Over the Hill and Far Away from the Truth

The desire to shift group identities based on victim-oppressor dynamics cannot supersede the way a social group feels based on its traditions and its lived present reality. This applies to Jews as well as anyone else.

During the last decade the issues of racial identity politics - along with other identities based on gender, sexual orientation and religion - have seeped into conversations on every social issue from elite military unit composition to the casting of heroes and villains in comic books and movies. The course of this tendency has been masked as an attempt to bring a justice-oriented perspective to culture and politics that would better society in the long run and eliminate discrimination and prejudice. What it actually aims to do is divide and conquer existing identity groups, divorce them from their core traditions and beliefs, and bring them to heel under a new intellectual master class.

No better purveyor of this fraudulent perspective exists than Temple University professor Marc Lamont Hill. Many Jewish critics of Hill assail his comments about Israel and Palestine as anti-Semitism, but in researching his record on this and other issues, that should be besides the point. Hill today poses as a defender of academic freedom and freedom of speech based on the price he appears to have paid due to his "river to the sea" speech at the United Nations in 2018. Last December, in the wake of the apparent severing of ties between him and CNN, I wrote an article compiling episodes in his career where Hill acted not as a free speech defender but as a grand inquisitor against others such as Don Imus, a black man calling for others to pull their pants up, and people criticizing the role of Islam in the Bataclan terror attacks of 2015. In one instance he was repeatedly implored by the late great black comedian Patrice O'Neal to desist from his speech policing, because the same standards would eventually be used to tear him down. And that is indeed what happened. I did agree that his personal activism at the UN should not be grounds for firing him from CNN, but mostly due to the fact that Hill is a commentator not a reporter and after all CNN is much more focused on commentary than news in our times. Likewise I do not object to Temple keeping him on their faculty.

What is objectionable however is Hill's habit of deciding by virtue of his academic position to impose his own definitions on everything from turns of phrase (like "from the River to the Sea") to the heritage of entire groups of people like Mizrahi Jews. The latter example arose out of some strange social media fight he was having with gay Israeli activist Hen Mazzig who is of Iraqi ancestry. In it he defined the State of Israel as "the racial and political project that transformed Palestinian Jews (who lived peacefully with other Palestinians) into the 20th century identity category of ‘Mizrahi’ as a means of detaching them from Palestinian identity."

Likewise, I happen to be half Iraqi Jewish on my mother's side as well. As political Zionists go, my mom and grandparents were not exactly the most active and enthusiastic ones. In fact, she moved to the USA in the 1980s specifically to find more economic opportunity and escape the wars that she had grown up with since being born in Israel in 1951. And for the life of me I have never heard a single Mizrahi, Sephardic, or Yemenite Jew (the three categories are not congruent by any means) define themselves as "Palestinian Jews". Article 6 of the Palestinian National Charter says that: "The Jews who had normally resided in Palestine until the beginning of the Zionist invasion will be considered Palestinians." Since this "Zionist invasion" depending on who one asks began either in 1882 or 1898, her family would have been over 50 years late to make the cut. 

But even the Jews that fit within the Charter's definition would probably in retrospect be looked at as part of the problem for the Palestinian nation on behalf of which Hill speaks and organizes. The pre-Zionist Jewish community in Ottoman Palestine never objected to the resettlement of the European Jews (Ashkenaz), the ones that are viewed by the Palestinian activist community as colonizers. For example, the Sephardic Chief Rabbi in Israel was then and is to this day known as the Rishon LeZion (Premier Rabbi of Zion) and the last one under the British Mandate Benzion Meir Hai Uziel was an ardent Zionist and supporter of the State of Israel. 

Later religious community leadership of the Sephardic and Mizrahi community crystallized around the Baghdad-born Rabbi Ovadia Yoseph and his Moroccan rival Mordechai Eliahu. Yoseph's attitudes were in some ways geared toward preserving the Mizrahi community and religious identities in the face of secular Zionist and Ashkenaz rabbinic hegemony. Yet this tendency had nothing to do with preserving a "Palestinian" identity, and indeed while Rabbi Yoseph was a religious authority and activist first and foremost and only in the loosest and clumsiest definition a Zionist of any stripe, and if anything Yoseph's statements on the Palestinians and Arabs varied between straightforward hostility and openness to negotiation.

And what of secular Mizrahi leaders in Jewish Israeli society? The vast majority of them have tended to sit closer to the hard-line Zionist parties of their various iterations. These range from the Yemenite-Moroccan underground fighter Geulah Cohen who founded the ultra-nationalist Tehiya (Renaissance) Party in 1979 because the Likud was not militant enough. That year Cohen stood adamantly against the Camp David Peace Accords that returned the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt. Mme. Cohen stated (see above) that by not passing the Jerusalem Act and the Judea and Samaria Act extending sovereignty over the two disputed zones captured during the 1967 Six Day War that Israel was "deceiving them (the Arab Palestinians) into thinking that there will be a Palestinian state". 

Other major Mizrahi politicians and leaders in Israel include the Morocco-born labour union organizer David Levy (Likud) who as foreign minister in 2000 quit the Labour Party government led by Ehud Barack  in objection to withdrawing troops from southern Lebanon, and the Iraqi-Iranian IDF Chief of Staff Dan Halutz who led the army during the 2006 Lebanon War. I would be remiss not to say that there are certain Mizrahi Jews that belong to the left-wing peace camp such as former Knesset legislator Ran Cohen (Meretz) who was an early advocate in the Left Camp for Peace (Sheli) and union organizer Amir Peretz (Labour) who served as defense minister in the mid-2000s. 

Whatever the political and social outlooks of these individuals however there has never been a major current among Mizrahi Jews to identify as Palestinian. Not even the members of the Black Panther Party - inspired of course by the American movement started in Oakland in the 1960s - did so, even though they protested in the early 1970s against ethnic discrimination by the ruling socialist Workers Party of the Land of Israel (MAPAI) claimed a Palestinian identity. The reason was plain and simple: These people had themselves arrived in Israel by virtue of the the Arab-Israeli conflict and the expulsion of Jews from their birthplaces from Morocco to Iraq. How could one have an underlying Palestinian Arab identity without having been both born in such a place as Palestine and not arriving there by virtue of one's Jewish religious identity. It is important to stress the religious aspect of this, as that was the main dividing line between Jews and their neighbours in the Arab and Muslim world throughout their time in the diaspora.

Hill's clownish proposition is that one's pedigree as a Mizrahi Jew somehow implies that there is an underlying common cause with the Palestinians that only requires a fertilization of the psyche (a "#woke" moment if you will) in order to fully sprout. And that's were the real response is needed to Marc Lamont Hill: If this is the type of mental fantasy that is being taught at Temple University by a black activist professor, then alumni and donors of all ages should reconsider contributing. There is no value to investing one's hard earned money in the pseudo-history of bad faith academics with capped teeth that cannot handle the common sense reason of Patrice O'Neal.