Mizrahi refugee woes emerge from shadows

To properly understand how the Holocaust has been seared onto Israel’s collective consciousness, one should visit the country on the 27th of Nisan, a date in the Hebrew calendar that falls in either April or May in the solar one. On that day, Yom HaShoah, the unsuspecting visitor is dumbstruck by the sight of an entire country coming to a halt.

At 10 am on the dot, a siren sounds across the country. Schools, hospitals, trading floors, garages, news rooms, tech start-ups — all these and more freeze exactly where they are as Israeli citizens observe a minute of silent contemplation. Both the stillness and the weeping siren suggest that this is not an act of anger against the outside world, but a humbling opportunity for all Jews, regardless of background or religious observance, to pay tribute to the 6 million who perished.

It’s a spectacle that also confirms the Holocaust, rightly so, as the most destructive episode in the history of Jewish tragedies. Other persecutions are remembered respectfully, but it’s likely only those with a penchant for history who will learn about the pogroms in Kishinev or Damascus, or the expulsion from Spain. Everyone, on the other hand, knows the scale of the Holocaust.

In that environment, it has been difficult for Jews of Mizrahi descent—those, like my family, who originate from communities in the Middle East and North Africa—to get the State of Israel to properly recognize the tragedy of their dispossession. The point wasn’t so much competition with the Holocaust, but the bald fact that the Holocaust was a civili-zational convulsion without peer. And in any case, how many times each year can a na-tion pause and weep? 

Another factor was politics. Israeli leaders for many decades were reluctant to acknowl-edge that the expulsion of the Jews from Arab countries, following the creation of the Jewish state, meant that there were not one, but at least two, refugee populations in the Middle East. Only in the last few years have prominent Israeli politicians emphasized that focusing solely on the Arab refugees from British Palestine in 1948 is a distortion of both history and morality.