Comment by alephnerd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alephnerd | Hacker News Reader

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> western armed Eastern European terrorist gangs

The majority of Israelis (45%) are Mizrahi or Eastern Sephardi [0] - primarily Moroccan, Iraqi, Yemeni, Syrian, Algerian, Iranian, Kurdish, Azeri, Tajik, and Egyptian in origin. The rest are Arab (20%) or Ashkenazi (33%) but these are overwhelmingly Soviet-era Jews who faced antisemitism during the Soviet era. You also have 1% who are Ethiopian in origin and 1% who are Indian (primarily Marathi) in origin.

The most rightwing Israelis are themselves 1.5 generation Mizrahi, such as Ben Gvir (Kurdish) and Karhi (Tunisian).

The same way Palestinians made homeless due to the 1948 war continue to resent Israel, similarly Mizrahi families continue to resent and distrust the Muslim countries their parents and grandparents were forced to leave from their mohallas.

Assuming Israel is overwhelmingly Ashkenazi is itself white normative and neocolonialist in nature.

> colonial rule

Same for plenty of Jews in Eastern countries.

For example, the Farhud [1] in Iraq as Iraqi Sunnis viewed Iraqi Jews as collaborationists with the British (this was also caused by Nazi propaganda during WW2) and the 1945 Libyan Riots [2] instigated by British occupation forces to coopt Libyan Sunnis.

[0] - https://people.socsci.tau.ac.il/mu/noah/files/2018/07/Ethnic...

[1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farhud

[2] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1945_anti-Jewish_riots_in_Tr...

Now do Christians in the Middle East--they have been practically exterminated out of existence everywhere.

The population has decreased significantly due to religious fanatics, but you should also give credit where credit is due.

Sisi has protected the Coptic community and Lebanon continues to have an active and prominent Christian community (which is split 50-50 between supporting Saudi and supporting Iran)

Morocco has also continued to protect the Jewish community there due to clan, tribal, and Berber ties trumping Arab or religious ties.

I wonder how upset those Mizrahi Jews should be with the Ashkenazi Jews that worked to promote their exodus by conspiring to create the conditions to push them out of Iraq and Egypt.

https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20230619-undeniable-proof-...

Plenty are annoyed with shenanigans like those in Egypt in the early 1950s, but denying the Farhud or the Shagabh Tarabulus is just as bad as denying the Nakbha.

Yemeni Jews didn't ask to be genocided out by Imam Yahya's Ghazis, just like an Arab families in Galilee didn't ask to get forcibly removed from the Levant during the same year.

Plenty of people did bad things - evil knows no border.

The kisas has been paid. Let them deal with it. This is a problem that can only be resolved by regional players acting in good faith.

Alternatively, the Enlightenment never happened in Baghdad, Aleppo, Oujda, etc. If Hamas and factions of the PA can argue for Shariat, then factions in Israel can argue for Halakha.

Of course, this is unrealistic, so the only answer is to nut up and negotiate. Reality is, the politicians and governments are in constant contact based on personal experience.

The moment Israel makes a sweetheart deal with Qatar instead of the current one with the UAE and the previously planned one with KSA, all of the Hamasniks would be in Ramla in hours.

The Thanis (whose country funds and owns the MEM like AJ) still haven't forgiven the Nahyans and al-Sauds for considering invading them if Tillerson didn't intervene.

No disagreements there!

I guess in the end: people are predictability and the predictability of masses makes them vulnerable to manipulation. What we get out is endless cycles of rule by the zero-sum cynical.

I guess even the faithless will end up resigning to pray for peace.

>> western armed Eastern European terrorist gangs

> The majority of Israelis (45%) are Mizrahi or Eastern Sephardi

That's irrelevant to the OP's point. Mizrahi Jews only started arriving after Israel was founded. The people who founded Israel were almost 100% Ashkenazi Jews, mostly from Central and Eastern Europe.

> The people who founded Israel were almost 100% Ashkenazi Jews, mostly from Central and Eastern Europe.

Israelis like Geulah Cohen, Moshe Barzani, Eliyahu Hakim, Shimon Tzabar, Eliyahu Bet-Zuri, Mordechai Alkahi, Avshalom Haviv, Meir Nakar, Eliezer Kashani, and Shmuel Tankus were all prominent Mizrahi leaders and commanders in Lehi, Irgun, and the Haganah.

Kurdish, Iraqi, Levantine, and Turkish Jews had been a prominent demographic in what became Israel well before 1948 due to it's former Ottoman status along with communal incidents in Kurdistan, Iraq, Syria, and Turkiye well before 1948.

In addition, in the late 19th and early 20th century, most of the Ashkenazi who arrived in the Levant at the time aligned with "Ottomanization" [0] or assimilating into Ottoman Turkish culture and dropping any trappings of European culture, hence David Ben Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi becoming students at the Dârülfünûn-ı Şâhâne in Istanbul and assimilating into Turkish culture during their formative years.

The Labor Zionist movement tended to be primarily Ashkenazi, but they were not alone in founding Israel. Mizrahis were overrepresented in the Irgun and Lehi, both of who's political wings became the Likud.

[0] - https://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/16111/13/16111%20TALBOT_Jew...

The existence of individual Arab Jews in Israel in 1948 does not change the point that the founders of Israel were almost all Ashkenazi Jews.

Almost every important Israeli politician in the founding years was Ashkenazi (and to this day, every prime minister has been Ashkenazi, surprisingly enough). Yes, you can name various individual members of the pre-state militias / terrorist groups who were not Ashenazi, but they were a tiny minority in a movement dominated by people from Central / Eastern Europe.

This is a huge aspect of the conflict that the left doesn't want to understand, because it doesn't fit the narrative of colonialism.

This framing is an American culture war topic that has morphed into a global culture war.

In most Western countries (except France), the Jewish community is overwhelmingly Ashkenazi in origin, and that is what sets the tone for how these countries view the conflict.

Mizrahi Jews have significantly different practices, and Israel is fundamentally their state, as Mizrahi culture has become the default culture in Israel. Even pop Hebrew music is overwhelmingly Arab in musical style now (eg. Daniel Saadon) and Arabic, Farsi, and other Mizrahi languages terms have become a major part of colloquial Hebrew now (יאללה anyone).

IMO, I think Israel becoming culturally Mizrahi is what is causing Israel to lose it's clout. Israeli and (non-religious) American Jews are increasingly separated from each other as they consume different media, speak different languages, and don't even go to the same Synagogues (or Temples as Ashkenazim call them). Israel has become much more insular as it has also become a richer country (it's not like 30 years ago when Israelis had to immigrate to the US to get paid a real salary).

And it doesn't fit with the conservative Christian view of the nation consisting purely of those that fled Germany. The truth is simply more complicated than either extreme is comfortable with.

That being said, the ancestry and the history doesn't change the actions being committed today.

> That being said, the ancestry and the history doesn't change the actions being committed today

Yep. But it adds nuance, which has been lost in discourse.

This is fundamentally an Eastern conflict that can only be resolved by Mizrahis and Arabs.

Westerners converting Israel-Palestine into a culture war are doing more harm than good, because it breeds resentment from both sides, as both view the West as the lackey of the other.

I don't think it changes the facts about what is happening, but I do think it changes how we think about the roots of the conflict, and about how (if) it gets resolved in the long term.

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