Abstract
In summer 2003, Vicky Knafo marched 125 miles from her desolate development town to the Finance Ministry in Jerusalem to protest welfare cuts for Israel’s single mothers. Single mothers from all parts of Israel joined her. Most of the mothers were Mizrahim—Jews with origins in the Arab and Muslim World. They constitute 50% of Israel’s citizenry. But like the 20% Palestinian Israeli citizens, they are treated as a racinated minority by the ruling 30% Ashkenazim (European Jews of Yiddish-speaking origins). This article consists of diary fragments recording the author's participation in the protest as a single welfare mother, ethnographer, and Mizrahi feminist.
On July 2, 2003, Vicky Knafo, a 43-year-old single mother of three, started her march on Jerusalem wearing a black baseball cap and wrapped in the Israeli flag. Her 205-km pilgrimage ascended to the capital from Mitzpe Ramon, a remote desert town with one of the highest unemployment rates in Israel.
Vicky is part of the 50% majority of Israel’s citizens—the Mizrahim (Orientals, Hebrew)—Jews with origins in the Arab and Muslim World and the margins of Ottoman Europe. The Mizrahim also constitute the majority of Israel’s disenfranchised. The other two segments of Israel’s citizenry are the 20% Palestinians with Israeli citizenship and the remaining 30% Ashkenazim or European Jews of Yiddish-speaking origins.
I learned about Vicky on July 3, 2003, as I perused e-mail messages from Ahoti (Hebrew for Sistah), Israel’s Mizrahi feminist movement. A member of Ahoti’s executive board, I received these messages daily. One e-mail message detailed a phone call that Vicky made to an Ahoti official: “I’m marching on Jerusalem for thousands of Israeli single moms. Enough’s enough. Up to June 29, we were big-time Likudniks and voted for Bibi [Benjamin Netanyahu]. He gonna hear no more from me! Please help me find places to refill water and spend the night.”
We Sistahs joined Vicky and protected her from the police who would try to arrest her for blocking traffic. We also brought her story to the press. When Vicky appeared on television, dozens of poverty-stricken single mothers from Israel’s Mizrahi and post-Soviet immigrant ghettos started their own marches to Jerusalem. From `Arad, another desert town, Ilana Azoulay joined the march. She pushed the wheelchair of her crippled son, who cradled an old three-legged Chihuahua in his lap.
The mothers arrived at the capital on the evening of July 9, 2003. Jewish Jerusalemites donated tents, blankets, and food. Over the next few days, hundreds of citizens visited in solidarity. Some wrote checks. Thus, the welfare mothers of Israel gathered on the rose park slope facing government hill and the Knesset and established Knafoland (Hebrew).
What I am about to tell you is not only Vicky’s story or mine. Nor is it unique to the sociopolitical context of Mizrahi single mothers. Throughout the world, single mothers of color and their children share this story of victimhood when the nation-state sacrifices their human dignity to global neoliberal restructuring.
Hok HaHesderim and Knafonomics
On June 29, 2003, an amendment to Hok HaHesderim (Hebrew for the Arrangement Law) slashed single mothers’ welfare allowances. Hok HaHesderim is the Israeli version of the U.S. Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1985—a “Reaganomics” initiative to deregulate government, reduce public spending, decrease taxation of the upper class, and ease inflation through monetary control. In the same year, Israel’s Likud-Labor National Unity Government copied the U.S. law to deal with the megainflation plaguing the Israeli economy. Hok HaHesderim has become a permanent part of Israel’s budget law. It consolidates diverse deregulatory budget cuts into a single annual Finance Committee-backed amendment for the Knesset to vote into law (Rolef, 2006)—usually in the wee hours.
Israel’s middle- to lower class single mothers are not the same as North America’s. Most Israeli single mothers give birth to their children in a legal union shortly after marriage. Thus, when they divorce, they have limited professional experience. In addition, child support is almost impossible to obtain, thanks to legal precedents favoring deadbeat dads (Shaul Bar-Noy v. NSB and `Aliza Bar-Noy verdict 4445/96). Some mothers can rely on their families for financial assistance. They are almost always AHUSALs—a Hebrew acronym for Ashkenazi, Hiloni (secular), Vatik (old timer, as opposed to a 1990s Ashkenazi post-Soviet immigrant), Socialist, and Liberal. In colloquial Hebrew, however, when Israelis say “Ashkenazi,” they mean AHUSAL. Throughout this essay, I use the colloquial “Ashkenazi” for the scientific AHUSAL. Mizrahi single mothers—the majority of single mothers—cannot rely on their families for help. Thus, they turn to welfare.
In June 2003, the National Security Bureau (NSB) mailed single mothers notices about slashing their monthly income assurances, income augmentations, and rent aid. The notices also informed them about the mothers’ retroactive debt to the NSB incurred between January, when the 2003 amendment entered into law, and June, when enforcement started. Distraught mothers packed lines at the NSB and at governmental bureaus for rent assistance and job placements.
Vicky marched because she could no longer pay her bills. On June 29, 2003, the New Israeli Shekel (NIS) was worth about US23 cents. Her half-time job paid her about 1,217 NIS (about US$280) a month. The amendment cut 1,304 NIS (about US$300) from Vicky’s monthly income welfare supplement of 1,983 NIS (about US$456), reducing it to 679 NIS (about US$156), an amount swallowed up by her retroactive debt, reducing her welfare to nothing.
