Internal Troubles

This morning we met with a woman named Ayala, who is the current head of the Israeli Black Panthers Party. She is a Moroccan Jew. Her parents immigrated here in 1952 during what was a second wave of Arab Jewish immigration to Israel. During the War of Independence in 1948 many Jews in Arab countries were no longer really welcome in those Arab countries and about 1 million of them immigrated to Israel. Israel enticed them here because it was eager to populate the country with as many Jews as possible. However, given that their culture, as Arabs, was very different from that of the Anglo European Jews who were the founders of the Zionist movement and the leaders of the newly formed state, they found themselves ghettoized almost immediately upon arrival. They were first put in settlement camps and then relocated to homes vacated by Palestinians. They tended to be sent to locations along the border of the newly created State to stake the claim of Israel to those new borders. They generally held the lower paying, lower status jobs in Israel and were not welcome to mix with the European Jews. In Jerusalem, they were housed in an urban ghetto, not far from the Old City. They did not have the same educational opportunities as the European Jews and they faced considerable discrimination. Their situation was, and remains, similar to the conditions that African Americans suffered even after the abolition of slavery in terms of being second class citizens, living in segregated, walled off areas of cities and towns, with much less economic opportunity available to them and facing prejudice because of their dark skin.

Ayala was one of 10 children. When her family first arrived in Jerusalem, they were housed in a home in the Mizrahi section of town, that had formally been a Palestinian neighborhood. After the 1967 war the Israeli government moved her family to a housing project that they built for the Middle Eastern Jews. As Ayala described her childhood, she said that the Middle Eastern Jews got along well with the Palestinians because they all shared a language and culture. They all felt equally alienated from the European Jewish White majority. During the early 70s her brother founded the Israeli Black Panther party, which worked to bring justice to the Middle Eastern Jews, sometimes with violent consequences. Ayala’s brother spent time in jail and she has done her share of jail time too. In fact, she is going to jail next week for 8 days, because of her current activities among the homeless population of her neighborhood. They had a “tent in” (kind of like a sit in only they stayed in tents in the city to protest the lack of affordable housing for the poor and the plight of the many homeless people in their neighborhood) and when the event was over the Israeli police arrested her because they said she didn’t clean up the area properly when the event was done. (Which is a joke because if you could see the streets of E. Jerusalem and her neighborhood in particular you would see that littering is quite obviously a common practice by everyone!!). To this day there is considerable distance and hostility between the Mizrahi Jews and the Ashkenazi Jews. Ayala is now the head of the current Black Panther Party and she is committed to community organizing and to working to better the living conditions for these Middle Eastern Jews.

Ayala believes there should be one, binational state. She also suggested that the Israeli government would be well served to invite the Mizrahi Jews into the negotiations with the Palestinians because these Jews and the Palestinians get along well, understand each other’s language and culture and they could be very helpful in bridging the gap between the Palestinians and the mainstream Israeli Jews. She also said that considerable work needs to be done in Israel to heal relations among the Ashkenazi Jews and the Mizrahi Jews. As she described the situation here, it sounded remarkably like the issues between whites and African Americans in the United States. A lot of churches and other groups are working hard to do anti-racism work, to begin to bridge the cultural and economic gaps between whites and African Americans. From what Ayala told us, the same anti-racism process would be most helpful here between these two very different groups of Jews.

We have come to the end of our incredible journey and we are all feeling exhausted and somewhat overwhelmed by all we’ve seen and heard. It has been a very full and rich two weeks as we have gone into the belly of the beast in this conflict. Several of us have remarked that although we have not done the traditional “Pilgrimage Tour” of the Holy Land, visiting religious shrines and sites of Biblical significance, we have in fact walked in the steps of Jesus by spending our time among the oppressed and marginalized. Ironically, if Jesus were alive today, he would be dealing with the prejudice, the apartheid, and the oppression that we have witnessed in the West Bank and E. Jerusalem because he was a Palestinian Jew! It seems fitting to have spent my first tour of the Holy Land doing this work, rather than visiting tourist shrines.

We leave here at 3:00 am to get to Tel Aviv for a 6:00 flight. If all goes well, I will arrive back in Rochester some 27 hours later! Let’s hope I manage to get through 4 airports with no delays, lost luggage or other adventures!