My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel (45 page)

So when Deri was born in Meknes in 1959, the first secular Oriental-Israeli uprising erupted in the poor Haifa neighborhood of Wadi Salib. When Deri was in the wretched Hadera boarding school in 1970, the second secular Oriental-Israeli uprising erupted in the poor Jerusalem neighborhood of Musrara, with the appearance of the local Black Panthers. When Deri was a yeshiva student in Jerusalem in the mid-1970s, a secular, cultural Oriental uprising erupted with new Oriental music, ignored by mainstream radio and TV but played in every nightclub along the Bat Yam promenade. Deri was not aware of all these developments because he joined Israel late and because even then he lived in an ultra-Orthodox enclave. Even when Begin was elected in 1977 with the enthusiastic support of Oriental Israelis, Deri was not enthusiastic at all. As a disciple of Rabbi Shach, who never believed in the Zionist state, he did not approve of Begin’s Jewish nationalism. Yet after Begin faded away and left behind the orphaned masses of Oriental Israelis, Deri saw the vacuum and was quick to fill it. First he presented Rabbi Ovadia Yosef as an alternative father figure to Begin. Then he introduced Rabbi
Kaduri as a comforting mystical figure. Then he defined himself as the martyr of Oriental Judaism. In this way he managed to detach himself from the political and the mundane and acquire for a while the other-worldliness of a semimythological figure.

As I drive out of Jerusalem I listen to a compilation of songs by Zohar Argov. Argov was born in the same Rishon LeZion neighborhood that Deri’s family was sent to in 1968. For months the Argovs and the Deris lived not far apart. In the early 1970s, the tender, aching songs of the shy, lanky singer conquered downstairs Israel and became the anthems of its struggle. They were sold on cassettes in Tel Aviv’s chaotic central bus station, they were sung at weddings, they were a hit in the Oriental nightclubs that popped up in Bat Yam, Jaffa, Netanya, Lydda, and Ramleh. For years Argov was not recognized by upstairs Israel. And when he was finally embraced, he took an overdose of drugs and died. Although his heartbreaking songs deal mostly with love and loss, they seem to fill my car with the great pain of the downtrodden. As I drive down the highway that the Deri convoy traveled to Maasiyahu Prison, I hear in Argov’s ballads the howl of the long-suffering Oriental Israel.

When I was a child, Oriental Jews were not recognized as such. Although they already constituted almost half of Israel’s population, they were oppressed and ignored. In an odd sort of way they were present and not present, belonging and not belonging. They were followed by a constant cloud of doubt and suspicion. They were not our lot, not really us.

In the army I was already a minority. In the paratrooper platoon I served in, elitist Ashkenazim like me were mocked. But only after the 1977 political upheaval that brought Menachem Begin to power—and the violent, inflammatory election campaign of 1981—was political power transferred to the other people. One could no longer ignore the fact that Oriental Jews were the majority. They came out of the immigrant camps and housing estates and development towns to which they had been confined for over a generation to capture the city square. Politically speaking, they were Likud. Socioeconomically, they were contractors and small business owners. Culturally, they were fans of Zohar Argov, whose music I did not yet appreciate.

But in liberal Ashkenazi circles, the surge of Oriental Jews brought about an ugly response. The racism of the 1980s and 1990s was even more repulsive than that of the previous era, scornful and maligning: They are nouveau riche. They don’t behave. Their English is atrocious. They are so sensitive regarding their honor. They are Indians. Levantines. Likudniks. They disgrace the state we founded and eventually will take us down with them. In these comments, I saw the dark side of Israel’s enlightenment, a lack of a civility in people who claim to be civilized. The Oriental story fascinated me. As I listened to more and more immigrant stories, and to more and more stories of oppression, I realized we had done wrong. I feared that the pain of Oriental Israelis might one day blow us to pieces.

In a sense, it is just like Aharon Appelfeld’s story. The same state that denied the Diaspora and denied the Holocaust and denied Palestine also denied the Orient. Perhaps there was no other way. In order to survive, the establishment tried to forge one strong people and build a unified state. But the human price was heavy. The long-term consequences were severe. We have wounded millions of Oriental Jews.