I knew Vicky’s situation intimately. I, too, was a single mother on welfare, except that my finances were worse than Vicky’s. Until June, I made about 1,200 NIS (about US$276) a month, augmented up to 3,200 NIS (about US$736). In June, my augmentation was cut to 447 NIS (about US$103). In July, I was laid off for the summer and got neither a paycheck nor welfare support. I should have received full income assurance from the NSB. I received nothing. My assurance was eaten up by my retroactive NSB debt.
Yet, Vicky and I were different in that I had access to privileges that she did not. I had an Ashkenazi father, and my parents raised me in a largely Ashkenazi working- to middle-class neighborhood less than 10 miles south of Tel Aviv. My Yemeni mother’s marriage strategy spared me the intergenerational poverty that had affected her childhood in a Jerusalem slum. I received a superior education while Vicky did not. But when Israelis look at me, they detect no trace of my blond, green-eyed father. Inscribed into my phenotype are my Yemeni racial marks—olive-chocolate skin, high cheekbones, a short torso, and wide hips. In Israel, my phenotype always trumped my privilege—at least until I opened my mouth and spoke eloquent English. My biography was not supposed to include an encounter with welfare. I should have arrived in Knafoland as a University of California researcher. But that route had closed.
Between March 1999 and November 2007, I was stranded in Israel. In February 1999, my 9-year-old son, Shaheen, was transferred to the sole custody of his father, my violent ex-husband who I divorced in 1993. There was no time to wait until my appeal would be heard. Believing that my son's welfare was in danger, I fled with him to my family in Israel. My ex-husband immediately pursued child abduction charges.
The Israeli courts strictly observe the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction, even disregarding exceptions that specify the rare conditions allowing a child to stay in the country where he or she had been brought. The return rate of children who are abducted from the United States to Israel is much higher than in other signatory countries to the convention (see Bruch, 1998–9, 2000a, 2000b, 2003; Schuz, 2004). International law recommends that a child abduction trial at all levels of court should last no longer than 1 year, to provide a swift remedy in the best interest of the child (Schuz, 2002, 2004). But our case took two full years to decide.
In a precedent-setting 2001 decision, the Israeli Supreme Court cleared me of any child abduction charges (Israel’s Supreme Court Verdict 5253/00; see Schuz, 2008). At the beginning of the trial, Shaheen and I had to submit both our Israeli and U.S. passports to the court. After the verdict, we received our U.S. passports, but not our Israeli passports. Israeli law states that dual citizens must enter and exit the country only on Israeli passports. Under international custody laws, a child’s official domicile changes to the present country after 2 years of residence (Schuz, 2001, 2004). I now had to request legal and physical custody over Shaheen from the Israeli courts to get our Israeli passports back. For almost six more years, the Tel Aviv family court refused to make any decision in the custody case. Without a decision, I could not appeal (Bruch, 2003). I was stuck.
I therefore had to resign my tenured professorship at the University of California–Davis. With few Israeli job prospects because of my color and politics, I became a single mother who was dependent on the governmental welfare bureaucracy. I became my own informant. To stay sane, I joined the effort to build Ahoti, occupying the slot of the angry feminist of color on primetime television.
Unlike mine, Vicky’s encounter with Israel’s welfare bureaucracy was foreseen. In the 1948 Nakba (catastrophe in English), the Ashkenazi Zionist Left regime expelled almost all Palestinians from their homes and lands. In the 1950s, the regime settled new Jewish immigrants from the Arab and Muslim World into former Palestinian villages and towns. The resultant forced downgrade in the immigrants’ economic mobility prompted the creation of an elaborate bureaucratic system that provided monetary supplements, housing, and government-sponsored employment in exchange for docile loyalty. This system imposed on these immigrants a complete reliance on the bureaucratic infrastructure (Handelman, 2004).
So while I came to Mizrahi feminism as an intellectual, Vicky became a feminist leader through the vicissitudes of life. We both belonged in Knafoland. Yet, I hesitated to take Shaheen and our dog there. Still in litigation over Shaheen’s custody, I was hyperaware of Family Court informers infiltrating the protest. If we stayed overnight at Knafoland, informers could accuse me of jeopardizing Shaheen’s quality of life. The Family Court would have license to take him, place him in a governmental boarding school, and ship him to his violent father in California. Ultimately, Shaheen and I decided to go to Knafoland together for half a day every other day.
The Hudna
The Hok HaHesderim amendment took effect on June 29, 2003—the same day that the Israeli government and Hamas declared the hudna (calmness in Arabic) ceasefire—a concept that Haifa University anthropologist and Bedouin expert Joseph Ginat plucked from the 628 Common Era (CE) truce between Prophet Muhammad and the Quraysh tribe of southern Arabia. Ginat cut and pasted this concept in his long-term role as the Israeli regime’s consultant on Arab and Muslim affairs (Erlich, 2005; Ginat, 2006). A temporary relief from the Al-Aqsa Intifada (2000–2005). The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) pulled back from the centers of Palestinian towns and villages. Suicide bombings in Israel stopped. But the hudna also meant no Grand Guignol for an anxious foreign press corps. So, when the Israeli media glommed onto Knafoland, the foreign press—from Cable News Network and Reuters to smaller outfits from Nigeria and the Philippines—followed right along. During the day, international reporters would camp in their own enclaves next to Knafoland. At night, they would zoom across town to Palestinian Jerusalem, to the American Colony Hotel Bar, the preferred hotel for diplomats, politicians, and foreign correspondents. Wherever the foreign press went, SHATIL went as well. SHATIL is an acronym for Sherutei Tmikha veYe`utz leIrgunim (Hebrew for Support and Consulting Services for NGOs). It is a subsidiary of the New Israel Fund (NIF), the U.S.-based funder of almost all Israeli human rights and civil society nongovernmental organizations (NGOs; New Israel Fund [NIF], 2007; Petras, 2002). Its main supporter, the Ford Foundation, works with U.S. governmental agencies to pacify unrest (Petras, 2002). NIF controls and contains most of Israel’s NGOs by selectively funding protest movements, depending on their agendas (Lavie, 2011).
