Ella Habiba Shohat

In this article, Ella Habiba Shohat, discusses the domination of European Jews, the Ashkenazim, over the voices of the Arab Jews, the Sephardim. The Zionist master narrative portrays the idea that “Zionism ‘saved’ the Sephardim from the harsh rule of their Arab ‘captors,’” while modernizing and integrating them into their own European culture. (270). The Ashkenazi Israeli equates the Sephardi to the Arab, as uneducated and primitive, yet blame and view them as the “obstacle to peace” because of their supposed hatred of the Arab, creating an attitude portraying a colonial parallel operative. Shohat correlates the history of Zionism with that of the Palestinians and Sephardi, stating, “An essential feature of colonialism is the distortion and
even the denial of the history of the colonized.” (286) Zionist discourse presents its history through a Eurocentric grid, with the Palestinian’s possessing a counter narrative, and the Sephardi tangled in the history of both and fragments embedded in each. She argues, though, each version of history neglects the crucial elements of economic and financial interests with the migration of populations. The Sephardim became a source of cheap labor, also allowing the Zionists to denounce their association with colonialism, as they were not exploiting native labor. This migration of the Sephardim created a solution and “quasi-redemption of a culture” for the Ashkenazim minorities, but a “complete annihilation of a cultural heritage” for the other. (Shohat 303) Shohat argues, what the Ashkenazi was to the European, the Sephardim are to the Ashkenazi, making Israel the only place the Sephardim exists in oppression.