Presence and Absence in Enemies, A Love Story: An Essay on Familism, Traditionalism, and Ultranationalism

When I lecture to academics and activists in North America and Europe about the Mizrahi support for Israel's right wing, I'm often asked, "Why no coalition between Mizrahim and Palestinians? Together, they are the majority of Israel's citizenry. Together they can dismantle the Ashkenazi-Zionist dominance. Can't they arrive at a one-state solution or some kind of Palestinian–Israeli confederation?"1Mizrahim—difficult to pronounce in the languages of the North. "Miz-ra-heem? Miz-ra-cheem?" Catchy it ain't. "Arab Jew" is the buzzword that resonates with the progressive-to-radical Global South solidarity cohort. With patience, I alert my audiences to the fact that a Mizrahi–Palestinian coalition is a utopian fantasy—an outgrowth of the academic discourse about "Arab Jews" that has swept the Northern public sphere advocating peace in the Middle East during the era of identity politic(king). I then explain that "Mizrahim" is a coalitional term for Jews whose origins are in the Arab or Muslim worlds or the Ottoman margins of Europe, and that most loathe the term "Arab Jews."Next question: "How come dark-skinned Jews—people of color—support the ultranationalist Right? Why don't they advance a political agenda of social justice in their area?"Hillel Cohen's new book, Enemies, A Love Story, offers in-depth answers to this paradox. A monumental contribution to both public and academic discourse, it details the interplay between Israel's intra-Jewish Mizrahi–Ashkenazi rift and its regional framework, the Palestine–Israel conflict (or "the conflict," in short). The Palestine conflict shrouds both institutional and quotidian lives in Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, and the rest of the Middle East.Cohen's prose is highly readable and fluid, but one's conceptual binoculars won't find his theoretical scaffoldings. Had he analyzed his data through contextual comparisons with similar research on postcolonial ethnic–racial conflicts, the book would have had the potential to travel outside the confines of the idiosyncratic Israeli studies ghetto. This essay is an attempt to try on some theoretical frameworks for Cohen's wealth of fascinating case studies and his insular interpretation of them.In my experience, one can divide critical scholarship about the conflict into three main categories:In recent decades the first and second categories have flourished, enjoyed research funds, and resulted in the proliferation of first-tier academic publications. Critical studies of the third category, however, are much less common. With a few exceptions, scholars in the emerging discipline "Mizrahi studies" strategically avoid or "obliviate" (25)2 analyzing the intersection of the Mizrahi–Ashkenazi conflict with the Palestine–Israel framework. The topic falls between the cracks. On one hand, it is silenced by the Zionist lobby that dominates North American and European academia—even more so by the Zionist–Ashkenazi academy in Israel. On the other hand, the topic does not enjoy support and solidarity from the international research community of Palestine studies, let alone funds.Enemies, A Love Story makes an important contribution to the third category. Cohen unfurls the evolution of the complex relationship between Mizrahim and Palestinians from the Ottoman era to the present, when "Mizrahim have become the subcontractors for carrying out Israeli violence" (384). Organizing the book chronologically, Cohen sets out to prove that "the roots of Mizrahim as having marginal identities, far away from the centers of power, are to be found . . . in Zionism's onset" (187). A virtuoso storyteller, Cohen narrates one case study after another, all gleaned from the conflict's historical tapestry. His analysis is both critical and compassionate. Stories alternate with explication of the strategies that have shaped the Israeli regime's foreign affairs and domestic policies, and demonstrate how both have impacted the daily lives of Israeli citizens.In Ottoman Palestine, both the Sephardic elite and the Arab nationalist movement advocated the separation of religion from the structures of governance (32). Both were repelled by the Zionist movement, whose roots were dialoguing with Eastern Europe's Christian white supremacy. For early Zionists, the Jewish religion became their means to define a separatist refuge, a nation-state in Palestine. This was to resolve Europe's Jewish Problem (34). Cohen argues that the failure to form an "alliance of the dispossessed" (102) between Mizrahim and Palestinians is rooted in socialist Zionism's success in establishing its hegemony over the Zionist movement during the British Mandate era. The Sephardic leadership naively believed that it would be able to mediate a compromise between the Zionist settlers and the Palestinian leadership (115), but its constituents were shunted to the margins of the Zionist project, deprived