Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Chapter Abstracts
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction. The Arab Lefts from the 1950s to the 1970s: Transnational Entanglements and Shifting Legacies
- 1 Unforgettable Radicalism: Al-Ittihad ’s Words in Hebrew Novels
- 2 Beating Hearts: Arab Marxism, Anti-colonialism and Literatures of Coexistence in Palestine/Israel, 1944–60
- 3 Free Elections versus Authoritarian Practices: What Baathists Fought For
- 4 Dealing with Dissent: Khalid Bakdash and the Schisms of Arab Communism
- 5 A Patriotic Internationalism: The Tunisian Communist Party’s Commitment to the Liberation of Peoples
- 6 Internationalist Nationalism: Making Algeria at World Youth Festivals, 1947–62
- 7 Travelling The orist: Mehdi Ben Barka and Morocco from Anti-colonial Nationalism to the Tricontinental
- 8 Marxism or Left-Wing Nationalism? The New Left in Egypt in the 1970s
- 9 Non-Zionists, Anti-Zionists, Revolutionaries: Palestinian Appraisals of the Israeli Left, 1967–73
- 10 ‘Dismount the horse to pick some roses’: Militant Enquiry in Lebanese New Left Experiments, 1968–73
- 11 The ‘Che Guevara of the Middle East’: Remembering Khalid Ahmad Zaki’s Revolutionary Struggle in Iraq’s Southern Marshes
- 12 Crisis and Critique: The Transformation of the Arab Radical Tradition between the 1960s and the 1980s
- 13 The Afterlives of Husayn Muruwwa: The Killing of an Intellectual, 1987
- Afterword. The Arab Left: From Rumbling Ocean to Revolutionary Gulf
- Index
1 - Unforgettable Radicalism: Al-Ittihad ’s Words in Hebrew Novels
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 October 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Chapter Abstracts
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction. The Arab Lefts from the 1950s to the 1970s: Transnational Entanglements and Shifting Legacies
- 1 Unforgettable Radicalism: Al-Ittihad ’s Words in Hebrew Novels
- 2 Beating Hearts: Arab Marxism, Anti-colonialism and Literatures of Coexistence in Palestine/Israel, 1944–60
- 3 Free Elections versus Authoritarian Practices: What Baathists Fought For
- 4 Dealing with Dissent: Khalid Bakdash and the Schisms of Arab Communism
- 5 A Patriotic Internationalism: The Tunisian Communist Party’s Commitment to the Liberation of Peoples
- 6 Internationalist Nationalism: Making Algeria at World Youth Festivals, 1947–62
- 7 Travelling The orist: Mehdi Ben Barka and Morocco from Anti-colonial Nationalism to the Tricontinental
- 8 Marxism or Left-Wing Nationalism? The New Left in Egypt in the 1970s
- 9 Non-Zionists, Anti-Zionists, Revolutionaries: Palestinian Appraisals of the Israeli Left, 1967–73
- 10 ‘Dismount the horse to pick some roses’: Militant Enquiry in Lebanese New Left Experiments, 1968–73
- 11 The ‘Che Guevara of the Middle East’: Remembering Khalid Ahmad Zaki’s Revolutionary Struggle in Iraq’s Southern Marshes
- 12 Crisis and Critique: The Transformation of the Arab Radical Tradition between the 1960s and the 1980s
- 13 The Afterlives of Husayn Muruwwa: The Killing of an Intellectual, 1987
- Afterword. The Arab Left: From Rumbling Ocean to Revolutionary Gulf
- Index
Summary
Introduction
In August 2012, the novelist and former communist Sami Michael (born 1926) created a local storm when he delivered a speech on ethnic relations in Israel. The left-leaning Israeli blog 972+, which later published it, called the speech ‘a “cri du coeur” that is full of love and grief ’. In his speech, Michael, who was born and raised in Iraq and migrated to Israel in 1949, voiced important criticisms of the Israeli Left itself, as he reflected on the rift between Jews of Middle Eastern descent (known as ‘Mizrahim’ or ‘Eastern Jews’) and European Jews (known as ‘Ashkenazim’):
Until today, more than sixty years after the state of Israel was established, this rift has not been mended. Mentally, it takes the form of racism, and socially it expresses the gap in status …The salon leftists – and in Israel, it is worth noting, the leftists have never left the salon – repudiated Eastern Jewry as expendable ‘raw material’, or in the Communist jargon of that time: the ‘lumpen-proletariat’. This was in spite of the fact that immigrants from Egypt, Lebanon and Bulgaria, and especially from Iraq, held an impressive Communist record from their countries of origin. The Communist establishment in Israel treated these immigrants with blatant arrogance. At the beginning of the 1950s there were immigrant camps in which 20 per cent of their dwellers voted for the Communist Party in the Knesset. Not one of them was promoted to a position of any value in the party. The Central Committee of the Communist Party was and still remains today more ‘purified’ of Mizrahi Jews than any other establishment in the state. The suspicion and arrogance towards the Mizrahi communities was a solid impenetrable barrier in the ranks of the Communist Party.
Michael concluded that the country's discriminatory attitude towards Mizrahi Jews and Arabs qualified it for the title of ‘most racist state’. That a former communist and the head of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel should have such opinions is perhaps unsurprising.
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- Information
- The Arab LeftsHistories and Legacies, 1950s–1970s, pp. 18 - 38Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2020