recent visits, we noted the high proportion of Mizrahim, and also, to a lesser degree, Ethiopians – most particularly, among young people. In the street, in the cafes, on the light rail, and especially with respect to the conscript army in which all young Israelis, boys and girls, must serve when they turn eighteen (with the exception of the ultra-orthodox Haredim and Israeli Arabs).
We had been contemplating why in recent years, and particularly, during the last Israeli election, right wing politicians were able to capitalize on an anti-Arab sentiment so incongruent (to liberal-minded outsiders, at any rate) among a people that proclaims itself to be conscious of its history of victimization and oppression. Why Israeli street protests and social media feature virulent tirades and slogans against the country’s Arab citizens and Palestinian neigbours (such inflammatory sentiment is returned with equal if not more vigour on the Arab street, on tabloid television, and from the mana-bir of mosques during Friday sermons). And why, therefore, Bibi Netanyahu’s election dog-whistle was so effective, resulting in a coalition government that is probably the most nationalistic, anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian in memory.
Commentators have suggested that the political shift to the right and to an increasingly authoritarian character has been due in part to the influx during the nineties of tens of thousands of Russian Jews who have no experience, appreciation and empathy for the occidental democratic model established by Israel’s founding fathers. It has also been said that the shift has been propelled by the exigencies of the security state that has perpetuated a pattern of fear and retaliation with respect to internal and external threats, be these Palestinian resistance to the occupation, as in the violent street protests and and bombings the first and second intifadas, and the lone-wolf vehicle attacks and stabbings of recent times, the ongoing rocket attacks and tunnel construction of Gaza, or the calls for the destruction of the Zionist entity by the Iran and its Hizbollah proxy, and by the televangelists and shock-jocks of the Muslim media.
It may well be “all of the above”, but there is also possibly the Mizrahi factor.
Now the majority of voters – this is where I am going out on a polemical limb with an argument that runs counter to what I have written above about the Mizrahim and their oriental legacy – Mizrahim don’t want Arabs – as friends, as neighbours, as fellow-citizens. Although Arabs and eastern Jews are literally ‘brothers under the skin’, although they shared the same lands, cultures and lifestyles for centuries, have they grown so far apart that the chasm has bred contempt?
They have grown up with the stories of their parents’ and grandparents’ own Nakba, the Arabic word for “the Catastrophe” of the 1948 war, when their families were cast out of their oriental Eden, expelled from Arab countries amidst threats and pogroms, murder and plunder. They spend their military service as conscripts and as reservists either serving in the occupied territories, or subject to deployment there or in Gaza when tensions flare, as they do frequently. They are aware of Arab mainstream and social media denigrating Jews and Israelis and calling for the destruction of their country. They know that any time, they and their loved ones, including particularly their soldier children, could be attacked by car, knife or bomb, or worse still, killed or kidnapped. Young – and not so young – Mizrahim have been hearing all their lives from their families and from the Arabs themselves that “they want to kill us”.
Nowadays, in many quarters, the Arab pogroms of the twenties and thirties appear to feature more prominently in Israel’s creation story than they did in earlier decades, providing an historical leitmotif to contemporary acts of violence. Times past, it was always the about the Zionist pioneers and, inevitably and unavoidably, the Shoah (and left-wing, peacenik Jews are predominately Ashkenazi of pioneer or Shoah heritage). Back then, there was also the image of triumphant David fending off five Arab armies and killing and expelling Arab Palestinians to create a contiguous national territory. Over half of Israel’s Jewish population has no connection to the Shoah, and to the secular and socialist Zionist ethos and once-powerful foundation institutions like the Kibbutz and Histradrut. The Israel of today, and the average Israeli, indeed, are very different to those of forty, fifty, sixty years ago, as are their perceptions and prejudices.
Perhaps the “victim” narrative appeals to and exploits atavistic fears of Arab hordes threatening to push the Jews into the sea. Maybe, too, it is a function of Israel’s dysfunctional place in the turbulent and bloody Arab world: a garrison state of citizen soldiers on a permanent, war-footing, the only democratic nation in these parts that nevertheless, paradoxically and immorally, maintains a military occupation of a conquered people, and sustains politically, financially, and among many Israelis, ideologically and spiritually, a neocolonial settler society. But in a sinister twist of fate, it is a narrative that would have been music to the ears of those long-gone Revisionist Zionists who harkened to the call of Zeev Jabotinsky and his Eastern European Ashkenazi crew who had resolved during the Mandate years that there could only be one people in Ha’Aretz, and that The Land would range from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River. Zeev’s vision inspired the vicious Irgun and Stern Gang, and these morphed in time into Likud, which is now effectively the ‘party of government, and the driver of all things intransigent.
One thing’s for sure: the Mizrahi factor adds to the many complications that hinder a just and permanent solution to the intractable conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.
In writing this piece, I am indebted to Israeli journalist and author Avi Shavit and his controversial and enlightening “My Promised Land – The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel” (Scribe 2014). Shavit wrote a brief, sad sequel in March 2015:
Veteran Zionist, humanist, journalist, and fighter for justice Uri Avnery wrote the following in February 2017: “When and how the Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Rift was born”. It is well worth reading:
http://www.haaretz.com/life/1.795156
hthttp://www.haaretz.com/life/1.795156tps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mizrahi_Jews https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Israel
In the statistics cited herein, there was no distinction made between Sephardim and Mizrachim. (If the Sephardim, Mountain Jews and other non-European groups are included in the Middle East and Asian group, then Middle Eastern and Asian Jews outnumber European and American Jews by a margin of 52 to 48
On a musical note:
From way back, I was particularly familiar with world-famous Israeli singers of eastern origin – Esther Ofarim, of dubious ‘Cinderella Rockefeller’ fame, (with her then-husband Abi, who was, incidentally, of Russian heritage), the late, sublime Ofra Haza, Noa, and latterly, Ladino diva Yasmin Levy].
In That Howling Infinite 