Social work practice, policy, and research focus primarily on the circumstances leading to women’s reliance on welfare and the policies that maintain their disenfranchisement, rather than help them to break out of the cycle of poverty. Rarely is the role of bureaucracy itself examined as an inflictor of pain on welfare mothers.
What follows are fragments from a diary that I kept during the Knafo struggle. My autoethnography exhibits how, from the single mothers’ positionality, welfare policy and race relations are interconnected by ever-shifting national political agendas. As a scholar, I am expected to produce dispassionate texts. My ethnographic experience should not tightly overlap with my personal biography. Mine did for nearly a decade. I was a welfare mother for real, navigating through a capricious and dehumanizing welfare system.
For social work to address the injustices of bureaucracy, painful witness narratives, such as mine, must be told with their anger, humor, and absurdity intact. Thus, I cannot abide by the current tendency in Cultural Studies to avoid narratives of victims. I was a victim and have no qualms about narrating my own victimhood and that of the other mothers. But I still grope for words that emulate within the reader the tactile discomfort of the mothers and me. In my attempt to relate these narratives, I write in multiple genres, in nonchronological order, and with purposeful repetitions and overlaps. Thus, the diary is a collage of handwritten descriptions and dialogue, official documents and e-mail messages, newspaper clippings, quotes from feminist of color theory, and Kabalistic visions.
Diary of a Welfare Mother
August 12, 2003
Shaheen and I entered the cafeteria of the Gilman Humanities Building at Tel Aviv University. We needed to kill an hour before Shaheen’s cello lesson. We opened the door, and the thick cigarette haze hit us. So we headed for the area cordoned off for university professors. Willful trespassers, we illicitly enjoyed the smoke-free, air-conditioned zone. Vicky and Ilana would never have sought relief from the sizzling summer in a faculty club. The privilege of my Berkeley Ph.D. gave me the chutzpah to transgress into this space.
We sat at the table in the center of the section, surrendering ourselves to the dense cloud of L`Eau d`Issey Summer and Yves Saint Laurent’s Opium. The room was strewn with professors. They chatted with faculty wives and female professors. The women sported chic clothes with lace, zippers, and knotted fabric, often all in one piece. From my window shopping in White City, Tel Aviv, I recognized the clothes as designer labels from Upper Dizengoff Boulevard boutiques.
They all craned their necks and winced at our presence. Was it because they did not expect darkies in their Ashkenazi space, let alone with a cello? Or did they identify Shaheen—and rightly so—as a scholarship kid from the barrio competing with their children? Like a pair of Pavlov’s dogs, Shaheen and I switched to speaking English. The professors let down their territorial guard. Perhaps our carefree accents made us sound like hip Californians.
Earlier that morning, we stood five hours in lines at the employment bureau for a placement clerk to stamp my unemployment card, the permission required to receive a check. Once a month—every month—single mothers from the slums pack themselves and their children into crowded buses to city centers. No money for child care. And the regime forbids welfare mothers from owning a car.
At the employment bureau, mothers, clutching their children’s hands tightly, dash inside and pounce on ticket dispensers hung at European height. In the lines—amorphous throngs—they strain to hear placement clerks bark their numbers. Guards—handcuffs and batons on their belts, pistols in their holsters—stand ready for a ruckus.
When a mother hears her number, she enters a placement clerk’s office. Half the time, the clerk hands the mother a printout of a job opening, along with directions to the interview. These are jobs like changing diapers for the elderly in nursing homes or at-home cooking for disabled people. None require any special skills.
The mother then goes to her prospective employer. With her children. On the bus. She does the interview. God forbid if she misses it. If she does—no welfare. Never mind that the employer will certainly reject her for the position. Guest workers from Bulgaria, the Philippines, or Kirala cost employers much less.
Interview complete, the employer is supposed to report to the employment bureau that the mother arrived and was rejected. The employer, a man by default, may ask her to follow him to the back and may ask for a sexual favor in exchange for his report (see Hertzog, 1996).
After her interview, the mother returns to the employment bureau. With her children. On the bus. Upon arrival, she gets in line. Again. She takes a number and waits to hear it called. Only in front of the placement clerk—for the second time—does she get her stamp. At this stage, a clerk may still demand sexual favors for the stamp. Finally, stamp in hand, she can travel to the NSB to obtain her welfare check.
Still one more hurdle. If the mother opens a bank account to deposit this one check, she pays 25% of the amount in commissions. More likely, she cashes the check, pushes the bills into her bra, goes home, and stuffs the money into the lone chicken in the freezer.
This was no participant observation. I waited in line to hear my number called.
The appointments with my placement clerk are always short and direct. Lucky me, I had been assigned to a woman in 2001. Over the previous two years, we had developed a good rapport.
“You are not eligible for The Wisconsin,” she announced. “Too old.”
For disenfranchised Israelis, “The Wisconsin” is not the name of a state. It is a program. And a nightmare. It originated in the U.S. state of Wisconsin (Zilberg, 2002) and combines the privatization of state-run programs with drastic welfare cuts (`Eshet, 2000). The elderly, physically disabled, and single mothers are directly targeted. The regime requires welfare recipients to go to employment bureaus for 30 to 40 hours a week to receive counseling, training, and job referrals. Individuals who are unable to find jobs are conscripted into unpaid manual community service work. Only at the end of this process does a person receive welfare benefits (Adiv, 2005).
