10. Immigration
It is a commonplace that Israel is a country of immigrants:
this is the only way in which the country’s Jewish
population could increase from some 25,000 to around 5.25
million in only 120 years.
Zionism was based almost completely on an ideology of immigration.
The simultaneous emptying of the Diaspora and the ‘filling
up’ of the old/new homeland was a brave, unique
idea that almost everyone thought doomed to failure from
the outset. The truth is, however, that Zionism –
in this first phase – succeeded beyond the wildest
dreams of its founding fathers. Israel now boasts the
second largest Jewish population in the world (after the
United States); according to demographic projections,
it will not be many years until it becomes the largest
center for Jewry. It is estimated that Jews from over
a hundred different countries have made their home in
modern Israel. This extraordinary success has come at
a high price, however, as this essay will now show.
Zionism was a product of 19th and early 20th-century Europe:
only the ideological ferment produced by the strange confluence
of nationalistic and socialistic forces could have produced
a movement so driven by idealism. Its earliest followers
fervently believed that they possessed the blueprint for
a better world for the Jews – in fact, for all humankind.
The early generations of Zionists brought a passionate
zealotry to the pursuit of their ideal – underpinned
by a secularized version of Isaiah’s “light
unto the nations” – and to the attempt to
turn an abstract set of principles into a real way of
life. Without such fervor, such an impossible enterprise
would undoubtedly have ground to a halt. It was the enthusiasm
– indeed, the fanaticism – of the Zionist
faithful that enabled the young society to grow and develop.
It was inevitable, however, that a society born of such
passion should have an Achilles heel.
Together with this enthusiasm and drive came a narrowness
of vision that was acceptable as long the vast majority
of the population of the Yishuv shared the same ideals.
There was an inner contradiction in Zionism, however.
This modern, nationalist ideology had developed entirely
out of a confluence of forces that existed only in Europe.
At its heart lay the idea that Jews from all over the
world must come to people the new society or State. When
that began to happen, after the establishment of the State
of Israel in 1948, the stage was set for deep conflict.
One of the first decisions of the young State was to open
the doors to all Jewish immigration. The Jewish population
doubled in the first four years of the country’s
existence, but most of the newcomers did not share the
ideological assumptions upon which the State had been
founded. The new immigrants of these early years came
from two main sources. Many were Holocaust survivors,
most of whom were broken and passive, with few demands
on the State. They wanted a shelter and were generally
grateful for whatever they found. Most of the other immigrants
were very different, however. They came from the Arab
world – North Africa and the Middle East; while
they made few demands on the new society they were migrating
to, they certainly had expectations. These Jews were predominantly
religious, holding conservative ideas regarding the character
of a Jewish State; their family structure and way of life
were traditional. Their migration to the new State was
mainly motivated by Messianism.
Given the passion and uncompromising certainty of the secular,
European, Ashkenazi Zionist establishment regarding the
character of the country that they intended to build,
their clash with the traditional Jews from the Eastern
countries was inevitable. The full force of the backlash
was not felt for a full generation, but when it did come,
the Zionist establishment felt insulted: they considered
the Eastern Jews ungrateful for the efforts that had been
made to help them. They did not understand that their
paternalistic outlook had itself insulted many of the
immigrants and their children. The stage was set for confrontation.
This is not the place to detail the story of that confrontation,
although it still fuels the political and social arena
of Israel in some very deep-rooted ways. Suffice it to
say that almost every substantial wave of immigration
has suffered many of the same tensions, despite its unquestioned
centrality in Zionist ideology. This conflict has arisen
out of the feeling that the needs of each group were neither
sufficiently understood and nor adequately attended to.
The other main Aliyah – that of the Russian-speaking
immigrants in the 1980s and 90s, (in addition to the smaller,
but important, earlier Soviet immigration of the early
70s) caused further tensions. Many of the members of the
earlier mass immigration wave of the 1950s felt resentment
toward the newcomers for being offered benefits that had
not been available to them at the time of their arrival.
