Comment by runarberg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by runarberg | Hacker News Reader

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I went digging around for numbers in these wikipedia articles:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Israel#Jews

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_Jews#Population

These articles agree that Jews of European ancestry comprise around 44.2% vs 44.9% of Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) ancestry. The study that gave these numbers admitted on having methodological limitations, so it may be undercounting MENA ancestry.

Another interesting statistic is the paternal ancestral origin of Israeli Jews, with 37% having Israeli paternal origin, 34.6% European, American or Oceanic, and only 27.9% having Asian or African. So at least for the last couple of generations, a plurality of immigrants of of European descent.

I’m sorry, but I’m not finding the well over 50% statistic.

What is also interesting to me is the lack of official statistics from the Israeli government about this ethnic brake down, especially since they make distinctions between Jews and Arabs, which kind of implies—at least to my ears—Arab Jews should not exist. To my ears Israeli culture fancies it self as European (being a member of UEFA, partaking in Eurovision, etc.).

It really looks to me like Israel has made an effort and succeeded in stripping Middle Eastern Jews of their identity[1]. A major tell sign is how Jews of Middle Eastern and North African ancestry speak Hebrew, not Arabic, despite the latter both being a minority language spoken in Israel, and despite the latter being the language of their ancestors. Colonizers often do stunts like these when absorbing the colonized population into their own culture.

1: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2017/9/20/invention-of-th...

I'm necroposting here, but this has been stuck in my head for a week:

Israel participates in Eurovision because it's a member of the EBU. Several Arab states are also members of the EBU, including neighbor states Jordan, Lebanon, and Egypt, along with Libya and Morocco (which has in fact participated). The Arab states are boycotting Eurovision because of Israel's participation.

It seems pretty clear that whatever other factors you want to weigh here, you can't judge Israel's Europeanness by its inclusion in Eurovision.

The UEFA story is roughly the same, just slightly worse and Israel did not end up there by choice or some self-perception of European-ness.

I just used those of examples of how much Israel fancies it self as a European culture. There are more examples, which together makes a convincing argument that Israel is way more a European culture than it is Middle Eastern.

> Israel participates in Eurovision because it's a member of the EBU

No, that is not the reason, being a member of EBU is neither a necessity nor sufficient reason for entry. Morocco is the only non-European EBU member to ever participate, they did it once in 1980, came in second to last (above Finland) with Italy the only country to give them points. They have not participated since probably because of poor cultural fit.

On the flip side, Australia has participated multiple times without being an EBU member. The only reason Australia participates is because of the shared European culture.

> The Arab states are boycotting Eurovision because of Israel's participation.

The Arab states have not participated even in the years which Israel is not competing, which was the case in 1980. Turkey has participated multiple times along side Israel, even in 2011 a year after the Gaza flotilla raid.

That said the Arab states may be boycotting because of Israel’s participation, but that does not disproof the fact that Israel participates because it fancies it self as European.

> The UEFA story is roughly the same

Perhaps, but Israel applied to and were granted memberships to the UEFA based on their European cultural identity. Greenland was not given the same break and had to apply to CONCACAF (but Kazakhstan was; curiously). When South Africa was kicked out of CAF they did not ask to join UEFA or OFC, instead had to wait until they ended Apartheid and then rejoin CAF.

Israel is way more a European culture than it is Middle Eastern.

This really is not a productive line of thinking, you know. As the Palestinians keep saying -- it make no difference to them where the settlers came from, or what their culture is.

If anything it seems to indicate an unusual fixation on (what you perceive as) the essential traits of Israelis. Which in turn feeds into the right-wing propaganda that all serious criticism of Israeli policy and/or Zionism is fundamentally dishonest and driven by you-know-what. It's like candy to them, in fact.

The only reason Australia participates is because of the shared European culture.

Then start a campaign to have Australia booted out of Eurovision. Go ahead and shout down their performers every time they take the stage, whatever you gotta do. But if that's the only substantive point you have against Israel's participation -- it's an awfully weak one. And again, suggests a weird and lopsided fixation with the topic.

[Morocco has] not participated since probably because of poor cultural fit.

Their music is infinitely better than almost anything that makes it to the perennial Schlockfest that is Eurovision, for starters. But we digress here.

I agree, this is a weird fixation, I regret going down this rabbit hole. I’m personally a little obsessed with European colonialism, and I don’t think people give European colonialism enough credit for the horrors it caused. It really ought to be like slavery is to the US, but rather it is something people think of as inevitable and some people are even proud of.

That said, I don’t care if Australia participates in Eurovision, even though it is yucky to think of it being a product of European settler colonialism (plus their songs usually suck), the current day Australian culture and politics is kind of divorced from that history of horrors now. I do want Israel booted of Eurovision though, not because they are not European enough for me, but because they engage in gross human rights violations. A country doing that has no business participating in international cultural events.