“Overqualified,” she declared, using the English word for the lack of a Hebrew one. Her voice was somber. I did not have the energy to hypothesize if this was sympathy for my plight or disappointment that she would not get her bonus for placing another single mother in The Wisconsin.
“Go to the sotzialit” (the Hebrew word for social work case officer), she sighed. “She’ll TRY to slide you into the Committee for Exceptional Cases. Maybe they have a solution for a professor on cut welfare.”
From March to June, I taught at the master’s program at the Israeli branch of Lesley University and at Beit Berl Teacher’s College. I worked six class hours a week and was paid by the hour. On average, I was making 1,200 NIS (about US$276) a month. I was entitled to an income augmentation of 447 NIS (about US$103) from the NSB for me to reach half the minimum wage. The augmentation required that I go to the placement center, in vain, to seek additional jobs. Hourly adjuncts are laid off at the end of every semester and are not entitled to unemployment benefits—therefore, the employment bureau.
Shaheen and I fried in the sun as we dragged ourselves from the employment bureau to the NSB. With his cello. On the bus. Before stepping inside, we waited in a security checkpoint line 78 people long. Once through the door, we joined another line of 213 people who were waiting to be sorted by a clerk into the correct offices. After I was sorted, another clerk had us wait in one last line 155 people long.
Finally, I could speak to someone about my problem. I was to receive 447 NIS (about US$103) income augmentation for June. This amount was apart from anything I was owed for July or August. My application for full income assurance had not kicked in yet. I wanted someone to explain why I received only 401 NIS (about US$92) for my June income augmentation. The printout in my hands showed that I should have gotten 447 NIS.
How was a mother to provide for her son and herself on 401 NIS? Lucky for us, an anonymous donor saw me on television and paid our rent.
The money was missing because of the new amendment to Hok HaHesderim.
Shaheen calculated our financial world in increments of milk bags. The weekly food donations from Operation Open Heart did not include milk. So we bought milk at the store. 46 NIS meant nine bags, or about 36 cups, of milk.
Every summer, I take my son to bear these lines. A dark child with no trust fund and no one to pull strings for him, he must understand the Mizrahi struggle firsthand to survive.
Shaheen and I were trespassers across the Gilman border because of our skin. In the lines, we do not cross any racial or gender border. Most of the humiliated mothers in these lines are Mizrahi. The humiliators are also Mizrahi—low-level welfare clerks and single mothers who are caught up in the state’s welfare bureaucracy. No need for English. I can comfortably speak in Tel Aviv slang with everybody. An extra bonus is practicing our Arabic with the muhajjabat (veiled women in Arabic) from Jaffa in the next line.
July 21, 2003
I must reply to the letter of Esther Rabinowitz (a pseudonym and onomatopoeia of her real name)—what a classic Eastern European surname!—who heads the service for income assurance and augmentation at the NSB’s Tel Aviv branch. I must defer to her by using the official-style language that she herself uses—including the vestiges of Israel's Socialist era, when comrades were addressed surname first.
To the honorable
Rabinowitz Esther
Claim Clerk [She used the masculine in Hebrew for clerk]
The National Security Bureau
The Service for Income Assurance and Augmentation
RE: Your July 15, 2003 Letter:
Dear Ms. Rabinowitz,
Your July 15 letter, postmarked July 16, arrived July 20. Enclosed is a copy, marked “Exhibit 1.” I would like to call your attention to the following: 1. Your letter states that I am entitled to receive income augmentation totaling 447 NIS. Yesterday I spent half an hour with Ms. Davidi, the dedicated clerk at the post office branch on Ibn Gabirol Street. In goodwill, she spent nearly an hour on the phone, traversing the Post Office Bank hierarchy to track down the missing augmentation.
Often a single mother, with her children (on the bus), might get to the post office to be told that there is no money in her name and that her check is probably at the NSB. And after surviving the NSB lines, the check-dispensing clerk might announce, “No check. Go back to the post office.” This runaround can last up to three weeks. Since rent is always due on the first of the month, the mother might return home to find a seven-day eviction notice on her door. And as no surprise: Ms. Davidi told me there was no sum of money in my name. Because of my repeated appeals to your office, I am urgently requesting you to personally investigate the funds’ disappearance. 2. As for the assertions raised in your letter, “Your phone appeal was full of racist remarks bordering on insulting a public servant, and in the future, such an appeal will not be answered,” please permit me to respond as follows: The way you addressed me was unconcerned, patronizing, and full of false accusations about me and all single mothers. These have nothing to do with my specific request for you to track down my missing income augmentation. 3. Considering items 1 and 2 of this letter, and in light of our phone and written communications, non-Orientals are also capable of exaggeration and emotionality. Perhaps the definition of dimyon mizrahi [Hebrew for “oriental imagination”] should be revised.
BABAH,
Smadar Lavie
BABAH is an acronym for BeBirkat Haverim in Hebrew or “With the Blessings of the Comrades” in English. This is exactly how she signed her letter.
Like many Israelis, I sent a copy of the letter to the ombudsman of the State Comptroller’s Bureau, who was supposed to look out for the little guy. This was my modest attempt to convince myself that I could have any effect on Rabinowitz. My only alternative, a competent attorney, would have cost 1,200 cups of milk an hour.