of both leadership and equal employment opportunities.A significant factor contributing to Mizrahi marginalization was the massive financial support garnered from Jewish communities in North America and Western Europe for the Ashkenazi settler project—"the import of capital," to quote Arlosoroff (127):3 "The financial aid apparatus that was established . . . during the Yishuv period—and also during the mass migration after the foundation of the state—enabled the European immigrants to extricate themselves more easily from the poverty trap and offered them an easier path into the middle class" (131). Cohen uses the Hebrew terminology for Mizrahim, `Edot haMizrah ("bands of the Orient").4 He considers the moment when monies start flowing between Ashkenazi-Zionist Europe and the Yishuv as demarcating the fixity of the schism between the Ashkenazi settler communities and the "bands of the Orient." He argues that this resilient fixity continues to this very day.Another chapter narrates the displacement of both the Yishuv's Sephardic elite and the Mizrahim into the societal margins of Israel. Ashkenazi panic followed the mass immigration of Jews from Arab and Muslim countries in the 1950s. This panic at the "primitivity" of the Mizrahim (234) found expression in societal ideologies and practices. Financially anchored by German Holocaust reparation funds, Eastern European immigrants decorated themselves with the borrowed plumes of Western supremacy. The socialist rhetoric of Mapai (the ruling Labor party) on class equality was therefore exposed as nothing but a discursive manipulation (209–10).Mizrahim labored to join the simulacrum of Westernness as performed by the dominant Ashkenazim, and in the 1950s–1960s felt it was necessary to part from their Arabness. In this very same era, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) morphed from a social movement into a solidified organization. One of its goals was to exploit the racial rifts in Israel in order to "mobilize the Mizrahi proletariat" for Palestine (251). But its attempts failed. The PLO ignored how Mizrahim were forced into the dominant Ashkenazi structures to survive economically. Likewise, it discounted their civic commitment as Jews to a state that defines itself in terms of Jewish religion. The PLO was a secular liberation movement.The next two chapters survey the period between the 1967 war and the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. The reader is moved by encounters between Palestinians from the 1967 occupied territories and Mizrahim who had not seen each other since 1948, and by family reunifications between West Bank and Gaza Palestinians and 1948 Arabs or the Palestinians with Israeli citizenship. Likewise, Cohen describes the development of "push–pull dynamics of desire" (261) between the Mizrahi public and the Palestinians of the Occupied Territories. But Palestinians sharpened their consciousness in the wake of the military occupation and the West Bank, Golan, Gaza, and Sinai settlement enterprise, "viewing Jews from Muslim countries as thankless, who harm their benefactors of olden days" (265).In these chapters, Cohen also documents two contradictory moves. The first is the emergence of the smolavan—translated as the white-leftie-minis. In Mizrahi lingo, smolavan is a term for Ashkenazi lefties who enjoy white privilege. Conjoining smol ("left" in Hebrew, but also evoking the English small) and lavan ("white"), smolavan signifies this miniscule privileged group loathed by Israel's Mizrahi majority. The second is Ashkenazi initiatives demanding "the prohibition of returning occupied territories" to their pre-1967 sovereign owners—Syria, Jordan, and Egypt (267). Both moves had a near-complete absence of Mizrahim. Likewise, the postcolonial Palestinian elites perceived Mizrahim as primitive—the cheerleaders of European Zionist nationalism, who lacked any nationalist initiatives of their own. The Mizrahi–Palestinian alliance was resuscitated by the Jerusalem Black Panthers, but never evolved into a mass movement (290–92).The peace process with Egypt, the First Intifada, and galloping inflation widened the gaps between Mizrahim and Ashkenazim. During these years, "election campaigns revolved around the question of 'bands' i.e., the ethnic question . . . The political Right was Mizrahi . . . For the first time ever the Right clearly equated the Left with . . . cold elitism, and itself with traditionalism and love for Jewish Israel" (317). These were the years of the Oslo peace accords and the subsequent sobering from them. A rift opened. On its bluffs were Mizrahi intellectuals who identified themselves as radical Left advocating a Mizrahi–Arab alliance against Zionism, or a more moderate variety of a Mizrahi Zionist Left, employing its Arabness to "break a path towards peace" (368). On the other side were the Mizrahi publics, who perceived themselves as "those so familiar with the Arabs, and therefore demanding they be handled with an iron