> Their music is infinitely better than almost anything that makes it the perennial Schlockfest that is Eurovision

Ohh, I deffinetly agree. Eurovision would benefit tremendously if Morocco would participate. I advocated for Bashar Murad this year actually (but couldn’t vote since I don’t live in Iceland any more). Even Greenland could help make Eurovision infinity better, regrettably Eurovision is too much of a colonialfest to ever allow Greenland to participate except via Denmark or Iceland.

I did not watch Eurovision this year—the first time in my life—because of Israel’s participation. Despite the songs usually being very bad, I find the whole show to be enjoyable, ironically one of my favorite songs is Israel’s 1987 song. This year however, there was no joy to be found. And it pains me to say it, but I don’t think I will watch Eurovision ever again unless they start taking a firm stance against human rights abuses of participating countries.

It's worse, for sure. For example, when it comes to clubs in illegal settlements by Israel, UEFA and FIFA are not enforcing their own rules : https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/sep/25/fifa-kick-isra....

Israel was also allowed to participate in Eurovision a couple of times while KAN was violating EBU rules about publicly funded news broadcasting.

I’m also not sure about the EBU rules, but I find it curious that Russia was prohibited from participating in Eurovision because of their government’s use of state media to spread disinformation, but at the same time, EBU does not issue the same suspension to Israel (especially now when Al Jazeera is banned).

If 44.9% (or more) of Israeli Jews are of Middle Eastern descent, and 20% of Israel’s entire population are Palestinian Arabs (I.e. also of Middle Eastern descent) then more than 50% of the entire population of the country (Jews + non-Jews) are of Middle Eastern descent.

And the biggest ethnic grouping (if you choose to group them that way, as all such groupings are somewhat arbitrary) are Middle Eastern Jews.

And I’m sorry but it just sounds like you’ve never lived in Israel or even visited for an extended period of time. Aside from the relatively recent immigrants from the former Soviet Union (starting from the 90s) Jews of all backgrounds speak primarily Hebrew, whether Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Mizrahi, or whatever. Aside from some ultra orthodox you will also not find anyone under 80 speaking Yiddish.

I see, however I was under the impression that Jews in Arabic countries (including Palestine) spoke primarily Arabic, and it was only after they migrated (or were otherwise absorbed into) Israel when they converted to Hebrew. And that the modern Hebrew language was a Zionist effort (a European colonial enterprise) to convert all immigrants to Israel to Hebrew speakers. So even though today most Israeli Jews speak Hebrew, the only reason for that is the colonial prospects of European settlers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judeo-Arabic_dialects#Present_...

It is hard to understand the point you're trying to make here. Israeli Jewish people of Iraqi origin are MENA people, not "colonial Europeans". I don't know that trying to sort out whether Hebrew is European or not is an especially productive enterprise.

Israeli Jewish people of Iraqi origin are MENA people, not "colonial Europeans."

I'd recommend you also start reading more carefully, please.

This (the idea that "MENA are European") is very clearly not what runarberg is saying. Nor are they even remotely suggesting that "Hebrew is European".

You're responding to a comment that opens up "it is hard to understand what point you're making". You can tell me what the point he's making is, if you're confident in it.

In turn, I'll be more careful about using quotation marks. That's an HN tic that I sometimes forget.

While I have both of your attention --- you all get that this is the same group of like 4-6 people talking to themselves, over and over, right? On HN, a 2-day-old threat is necrotic. As I've said elsewhere, I only really have two angles on this issue: (1) that Israelis aren't European and Gazans aren't Hamas, and (2) that none of this is ever going to get settled on HN.

The thing that sparked my interest here is a sidenote in one of the cited Wikipedia articles:

> Not all Jews immigrating to Israel from European countries are of Ashkenazi origin (the majority of French Jews are of Sephardic, and some Jews from the Asian Republics of the USSR are Mizrahi), and the Israeli government does not distinguish between Jewish communities in its census. [1]

That is how the Israeli government doesn’t track European vs. MENA ethnicity, instead leaving it up to studies to guess. And it took me on a rabbit hole of trying to figure out why that is. It feels very odd to separate between Arabs and Jews, but not allow Jews to identify as Arab-Jew in the population statistics.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_Jews

What I’m trying to argue is that Israelis of middle east and north African ancestry are also victims of European colonization. That their cultural identity was erased and absorbed into the dominant European identity.