June 29, 2003
Hok HaHesderim goes into effect. No money at the Post Office Bank or the NSB. My rent is due the day after tomorrow.
Breathe. Count to five. Nonetheless, I hear the Kabalistic Angels of Wrath flapping:
My Ashkenazi, white sisters to the scholarly struggle—I am your alien worker. I am your schwartze [short for swartze hayye, “black animal” in Yiddish slang. Some Ashkenazim use it to refer to Mizrahim. Some American Jews use it to refer to African Americans.] When you depart for your professorial sabbaticals to think and write, I teach your students. Not even an adjunct. No retirement. No research or development funds. No paid time to think, write, or prepare for your classes. You throw me bones—a course here, a lecture there. One week of rent if I’m lucky. And despite your choke chain around my neck, I will not shut up. I am your deformed mirror. You are afraid to look, scared that your enlightened racism will talk back: Sisterhood? Who are your sisters—your white women colleagues at the university? Your elite Ivy League American audiences, who buy the Israeli sisterhood you market in English? Who buys your enlightenment? We, the Mizrahi majority, with our taxes, finance your lifestyle. Will your childhood friends, now on the bench, force you to vacate space for us around the faculty meeting table, even though we have no parents or husbands financing feminism as a hobby?
The Education Ministry may surveil your syllabi. But the Propaganda Ministry sends you across the Atlantic to universities that dare let students have an Israel Apartheid Week. The ministry pays your honoraria to entice their cash-strapped Mideast Centers to place you on their speakers’ lists (Traubmann, 2006). But you will not acknowledge that you are willing participants in the Nicer Face of Israel’s antiboycott campaign.
You prattle on in English about transnational feminist alliances. With whom? Your donors? At your conferences abroad, when you schmooze with editors of academic journals to get your papers published? And for whom? Not moms in the ‘hoods. These mothers graduate from underfunded slum schools barely proficient in standard Hebrew. Proper English is not even on the menu. From the podium, you quote Frankenberg (1993), but do you ever contemplate creating a support group to undo your own intra-Jewish apartheid?
July 22, 2003
Late evening. Shaheen and I are back from Jerusalem, back in our rented apartment. Exhausted. Sunburned. All afternoon, we picketed, seared to succulence by the summer sun.
Some good souls had brought bristolim (Bristol boards in Hebrew) stapled to sticks along with brightly colored Sharpies, so the protestors could make their own placards. They also translated the protesters’ slogans into English to catch the eye of the foreign press. Shaheen and I came up with our own slogan, complete with postmodernist language games:
Medinat (Tz)hok /Tugat Ha`Oni
In Hebrew, medinat hok is a democratic state governed by a code of law. Medinat tzhok, literally, “a state of laughter,” means a state that ridicules its own laws. We used parentheses to create a pun stating that Israeli laws make the state a parody of a democracy. Next to it, we wrote, “Tugat ha`oni,” meaning “the sorrow of poverty.” With the parentheses, this pair of passé structuralist binaries disintegrated into Derridian traces deconstructing the Zionist simulacrum of the welfare state.
“Mom, this doesn’t translate to English,” Shaheen wryly commented. “Only local media for us—if we’re lucky.”
One good soul in a khaki linen suit approached us. Who wears a suit in July? An Anglo-Saxit (the feminine singular for Anglo-Saxim, Hebrew for Jewish immigrants from English-speaking countries). She introduced herself in Hebrew—using her growling, English “R”—as a Jerusalem sotzialit.
“Are you Yemeni or Ethiopian?” she cooed to Shaheen.
We glanced at each other, fear in our eyes. We shut up. Anything we said could be used against us. Instead, Shaheen clutched his sign, stuck it in her face. We kept marching.
The Angels of Wrath, again, throbbing in my soul. I hear mirages. Feminist theory of color. Classic lines rehearsed so many times in class: White women face the pitfall of being seduced into joining the oppressor under the pretense of sharing power. The tokenism that is sometimes extended to us [women of color] is not an invitation to join power; our racial “otherness” is a visible reality.... For white women there is a wider range of pretended choices and rewards for identifying with patriarchal power and its tools. (Lorde, 1984, pp. 118–119)
I open my laptop and gingerly trot my fingers across the keys to prevent the yoghurt from dropping onto them. I send my U.S. friends the link to the Los Angeles Times piece on Knafo (King, 2003). My commentary reads: http://articles.latimes.com/2003/jul/18/world/fg-welfare18 Please note that all foreign press articles but this one portray Knafoland as a generic Israeli gender-focused social protest. This LA Times piece puts the right color—dark—on Israel’s Jewish poverty. Even if the author uses the term Sephardim, rather than explains the term Mizrahim for her English-speaking readership. Likewise, this is the only article without quotes from Israeli university gender experts. A worker for SHATIL’s English public relations division—a fixture in Vicky’s tent—was always ready to translate for foreign reporters. I was also in the tent, but I did not want to make waves. So I said nothing. I noted that the translator used the term “poor Israelis” whenever Vicky said “Mizrahim.” Perhaps the translator did so because simple Israel-Palestine dualism makes the biggest news abroad, under the common Zionist wisdom that a united Israeli Judaism against all goyim (non-Jews in Hebrew, colloquially “enemies”) trumps race, class, and gender. Or perhaps the translator was already calculating the donations to NIF from progressive diaspora Jews who were alarmed at Jewish homelessness in the Jewish homeland. Of course, the translator could not afford to inform potential donors about the color of Israeli poverty. How would progressive diaspora Jews—important contributors to the civil rights and anti-Apartheid movements—react to the revelation of Israeli intra-Jewish racism? When the Los Angeles Times journalist showed up to interview Vicky, the NIF translator had left the tent to pee. I knew she’d be gone for at least half an hour because I had earlier heard her complain about the squat toilet Port-a-Potties that the municipality had installed by Knafoland. To use the Knesset’s fancy public toilets, she had to cross the park and go through security. So I stepped in to help the reporter. But I refused to act as an academic gender expert. Vicky is so eloquent that I simply translated her word for word.