Yet there is another way to look at all this. There is a politically incorrect truth here that is not easy to express. And this truth is that Israel did a favor to those it extracted from the Orient. The Jews there had no real future in the new Baghdad, the new Beirut, the new Cairo, or the new Meknes. Had they stayed, they would have been annihilated. But forcing them to forgo their identity and culture was foolhardy, callous, and cruel. To this day, many Oriental Israelis are not aware of what Israel saved them from: a life of misery and backwardness in an Arab Middle East that turned ugly. To this day Israel is not aware of the pain it inflicted when it crushed the culture and identity of the Oriental Jews it absorbed. Neither Zionist Israel nor its Oriental population had fully recognized the traumas of the 1950s and 1960s. Neither has yet found a way to honor it and contain it—and make peace with it. This is why the wound lingers on.

In a Tel Aviv café, I meet Gal Gabai. A friend and colleague, Gabai is a journalist and the anchor of a popular political talk show. I ask her what makes her identify with Aryeh Deri. “You are a secular feminist left-winger,”
I say to her. “You are committed to democracy, liberalism, and the rule of law. Why are you mesmerized by this ultra-Orthodox politician who was convicted of taking bribes and whose world is so distant from yours?”

Gabai, who is a decade younger than Deri, says that ever since she was a young girl in 1970s Beersheba, she remembers being torn between two polar forces. One was
ruge raas:
the edict to hold your head high. The other was
khshumeh:
shame, the need to hide from others, not to let them see you in your disgrace. For dozens of years
khshumeh
was stronger than
ruge raas
, shame stronger than pride. “There was a feeling that there was something wrong with us, with Oriental Jews,” Gabai says. “That there was something tainted and inferior. That’s why we bowed down to the Ashkenazim and abased ourselves before them. There was a subtle, complicated sort of self-loathing, a deep unease with one’s self. Until Deri came and proved that we could stand tall and proud—walk among the Ashkenazim as equals. Deri brought North African Jewish tradition to center stage. He said we were just as good, if not better. He awoke the
ruge raas
in us. He let us lift our heads high. He gave even Oriental yuppies like me the ability to be at peace with ourselves and feel worthy. Deri meant I could be accepted in Tel Aviv without turning my back on Beersheba. He meant we could succeed in the West without betraying the East.

“I remember the overwhelming identification with Deri in my grandmother’s housing estate in Beersheba,” Gabai recalls. “Deri enabled the housing estate to go back to the traditions that Labor never recognized and the Likud never encouraged. Deri offered a traditional cultural option that was not shameful, backward, or fanatical. He put a stop to our mimicry of the Ashkenazim. He wiped away the shame. He won us over by not wearing a costume, by not disguising himself. Unlike the Oriental Israeli leaders who preceded him, Deri was authentic. He was at peace with himself and at peace with his Oriental identity. While others pretended to be Europeans, Deri said proudly he was a Moroccan. This was liberating. You cannot imagine, Ari, how liberating this was. At last one of us, a Moroccan from Meknes, was not afraid of who he was and was not afraid to say it. He was proud of himself, even full of himself.

“I have a theory,” Gabai says. “In Israel, belonging is bought with
blood. We Oriental Jews didn’t bleed enough into the river of belonging. We were not murdered in the Holocaust. We did not get killed in the War of Independence. We did not participate in the formative saga of Holocaust heroism revival. We were imported here and we were imported late. We were imported only because European Jewry was exterminated and there was no other way to grow the state. That’s why there is always a shadow hovering over us: this place was not really meant for us. This communal house doesn’t quite suit us. It was, and it remains, alien to us. We have no other home, but for us, Israel is not quite home. We are not at ease here as one should be in one’s home.

“Let me put it this way,” Gabai continues. “In its terms of reference and in its mission statement, the State of Israel never planned for Aryeh Deri or Gal Gabai. That’s not who it had in mind. But at the end of the day, the European fort was housed by Arab-speaking Jews. By Aryeh Deri and Gal Gabai. But the fundamental structure of the fort and the ethos of its builders sentenced Aryeh Deri and Gal Gabai to remain outside in a sense. Western Zionism feared us. It feared the Arabism we brought with us: the Arab music, the smells and tastes of Arab cuisine, Arab mannerisms. Think about it, something amazing happened here. After the Holocaust, Zionism imported a million Jewish Arabs here so they’d save it, demographically, from the Arab world. But after it brought these Jewish Arabs, Zionism panicked because of their Arabic identity. It sensed danger in my grandfather’s Moroccan music, and in my grandmother’s Moroccan cooking, and in my father’s Moroccan tradition. It feared that we Oriental Jews would dissolve Western Zionism from within.