fist" (316).During these years, in both Mizrahi and Palestinian public consciousnesses, Mizrahiness transformed from a constructed identity into an essentialist one. This essentialization was due to "the Mizrahiness of . . . mobs who carried out lynchings" (339) against Palestinians. All the while Israel, a state run by an Ashkenazi elite, inflicted systemic violence upon Palestinians—in the form of military operations, land theft, mobility restrictions, and bureaucratic torture. This state violence was perceived as a national necessity, devoid of any ethnic or racial markers.Paradoxically, the Oslo years were the years when Mizrahi intellectual circuits, employing postcolonial identity politics, offered the analysis of Mizrahiness as a construction. Concurrently, however, Mizrahi identity acquired the fixity of an absolute essence in the Israeli public sphere—fusing discrimination immanent in the immediate typecasting of interpersonal interactions (accent, surname, phenotype) with religious nationalism anchored in a state that defines itself as a Jewish democracy: "Here we keep going around and around a central question: is there any conduct . . . or actions . . . toward Arabs that can be typified as Mizrahi?" (339).Cohen's book concludes with review and interpretation of current events that further nurture the fixity of the Mizrahi persona in Israel's popular imagination as an "Arab-hater," that is, a Palestinian-hater. Cohen notes that "the interplay between anti-Arab violence and Mizrahiness is a perception shared by both Ashkenazim, who perform white supremacy, and Mizrahim, who strive for restorative justice." He quotes Orly Noy, who explains that "within this evil system, our Mizrahi role as oppressors stems not only from having been victims of the Ashkenazi establishment, but also from the many dividends we reap as actors in this oppressive enterprise" (386), the occupation of Palestine. This is where Cohen finally reveals his book's key protagonist—the Ashkenazi-Zionist establishment. But he avoids pointing fingers by casting it in the passive voice: "The tunnels of racism were dug Who did the digging? . . . by social groups who classify other groups based on origin and then shunt them into the margins so that they themselves are able to remain in the center . . . and by other institutions who offered them redemption through Jewish supremacy . . . The racism springs forth . . . and transcends the Mizrahi embodied existence on the margins" (387).Spellbound yet irritated, I couldn't put the book down. Cohen's conclusions are not news either to me or to anyone following Mizrahi discourse, but I was enchanted by Cohen's individual case studies. He weaves them into such a spectacular yet sad tapestry. I was irked by the book's deployment of Zionist colonial terminology: "Bands" (`edot) instead of "ethnic groups." "'Band' discrimination" instead of "racism." "`Aliyah" ("ascendance," Hebrew) instead of "immigration."5 "Arabs" instead of "Palestinians." Cohen mostly relies on Israeli secondary sources authored by key figures in Israel's academic and public discourse, including the handful of Mizrahim among them. He even apologizes on behalf of the Ashkenazi establishment of the 1950s: "an apparatus that was on the verge of collapse because it was so overwhelmed with tasks" (219). There is an imbalance between Cohen's reliance on these sources and the fewer Palestinian sources he quotes.Baffling for us Mizrahi activists and scholars is the absence of the two formative affairs in the relationships between and among Mizrahim, Palestinians, and Ashkenazim: the Yemenite–Mizrahi–Balkan Children Affair and the Ringworm Children Affair.The Yemenite–Mizrahi–Balkan Children Affair was the systematic kidnapping of roughly 5,000 light-skinned Mizrahi, Balkan, and Yemenite babies from the 1930s through the 1970s. Health officials alleged that these infants died of illness, falsifying documents for their families without providing a body. Ashkenazi-Zionist politicians and bureaucrats sold or gave away these children in unconsented adoptions to childless Ashkenazi families in Israel and abroad.6The Ringworm Children Affair was when roughly 150,000 Mizrahi children were irradiated with high-dose X-rays in the 1950s (allegedly against ringworm) without their parents' consent or knowledge. These children suffered from lifelong disabilities and ailments, if not succumbing to an early death. Their development into adulthood was documented by the Israeli physicians responsible. Their souls rest between the pages of the most prestigious English-language medical journals. Mizrahim refer to the Ringworm Affair and the Yemeni Children Affair as "our holocaust."And how come Mordechai Vanunu is missing from the book? The courageous Moroccan anti-nuclear activist who revealed to the world the details of Israel's nuclear might! Suffering through decades of solitary confinement, forbidden to leave Israel for thirty-seven years to reunite with his Norwegian wife and