July 29, 2003
I just completed a gig for no less than WIZO, the Women’s International Zionist Organization. I was a guest lecturer for the annual course of its School for Women’s Political Leadership. The organizers, as well as a handful of students, were Ashkenazim.
The Jerusalem WIZO center is in the superexclusive Talbiyya neighborhood. After 1948, the higher echelons of the government’s professional elite took over Talbiyya’s grandiose, Beverly Hills-style, hewn-stone mansions, built in the 1920s by the Palestinian elite. Talbiyya is the official residence of Israel’s prime minister.
WIZO bussed most of its students to the weekly lectures in Talbiyya from the economically depressed Mizrahi moshavim (agricultural co-ops) of the Jerusalem Corridor, which sits on the pre-1967 border with Jordan. Until 1967, the corridor was remote, dangerous, and economically depressed. Palestinians who wanted to visit their old homes would sneak across the border.
In the postlecture discussion, many women said that it was the first time in the course that they had felt present and that the feminism I had lectured about was theirs. With pauses and hesitations, they started to exchange their own stories about how they each wrestled with racism. They got it. Something beyond the lived experience they labeled “deprivation” or “discrimination.”
But of course, this evening—like at all my lectures—an Ashkenazi addressed me with sugarcoated venom: “I enjoyed your lecture. But all you’ve done is use haughty language and generalizations to talk about your own problems. Is this really feminism?”
“And last week,” piped up another Ashkenazi, “when the gender studies professor taught us that in feminism the personal is political, I thought you’d be our example. I disagree with her.” She meant the first student. “You didn’t tell us your personal story. Only theory.”
Here we go. More “Personalism” (Hurtado, 1996, p. 33). Once again, I hold up the mirror so the white woman can see the reality she creates for me. And once again, she ignores the reflection. She trivializes my feminist paradigm into a festering wound that she must watch me pick at. For her, my wound is psychotherapy, not a lecture (Hurtado, 1996). Her wound can make the transition from the personal to the political in the name of sisterhood. My wound is divisive. She won’t let me expose it. She refuses to understand that my wound is our wound. When the student blames me for personalism, she “leaves us without a comprehensive theory for understanding the very real structural oppression that exists based on the simultaneity of gender, race, and class group membership (Hurtado, 1996, pp. 33–34).”
“Thanks for sharing.” I slapped a smile on my face. “Can you please tell the group the ethnic backgrounds of your woman friends? Your best five, who you go to cafés with every Friday. Are they Ashkenazi? Mizrahi? Secular? Religious? Maybe… Palestinians?”
No response. Only the hum of the air-conditioner.
“I never ask.” She fidgeted with her hands. “They are all Ashkenazi—Israeli, that is.”
As I write this diary entry, I fish from my bag my brand-new copy of Lubin’s (2003, p. 13) Woman Reading Woman, the last word in radical Hebrew poststructuralist theory: The discussion of survival and modes of survival, subversion, and subversive activity, in formations of criticism or in the act of reading as a critical act, will take place, therefore, around creations of women and actions of criticism, subversion, and survival done mainly by women, but the discussion will relate to any act of criticism, subversion, and survival done by the margins, be these women, Mizrahim, Palestinians, Homosexuals, Blacks, Hispanics, or the disabled.
I jump from the introduction to the bibliography and index. Scrutinizing the copious bibliography, I spot only two female theoreticians of color: Gayatri Spivak and bell hooks. Everyone quotes them. Where are the rest of the classics? Feminists of color used poststructuralist, deconstructionist theory as a springboard for the critical analysis of the intersection of gender/sex, race, and class with citizenship and nation.
Aha! I’m so glad to meet the Mizrahim in the index. Once again, we are the data to be ethnographed, so the Ashkenazi professor can copyright our oppression for merit and promotion. Lubin mentions only Ella Shohat of NYU and, even then, cites only the sole work of Shohat that is not embedded in feminist theory of color. Where are the other Mizrahi feminist voices? Where is Vicky Shiran, the founder of Mizrahi feminism? As Shiran (2002) noted: Mizrahi feminism is a school of critical thought shaped… by dialogue with… Black and Third World feminists…. Mizrahi feminism exposes the common practice of Ashkenazi feminism: how it advertises itself as a universalist platform that represents all Israeli women… as if Mizrahi and Palestinian women are, indeed, equal partners in determining… the [Israeli feminist] discourse and struggles…. Mizrahi feminists do not agree with how Ashkenazi feminists see Mizrahi and Palestinian women—as decoration. …So as their men deny gender-based discrimination, Ashkenazi feminists deny their discrimination against Mizrahi and Palestinian women on grounds of class, ethnicity, and nation. This denial enables them to appear in a false show as if they represent… half of the state’s citizens, when they are, in fact, sectorial representatives of their well-defined minority…. Facing our piercing critique, Ashkenazi feminists’ tactics… silence and denounce us. They say: “We all should fight the real oppression instead of fighting amongst ourselves.” Of course, it’s easy for [Ashkenazi feminists] to achieve nods of agreement. In the prevalent hegemonic discourse in Israel, any kind of Mizrahi criticism is always already condemned.