These social tensions have found expression in Israeli
creative culture. For decades, Israeli culture was a product
of the Ashkenazi European society: most of the literature,
music and art was created by Europeans. It is possible
to point to a number of Eastern motifs in the early art
of the country but generally it reflected the European
idea of the East rather than a living acquaintance with
the Jewish products of that region.
Early art and architecture in the country certainly represented
‘the Orient’. Eastern-style arches and cupolas
can still be seen adorning some of the early houses in
modern Tel Aviv. In those places where early Bezalel tiles
continue to decorate the exteriors and interiors of the
early houses, the so-called ‘Hebrew Eastern’
style still dominates, replete with palm trees and other
symbols of the region. Much early Israeli painting exhibits
the same influences.
An exception to this trend is evident in early Israeli
music, both classical and popular. While a number of composers
were influenced by their encounter with Yemenite Jewish
culture in Palestine, incorporating rhythms and melodies
from that culture into their music, this was not the general
tendency. The Yemenites of the Yishuv were themselves
an atypical story of Eastern immigration. There were Yemenite
waves of Aliyah at the end of the 19th century and then
again in the early 20th century. These early Eastern immigrants
held an exotic attraction for some musicians and artists
of the Yishuv.
Once the mass immigration of the post-State period began,
however, attitudes began to change. Presented with the
harsh, much less attractive reality of the misery of mass
immigration, the exotic attraction tended to decrease.
The European Jewish establishment looked down on the new
immigrants and their culture. They believed that the Eastern
culture of the East was backward and that the immigrants
should relinquish it.
They did not expect the immigrants to replace their way
of life and culture with those of Europe, but rather that
they should transmogrify into model citizens of the new
Hebrew nation and that their culture should be Hebrew
culture. The reasoning was clear. The earlier Zionist
immigrants had done just this: they spoke Hebrew rather
than Yiddish and their way of life – far from being
a copy of European Jewish life – was instead a rebellion
against it. If they could thus transform themselves, so
should the new Oriental immigrants, dropping in the process
all vestiges of the ‘Arabic’ lifestyle that
they had brought with them.
In many ways, this was an unfair expectation – even
in theory. While it is true that the Ashkenazi immigrants
generally had transformed themselves into a new type of
Jew, they had done so voluntarily, in keeping with their
ideology. Moreover, the Hebrew culture that they had created
was still a variation of European culture. (This idea
will be enlarged upon in Section
13.) Such demands on the new Eastern immigrants were
thus doubly harsh, and the resentful immigrants were in
no hurry to comply.
It was with the second generation that the cultural backlash
began. Buoyed by the new ethnic pride that followed the
temporary success of the Black Panther protest movement
of the early 1970s, a number of poets, writers and musicians
began to express a positive consciousness of their background.
Rather than ‘apologizing’ for it, they began
to proudly call themselves Mizrahim (‘Easterners’
or ‘Orientals’). This process has continued
until the present day; indeed, the last thirty years have
witnessed the coming-of-age of Oriental culture in Israel.
Some of the more significant names and developments of
this period can be mentioned here. The first noteworthy
voice was Erez Biton in the 1970s. With his poems of praise
for the North African Jewish past and his sharp presentations
of the alienation of the Oriental Jew in Israel, he foreshadowed
a wave of later poets such as Roni Someck, Bracha Seri
and Tikva Levi. In prose, Eli Amir, Sami Michael and Dan
Bania Seri have enjoyed great success; a younger generation
that includes such names as Ronit Matalon and Dorit Rabinyan
is enjoying widespread popularity.
Rabinyan is a particularly interesting case. Along with
Avi Shmuellian, she is a leading representative of a new
kind of Israeli novelist: both have published novels presenting
the mystery of Jewish life in Arab lands – in these
cases, Persia/Iran – in a fresh manner. Both of
these writers have used a semi-surrealistic style in a
way that elevates the subjects delightfully. Whether this
will become a strong new trend in Israeli literature remains
to be seen.