the Minnesotan family who adopted him after he had been disowned by his family and community—forbidden even to greet the foreign nationals who come for solidarity visits in East Jerusalem.Why no mention of Vicki Knafo, the single mother from desolate Mitzpe Ramon, who in July 2003 initiated and led a Mizrahi single mothers' march on Jerusalem? The un- or underemployed Mizrahi mothers protested Israel's neoliberal austerity policies that reduced their welfare benefits to nothing. The massive protest encamped in front of the Finance Ministry. When Palestinian single mothers with Israeli citizenship joined the march, they brought the moms more international media attention—the media so transfixed on the Palestine–Israel binary. But shortly thereafter, the Mizrahi mothers kicked them out of the encampment because they were not Jewish. The camp disbanded in August, when a Palestinian guerrilla blew himself up in a Jerusalem bus. The rare international media attention to this Mizrahi struggle reverted to the habitual, bloody Palestine–Israel conflict.And what about the absence of Mifgash-Liqaa,7 the Hebrew–Arabic chromo quarterly edited by the late Mohammed Ghanaim? It translated short stories, poetry, and classical essays from Arabic to Hebrew and vice versa. It made a point of publishing Mizrahi authors whose native language was Arabic, who wrote in it or adopted Hebrew as their poetic language. At the time, this was quite a rarity. Mizrahi authors were at the margins of the Ashkenazi-dominated Hebrew literary scene, and their poetics therefore dismissed as "folklore."In sum, the book's focus is Israel's Ashkenazi dominance and hegemony and the two client groups interlocuted through this dominance—Mizrahim and Palestinians. Even when Palestinians and Mizrahim directly dialogue or quarrel with each other, their encounters are interlocuted by the Ashkenazi hegemon. He may be physically absent from the encounter, but as the one who makes the rules, his spirit always hovers over it. This hegemonic Ashkenazi interlocution is the crux of Cohen's book but is absent from his analysis as such.Cohen is a historian and I am an anthropologist who teased out from the book four analytical axes. Two are the concepts of colonialism and racism. They exist interdependently in the book, but Cohen avoids making them explicit. He does throw in the Ashkenazi "concept of white supremacy" (167) and the separatism of Jews in the Arab World (312), but does not employ these two as a throughline to thread together the book's riveting stories. Two other axes are conspicuous in their absence: The first is the interrelationship between the Mizrahi and Palestinian colonial conditions and the analytical categories of sex and gender. One cannot ungender either colonialism or racism. The second is the analysis of the diverse forms of kinship and familism. As of today, the family remains a keystone of social analysis. Also absent from the book is the relationship between the gender and family structures of Ashkenazim–Mizrahim–Palestinians on the one hand, and what Cohen terms "traditionalism" on the other. According to him, traditionalism leads to ultranationalism. But he does not conceive of ultranationalism as foundational to secular Ashkenaziness.This book had the potential to serve as an excellent case study of border epistemology—a decolonial analysis of the ways that the Mizrahim and the Palestinians are so deeply familiar with the Ashkenazi hegemon—a border zone, the interstices between the Palestine–Israel binary. It could have restored the Mizrahi and Palestinian originary knowledge while rescuing it from the vise of Eurocentric dominance. But Cohen does not read his sources "against the grain," and therefore does not follow the subaltern studies method for historical analysis. Rather, he goes with the flow of the hegemonic sources.The dominant discourse of Mizrahi studies has been shaped by Moroccan and Iraqi scholars and activists who focused on Mizrahi culture and society from the 1950s mass immigration onward. But year zero of the Mizrahi–Palestinian–Ashkenazi entanglement is 1882—an inexplicable lacuna in Cohen's book. The year 1882 links the Ashkenazi First Aliyah, a result of the "1881–1882 pogroms" (40), with the Yemenite E`eleh baTamar ("ascendance via palm trees," Hebrew) Aliyah. Yemenite Jews provided the Ashkenazi settlers with cheap Jewish labor, allowing them to avoid relying exclusively on the Palestinians as a local and available labor force. The Palestinian laborer had indigenous knowledge of the land, positioning him above the Yemenite immigrant "natural laborer," whose daily pittance was even less than the Palestinian's meager pay.Cohen's account of the Dry Twigs affair fails to notice the hierarchy that positioned three Yemenite women laborers under the Yemenite male laborers (151–52). Above both male and female Yemenite laborers was a Palestinian laborer. An Ashkenazi pioneer citrus grove owner objected to his Yemenite women workers collecting