August 18, 2003
“Tomorrow, I’m going back home,” rasped Ilana Azoulay last night. She was hoarse—maybe from screaming, maybe from smoking. Maybe from both. She and I huddled in her tent. Everyone else had gone up the hill to the park’s vista point. Charlie Biton, cofounder of the Jerusalem Black Panthers and a retired Knesset member, was showing a film about the Panthers. Israeli Public TV was there to cover Biton with the single mothers and their fans. His public relations agent probably texted the crew about the possible scoop: “The old Mizrahi rebel educates the new.”
Back in the tent, the air was cold and quiet. Ilana was quiet. Her hair was a newly styled, soft blond, probably donated by a volunteer hairdresser—one of many who flocked to Jerusalem. In her tan, brawny arms, she cradled her old three-legged Chihuahua. This was not the Ilana I’d gotten to know, the pressed coil ready to spring.
“I figured out Bibi’s speech yesterday. A new work-placement plan. Same old stamps, same old lines.” She snickered in staccato, her lips puckered inward over her gums. Dentists also flocked to volunteer for the mothers. Alas, philanthropy did not include dental implants.
“Ethnic cleansing—this is what he is doing to us single moms. Ethnic cleansing.”
My anthro radar lit up. Ilana had said tihur etni, the literal Hebrew translation of “ethnic cleansing.” During the identity politics-happy 1990s, the term appeared in Op-Ed pieces and interviews with the anti-Zionist Ashkenazi intelligentsia. They used tihur etni when they quoted English-language Nakba scholarship produced by the Palestinian diasporic intelligentsia.
“These feminists came last week. They made us a weekend picnic. Yoga was cute. And what do they get from this? What? Were their kids taken away? Were their NSB allowances cut?… So there were also Mizrahi feminists there. So what?… If I’m destined to die, let it be in `Arad. At least now they’ll put me in subsidized housing, give me new teeth and an electric wheelchair for my kid….” She referred to her deal with the encampment sotzialit—what she got in exchange for stopping her protest.
“And you? If you’d have come here from the start to live with your kid…Damn them. May their names be erased. How they slashed you.” She said this in a blasé tone, all the while her Chihuahua nuzzling her armpit. “At the max, you would have gotten a buncha donation checks outta this. Not a university professorship outta this. Forget it. You—forbidden from going there. The university. There—no need for ethnic cleansing. No need.”
“Why didn’t you join everybody else to watch the film and get on TV?” I asked.
“Tell me,” she said. “Have you hit your head? What will I get out of climbing to the top of the hill to see the film Charlie Biton brought about the Black Panthers?” She turned her head toward her dog, hugged it tight against the faded, stretched tattoo on her bicep. “So, buddy. What’d ya think? We’ve lost another photo op on the nightly news.”
Knafoland and the Hudna—The End
The Knafo struggle ended the next day. On the evening of August 19, 2003, a Palestinian suicide bomber dressed as an Orthodox Jew carried a bomb aboard Bus 2 from the Western Wall into Jewish Jerusalem. The bomb detonated just past Peace Road Number 1—the old 1967 border between Palestinian Jerusalem and Mizrahi Jerusalem. Twenty-three people died. More than 130 were injured. Most of the casualties were ultra-Orthodox Jews. One Filipina domestic worker also died. This ended the hudna between Israel and Hamas.
Before the bombing, the media whiled away the uneventful days of the hudna in their own encampment near Knafoland. When their Motorolas buzzed with news of the bombing, they all leaped up. In a press corps’ caravan, they sped across town to cover the carnage. Afterward, they went to the American Colony Hotel Bar to get drunk.
Without media coverage, the sotzialits took advantage. They offered the mothers minimal incentives to leave and reminded them that if their children were not in school come September, they would be reported to the Youth and Family Courts. The plight of the single mothers was completely off the public agenda in favor of the Palestine–Israel conflict. Most mothers left the encampment within a few days of the bombing. Only Vicky and a few diehards stayed until September 23, 2003, when Vicky herself departed.
For the Jewish New Year, 2004, Vicky Knafo, strapped for cash, posed nude for an Israeli porn website. For this photo op, she had written on her breasts: “The State Milks Single Mothers.” Later, she sued the owners of the site because they did not pay her what they promised. On the eve of the Jewish New Year 2005, Vicky’s son committed suicide. Right after the Jewish New Year, 2006, Vicky joined the MERETZ Party, the party of the bourgeois Ashkenazi Zionist Left, Zionist Left, and started giving speeches about peace. Shortly thereafter, she disappeared from the public sphere.