A.B. Yehoshua, who has been counted among the first rank
of Israeli writers for decades, occupies a unique place
in his representations of Sephardi culture. Coming out
of the Zionist mainstream, he has taken a different path.
Although his work is not built entirely around Sephardi
or Eastern characters, his recent novel Journey to
the End of the Millennium is a proud, fascinating
look at the Sephardi past.
There has been a parallel tendency in music. Riding the
wave of ethnic pride of the mid-1970s, a wave of musicians
developed – e.g., Zohar Argov and Haim Moshe of
the first generation – who created a genre of Oriental/Hebrew
popular music that comprised a mix of Arabic and Greek
musical motifs. While the critics initially looked down
on this phenomenon, it proved extremely popular with the
listening public. Others would follow, with singers like
Zehava Ben and Eyal Golan at the forefront. Ofra Haza
and Boaz Sharabi sang more mainstream, less overtly Oriental
music to reach their audiences. Groups such as Ethnix
and Tippex garnered great popularity with their mix of
Oriental motifs, rhythms and instrumental sounds and Western
musical styles. The extraordinarily talented group HaBreira
HaTiv‘it brought together musicians from widely
differing musical backgrounds who produced a type of Eastern
music that celebrated the experience of the North African
Jews.
Then there was the phenomenon of a generation of musicians
and singers (whatever their own ethnic backgrounds) who
had grown up playing Israeli music with Western influence:
regardless of each individual’s ethnic background,
these artists began to produce music that fused Eastern
and Western motifs. Perhaps this was the most interesting
of all the trends in Israeli music, in terms of its social
commentary. Musicians such as Yehuda Poliker, Meir and
Ehud Banai, Alon Olearchik and Etti Ankari produced authentically
Israeli music in the sense that they drew their inspiration
from Israeli society as a cultural meeting-point.
Dance and cinema should also be mentioned. The Inbal dance
company may be the best-known ‘ethnic’ dance
company in Israel. Over the years, their repertoire has
expanded from folkloristic motifs to free interpretations
of ethnic motifs. They are not the only company, however,
that now unashamedly draws on the East for artistic inspiration.
The Israeli cinema has not produced a large number of serious
films on ethnic issues. On the other hand, several light
comedies and dramas with an ethnic slant have proved popular
with some sectors of the public. In recent years, a few
films such as Schur have started to explore issues
of Eastern ethnicity although this can hardly be called
a trend. The best drama so far about the ethnic tensions
within Israel is the excellent TV film from 1986, Lehem
(Bread), which explores social conflict in a southern
development town during a period of economic hardship.
The widespread popularity of all these forms combined truly
can be called a cultural revolution. Like all real cultural
revolutions, it has been underpinned by a number of socio-political
changes, without which the innovations in cultural expression
would not have occurred.
So far, this essay has only discussed cultural expressions
relating to the Oriental immigration of the fifties. The
influx of Russians and Ethiopians is still too recent
for its cultural impact to be judged fairly. Based on
the experience of the Aliyah of the 1950s, it may be a
considerable time before the fruits of these waves of
immigration become evident in the Hebrew-speaking population.
However, it may be presumed that, because the Russian
immigrants comprise a population who are used to expressing
themselves in modern cultural media, their impact will
be felt more quickly. At the moment, though, their main
cultural expression remains in the Russian language, causing
this vibrant culture to be consumed by Russians alone.
A few Hebrew language films – e.g., Coffee with
Lemon (1994) and Yanna’s Friends(1999)
– have explored aspects of the Russian Aliyah, but
these are not large-scale productions.
The most prominent and important Hebrew-language expression
of the mass Aliyah from the former Soviet Union is undoubtedly
the Gesher theater company. Originally composed entirely
of Russian immigrants, the company has recently accepted
Israeli actors into its ranks. It has been very widely
praised for its work over the last few years, some perceiving
it as Israel’s most innovative theater company.
At the moment, however, this seems to be the only such
group.