The introduction of Modern Hebrew was unmistakably a Zionist enterprise (which it self is a breed of European colonialism). As I’m reading through the linked sources in the Wikipedia article I cited I see how much of a cultural pressure Arabic speaking immigrants were put into speaking Hebrew, not Arabic, in public. As if their language (and by extension their cultural identity) was dirty somehow:

> “I wanted people to speak Hebrew,” she said. “Kids who had Yiddish in their house felt the same. It was more so for those of us coming from the Islamic world, since Arabic was identified as the language of the enemy.” [1]

Now Yiddish speaker probably experienced something similar, but at least they had other aspects of their culture accepted:

> But the builders of the Israeli state faced a major ideological challenge with the Jewish population of the Middle East, who were encouraged to mass migrate to Palestine and used as cheap labour to build Zionist settlements. What the European colonisers found particularly “disturbing” about the Mizrahi Jews was their “Arab character”.

> As Israel’s first female prime minister, Golda Meir, declared: “Every loyal Jew must speak Yiddish, for he who does not know Yiddish is not a Jew.”

> That is, the only true Jewish identity was the one that the Ashkenazi elite had brought from Europe; the Jewishness of the Mizrahim (or Sephardim) was “impure”. Because of that, they were deemed susceptible to “Arab influence” and their loyalty questioned. Action had to be taken swiftly to control this “suspect” Jewish community which soon became half of the Israeli population. [2]

This kind of reminds me of modern day California, how many Latin American immigrants (first and second generation) don’t feel comfortable speaking Spanish in public, instead speaking the language of the dominant culture, and having a part of their cultural identity erased as a result.

1: https://jewishstandard.timesofisrael.com/recovering-judeo-ar...

2: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2019/3/21/singing-in-euro...

I took this to #judaism on a Slack I'm on (I'm not Jewish; I'm Irish/Slavic Catholic) and got an earful about how complex the history is here:

* The people of the Old Yishuv spoke Yiddish and Ladino, European languages, as well as Israeli Arabic; European language influence long predates Zionism.

* The European character you're imputing to Modern Hebrew is its pronunciation, but Hebrew itself is the common character of all those languages, Ashkenazic, Sephardic, and Arabic.

* Jewish people in the Middle Eastern diaspora generally spoke Hebrew-inflected dialects of the regional languages (as you noted with the Judeo-Arabic page).

* Israel is a melting pot of influences from the Jewish diaspora; for instance, Morrocan Jewish people determined the way Passover is celebrated (with Mimouna). Everything cuts in every direction.

I'm not doing all this stuff justice (in case anyone from that Slack is reading this comment); just to say, all of this stuff is super complicated.

What I'd like to understand better is: the comment you were responding to was defending the proposition that significant numbers (a plurality, I think?) of Israelis are indigenous MENA people. I get that there was probably cultural pressure to adopt Hebrew, and that modern Hebrew is associated with the Zionist cause. The Mizrahim generally arrived in Israel after the Nakba (in a series of counter-Nakbas), and were poorer, more rural, and less privileged than the Israelis who met them there. Sure, that rings true.

But what difference does that make to the point the parent commenter was making? I'm just trying to understand the argument.

(This I guess is a second reason I pop up on these threads: to get an excuse to get my head blown off with historical and linguistic facts from friends on Slacks).

I actually don’t think this is related. I entered this thread by misunderstanding my parent and getting the numbers wrong. Then I stated:

> What is also interesting to me is the lack of official statistics from the Israeli government about this ethnic brake down.

I saw this in one of the cited Wikipedia article (and my anti-colonial bells started ringing) which brought me down this rabbit hole (see other post).

Gotcha. This is like 80% me nerding out at this point.

Aside from the relatively recent immigrants from the former Soviet Union (starting from the 90s) Jews of all backgrounds speak primarily Hebrew.

It sounds like you’ve never ...

You must not be reading the post above yours.

Because very clearly, the commenter wasn't saying that the Mizrahi don't currently speak Hebrew (some 60-70 years post-migration). Rather they were referring to loss of identity, de-facto forced assimilation and other unhappy circumstances they faced as a consequence of that migration.

You may not like where they're going with the "colonial" interpretation, and other ideological implications they're drawing on top of this (e.g. the erasure of Judeo-Arabic identity).

But that's no reason to start putting words into their mouth, and making them out to say something that they're plainly not.

But the Yiddish speaking culture of Ashkenazi Jews was also erased. At the founding of Israel the ideology was "we're all Israelis now, so speak Hebrew and forget your experience in the diaspora (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golah). It was certainly harsh and from modern perspective wrong but it applied to everyone, not just Mizrahi Jews. My grandparents had their last name "Hebrew-ised" and spoke Hebrew at home rather than their native Romanian/Ukranian/Russian.

An excellent point + thanks for the golah/galut reference. I certainly didn't mean to imply that forced assimilation was an issue solely for the Mizrahi.

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