kindling at the end of the day. He ordered the Palestinian to tie the Yemenite women to the tail of his donkey and dragged them all the way to the moshava (settlement) of Rehovot's city plaza while the pioneer whipped them. It was the Palestinian who performed this humiliating decree against Yemenite Jewish women for the Ashkenazi settler.The Yemenites documented themselves meticulously and possess community center archives and self-published books. Many had private archives. Upon their death, their children donated these archives to municipal libraries or sold them to antiquarians and dealers. These could have served as sources for textual analysis intertwining economic exploitation, Mizrahi marginality, and grassroots labor organizing with the colonial capitalism of the Yishuv era.Cohen does not delve into Eastern European Jewish racism toward the Orient prior to Zionism's eruption. Employing subaltern analysis, he could have argued that this racism has fixed itself on all Zionist social structures and institutions, despite the paradigm shift Zionism offered Eastern European Jewish existence in the pre-Holocaust diaspora and, subsequently, in Israel. In antisemitic Eastern Europe, Jews had been an oppressed minority. They did not enjoy the liberal practices of equality, political freedom, secularism, and contractual relationships. Therefore, these were nothing but simulacra for the building blocks of Ashkenazi-Zionist superiority over Mizrahim—the thin veneer of civility for a political entity in the making, the medina ba-derekh that morphed into the state of Israel—a sovereign entity that declared itself paradoxically as both Jewish and democratic.Cohen hesitates to deduce from his impressive data sets that both Palestinians and Mizrahim experience the colonial lived realities as subalterns. While colonialism can end through national liberation movements, coloniality appears during the colonial phase and lingers beyond it. It seeps from the past into the present and shapes the societal contract and fabric. It is an ongoing state of being in which the hegemon superimposes over the subaltern its definitions for what counts as logic, processes of knowledge production, labor relations, kinship patterns, even what counts as hope — and takes credit for it.Attempting to locate the deep structure of the Palestinian resistance movement offered by Cohen, the reader might note that the logic of Zionist colonialism is turned topsy-turvy by Palestinians: Israelis are the "barbarians" who destroyed their indigenous civilizations, and they are the builders of a national liberation movement (138). But Mizrahi liberation movements mostly failed. From Cohen's case studies, it appears that while the Palestinian is the ultimate "Other," the Mizrahi is "the Other" who is "not an Other." For Mizrahim, Zionism is the dark side of modernity. No heralding of enlightenment or emancipation on one hand (69), and no indigeneity on the other. Rather, a chauvinistic degeneration. These days, some Mizrahim attempt rehabilitation as they form a frail middle class (11, 381).Despite his wealth of data describing some as biologically and culturally superior and others as inferior, Cohen hesitates to analyze Zionism's reliance on ideologies and practices of race. A racial formation, Zionism provided the foundation for the power relations between the settler-colonialist, proclaiming himself as secular, and his tradition-bound subalterns. It legitimized a hierarchy of social systems that bestowed upon the Ashkenazim control over both material and human capital—"the industrialization and modernization of old-guard Israel were based on the labor resources of the mass Aliyah from Muslim countries" (190). Moreover, Cohen hesitates to extrapolate from this statement that throughout the history that he surveys, the melding of European race(ism) and Jewish nationalism was the organizing principle for a thicket of "love–hate" entanglements. The thicket underpinned both the institutional and everyday construction of authority and obedience for Ashkenazim, Mizrahim, and Palestinians. This melding continues to dictate the intersubjectivities of sex and gender, kinship and family, and domestic and paid labor—the components of civic, communal, and (inter)personal lives. Race and religion determined who would be a blue-collar, minimum wage, rightless daily laborer and who would be represented by a workers' union. Race and religion determined who would have full citizenship in the nation-state and who would be second- or third-rate. Race and religion also determined that European knowledge possessed validity, and Mizrahi and Palestinian epistemologies were nothing but prejudiced primitivities.After 1967, when the smolavan groups appeared on Cohen's stage, they legitimized parts of the Palestinian epistemologies and thus granted them a niche in their activism and scholarship. As for Mizrahi epistemologies, when these resisted the Ashkenazi-Zionist knowledge regime prior to the 