“That’s why they steamrolled us,” Gabai says. “They had to dominate us. The problem was not one of socioeconomic injustice. It wasn’t about housing or welfare or income. The new immigrants from Poland and Romania had it hard, too. But the difference between them and us was that from the very beginning they belonged. They were the ones the State of Israel was meant for and planned for. From the outset we were under suspicion. So we were culturally castrated. We were expected to relinquish what we were previously. We had to prove daily that we were not Arabs. The outcome was an internal struggle that is tearing us apart to this day. We do not accept ourselves and we do not love ourselves. We are split between worlds that don’t really intersect.
And we are always asked to present proof. We have to prove we are not inferior and not flawed. We have to prove we have totally assimilated. We must prove daily that we are not Arabs anymore.

“You wouldn’t get it,” Gabai tells me. “You are from here. You belong. In Israel you are always at home. You own the place. But I was raised knowing that there was an inner circle that I was not a part of. There was an alpha group, and I was not in it. Because there was so much love at home, I was empowered. I had my own well of strength. So I insisted on breaking in. I wanted to be with the strong, with those who belonged. That was also the message I got from my family. Their first message was education: study, study, study. But it was clear that knowledge on its own would not suffice. To really get ahead one had to bleach oneself. Progeny bleaching was the best vehicle for social mobility. My beloved grandmother would say it to me in her native tongue: ‘For you, Gal, a Moroccan will not do, only a Polish boy.’ And this went right into my subconscious. No way would I have a Moroccan spouse—if I’d married a Moroccan he would have been an earnest social worker and I would have been a caring high school teacher, and in the evenings we would listen to nice ethnic music in our three-room apartment in a Beersheba housing estate. But because I was ambitious, I had to mate with white power. I had to dilute the black in me with white sperm.

“Our home was filled with music. Even when times were hard, our rooms were filled with the warm sounds of Moroccan music. But my grandmother took me to a classical music concert and when we came out it was clear that I would play the mandolin—not the Moroccan
oud
, but the Russian mandolin; not Farid al-Atrash but Tchaikovsky. I love Tchaikovsky. I love the mandolin. But within me there is always a yearning for what was lost, a yearning for Arabism. When I visit Arab friends, my eyes tear up. When I watch Arab movies, I am all emotion. I know that there, in Morocco, my father was at ease. In Israel he was never at ease. And he passed his unease to me. Although I live in Tel Aviv and I host a television show, I am not at ease within my own skin. I don’t delude myself. For me Arabism is closed off. But in a sense, Israeliness is closed off as well. Although my three kids are half-Ashkenazi, Ashkenazi Israel does not accept me as I am. Israel still suspects me.

“That’s why Deri was so important,” Gabai says. “Before and after Deri, most Oriental Jews in Israel channeled their pain to nationalist
politics and Likud support. This was artificial and wrong, as most Oriental Jews are not extremists. And when Deri came along it was different. He addressed the Oriental-Jewish inferiority complex and the Oriental-Jewish sense of longing. He made our pain legitimate. But what was really wonderful was his alliance with Rabin. When Yitzhak Rabin and Aryeh Deri formed their alliance in the early 1990s, it was much more than a political compact. Rabin represented the kibbutz, the Palmach, and Tel Aviv; he was the mythological Sabra and warrior of Zionism. Deri was Meknes–Bat Yam–Jerusalem. He was the hero of Oriental Israel. When Rabin and Deri stood together, we could all stand together. When Rabin and Deri looked each other in the eye, we could all look each other in the eye. There was mutual recognition. There was a way to combine political moderation with ethnic pride. Now the Oriental Jews could prove themselves not by hating the Arabs but by being a bridge to the Arabs. For the first time there was hope that Zionism would make peace both with the Arabs without and the Arabs within. But then Rabin was assassinated and Deri was convicted and everything fell apart. The moment of grace of the early 1990s passed. And the more Deri was persecuted, the more rage there was. People were angry at the white establishment that hounded him. But people were angry at Deri, too. Perhaps everybody in politics is corrupt, but he should not have been. He should have been cleaner than clean. Because he had a mission. He was endowed with a crucial historic role. He was our entry ticket. He was supposed to let us in, make us belong. But because he’d fallen, this couldn’t happen. Our hope seemed to have been an illusion. And we all knew we didn’t stand a chance. We could not be ourselves. All we could do was to adjust, to mimic, to give up and mimic. To go back to
khshumeh
.”