Epilogue
On February 21, 2005, I attended a convening of the Israeli Women’s Parliament. The day’s topic was “Minimum Wage: A Woman’s Perspective.” Dr. Linda `Efroni, a brilliant Iraqi economist and labor attorney, was a speaker. She is a prominent consultant for Israel’s major labor unions on issues concerning income and working conditions and a member of the Israeli Council of Higher Education. Yet, she has been only an adjunct at Tel Aviv University. In the discussion after the speeches, she told the following story: Around 2001, I was invited by the Israeli College of National Security, where military officers are groomed to become generals, to give a lecture at Haifa University. Haifa University regularly hosts events of the college. The audience was made up of students in the special program, but also senior members of the SHABAK—Israel’s FBI—military intelligence, the Israeli police force, and other senior officials in the national security apparatus. There were about 40 people in all sitting around a large conference table. This was around the time of the social unrest following the collapse of the Argentinian economy. They wanted to know if similar unrest was possible in Israel because of socioeconomic gaps, and how these gaps could be minimized. I offered my analysis. We have problems with security and with borders. These transcend socio-economic protests. It would take a miracle for any social protest to succeed. If social unrest appeared in the news, I would not be surprised to hear about Hezbollah Katyusha rockets falling on Kiryat Shmona the next day. This would immediately shift public discourse back to security. I could not rule out that the Katyushas on Kiryat Shmona were a response to the IDF Air Force provocation of their fighter jets crossing the border deep into Lebanon. I told them that I didn’t have the knowledge, but my intuition as an analyst told me that. Everyone was quiet. Everyone was quiet. No one said a thing. And then we broke for a buffet lunch. At the buffet, a corpulent man approached me. He said, “Shalom, my name is XY. I was a media adviser for the minister of defense. This is exactly what we did.” Yes, this is exactly what I said. And this is what he said. He didn’t say that it was off the record. As for Vicky and the end of the hudna, I was in a meeting with Bibi in Jerusalem. She wanted me to join her. The man was very stressed. He sweated a lot. Very stressed. In hindsight, even in the Finance Ministry, they didn’t believe it was going to be so easy. Hok HaHesderim nullifies the legislature. Israel is not a democracy. In the 2003 amendment, they saved 5 billion NIS. They transferred the money to the upper echelons in the form of a tax refund. They could have done other things with this money. They were so surprised at how easy the transfer was. I think it is not impossible that they let the suicide bomber slip through.
In summer 2011, tens of thousands of young Israelis, priced out of their rental leases or foreclosed upon, protested the state’s slashing of public services, echoing the Single Mothers’ Protest of 2003, but on a larger scale. The protesters referred to this as “Tel Aviv’s Tahrir,” after the Tahrir Square demonstrations in Cairo, Egypt, that toppled the Mubarak neoliberal regime. Unlike in the Knafo protest, the leaders and spokespeople of summer 2011 were Zionist-Left Ashkenazim, even though young Mizrahim composed the majority of the protesters, reflecting Israel’s demographics. Most of the protest’s leadership were single, from affluent families, and receive preferential treatment from the authorities. Thus, the regime could not threaten them with the forced boarding of their children due to poverty.
Palestinian citizens of Israel have largely avoided participation, despite courting from the protest leadership using their common Israeli citizenship as grounds to join. Most criticized the protests for not clearly addressing the connections between Israel’s economic troubles and the cost of the military occupation and civic Jewish settlements in the West Bank. The protest leadership’s strategy was to avoid any mention of Palestine to reach a consensus between all sectors of Israel’s secular and religiously observant majority Jewish citizenry.
Thanks to a lull in the Israel–Palestine conflict in summer 2011, the protest succeeded in getting international media attention. On August 18, 2011, a suicide attack by Sinai Bedouin guerrillas struck an Israeli bus. This attack prompted the IDF to bombard Palestinian civilian populations in Gaza. Hamas responded by bombarding civilian populations in Israel’s South. The Israeli regime used this attack to divert attention from the protest. But the protest has not completely died as of this writing. So any in-depth analysis of it would be premature. Major mainstream Hebrew media outlets have reported that SHABAK and the IDF both had intelligence on the date, time, and place the bombing would occur. Netanyahu instructed them to shut up when the Knesset inquired about their lack of preventive measures (Azoulay, 2011; Melman, 2011; Pepper, 2011).
At the January 27, 2012, dinner for the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland, Israeli Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Defense Ehud Barak delivered a speech on the prospect of an Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear facilities. In the same speech, he referred to the social protest: “If the government will not respond to the protest, it will return with force and violence” (Rolnik, 2012). The fact that these two subjects appeared side by side in Barak’s speech has gone unnoticed by the international media (Elliott, 2012).
Hebrew media analysts predict possible reasons that may serve to end Israel’s Jewish social unrest. One may be an IDF military attack on Iran. Another may be military response to Palestinian uprisings resulting from another unsuccessful UN attempt to declare an independent Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza. In any case, a conflict that unites all Israeli Jews will serve to end any social unrest—the same way that a timely suicide bomb ended the summer 2003 Knafo protest.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
This essay is dedicated to my son, Shaheen. The text benefitted from the comments, critiques, and dialogues with Reuven Abarjel, Bill Beeman, Gabriella Bernieri, Jim and Penny Bowen, Steve Caton, Rabbi Reuven and Bat Sheva Drori, Marcella Edre`i, Mickey Eliason, Joy Totah-Hilden and Robert Hilden, Angela Hobart, Caroline Ifeka, Patricia James, Christos Lynteris, Salwa and Zuheir Majadleh, Rahella Mizrahi, Milli De Monticelli, Martha Mundy, Shira Ohayon, Lisa Rofel, Rafi Shubeli, Susanna Sinigaglia, Reinhardt Suarez, David Valentine, and Tanya Zivkovic. I am grateful for their time and thoughts. I also thank my sister activists in Ahoti --for Women in Israel, my Palestinian and Mizrahi women students, and my feminist colleagues at the Beit Berl College: Esther Hertzog, Erella Shadmi, and the late Vicky Shiran. My deepest gratitude to the women who stood with me between 1999 and 2007 in the lines of Israel's National Security Bureau, Forced Employment Bureau, and the NGOs that distributed food for Shabbat. Thanks to these women, I survived the vagaries of Mizrahi single motherhood and kept the hope that, one day, I would be able to return to the focused concerns of writing.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.