1990s, they were destroyed. But the 1990s signaled the emergence of Mizrahi identity politics, following global trends. Yet these were mostly subordinated to the Ashkenazi knowledge machine. To avoid jamming its cogs, Mizrahi identity politics focused mainly on the discursive performance of culture, devoid of transforming the political-economic foundation of the civic sphere. These days, both government funds and Jewish diaspora donations are invested in Mizrahi multiculturalism spiced with the holy trinity of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Monies are spent on cinema, literature, and other modes of song and dance displaying fashionable liberal pluralism staged by Jews of color. Not a word on Palestine. These performances do not offer restorative justice to the Mizrahi public, pushed yet again into the margins—this time around, those of the neoliberal global economy. According to Cohen, this pushing is a pattern that repeats itself again and again throughout the entire history he rigorously documents.It is difficult to dissociate the colonial state-of-being from its GendeRace. GendeRace is a neologism that assists me in the analysis of the Mizrahi condition. It signifies the solidification and crystallization of two fluid categories: "gender" and "race." In feminist analysis, gender and race are often considered categories that intersect with each other. This intersection is always in motion. But the lived realities of Mizrahi women constitute a reification where the intersection is jammed—when sets of phenomena and performances are etched into gender as a construction, while simultaneously alloyed with race as a construction. This pair morphs into an essence—GendeRace.In so doing, I walk the path of queer theory when it argues that one ought not assume a priori that the default category of the social always escapes essentialism. Rather, the social is essentialized. One learns to construct gender and race as cultural phenomena while concurrently one is socialized to identify them on the spot as primeval naturalisms. Take, for example, today, when I walked down Castro Street in San Francisco. Despite my keffiyeh scarf, three people greeted me with "hola" and started small talk in Spanish. I also wear an Arab phenotype but am often mistaken on the spot for a Latina—a category more commonly identified in California. I answered "salaam" and "shalom." Each looked perplexed and went on their way.Constructed as cultural phenomena, gender and race constitute a major component in the grand narrative of nationalism. As such, they transcend their construction and become naturalized—a Benjaminian second nature. An essence. Alloyed with each other, they become a fixity. Despite history's progress, GendeRace remains resilient—an active agent in the hierarchical formation of a nation.8Like any other Northern/Western democracy that adorns itself with pluralism, Israel is a formation of coloniality. The racialization and gendering of its non-European men and women are the building blocks for its construction of white phallocentric citizenship. In spite of the principle of equal rights enshrined in law, white privilege is therefore self-perpetuating. But the state of Israel defines itself as a national home for all Jews all over the world. Cohen's conclusions are correct when he argues that, for Mizrahim, the overlap of Judaism and (ultra)nationalism provides a "civic purity," differentiating them from the Arab non-Jews. This sense of belonging allows Mizrahim to climb the social ladder better (169, 200, 218–21, 236, 253, 376).Colonial capitalism comes with its own gendered division of labor. The hegemon destroys the inter- and intra-organic webs of subaltern gender relations. It ropes the subaltern patriarchy into its own patriarchal logic through the imposition of racism and sexism. Consider, once again, the Dry Twigs episode as the ultimate case study in colonial GendeRace hierarchies. Mizrahi and Palestinian lower-class women have been dehumanized from the Yishuv era to the present. Absent from Cohen's book are the Yishuv's housemaids. There were the Jewish Teimonichkes—Little Yemenite Women (Yiddish), akin to petite Aunt Jemimas. Some of the secular, elite Yekke (German Jewish) women of Jerusalem's Rehavya neighborhood preferred Palestinian housemaids. Absent as well are the moshavot's (settlements') prepubescent Yemenite housemaids, who were nicknamed "small domestic animals."Deploying sexual violence, the Ashkenazi-Zionist regime exploited the racialized Mizrahi woman for birthing Jewish citizens to augment the demographics of the Jewish state in mandatory Palestine and as a cheap workforce. Childbearing Palestinians had to be driven out beyond the Rhodes armistice lines to secure a Jewish majority.9 Ashkenazi women were also subject to oppression, but unlike Mizrahi and Palestinian women, they were deemed civilized humans for birthing cultured babies. The Jewish state was organized as a heteronormative system whose components c