The Yemenite Children Affair: A Moral Call*
The Yemenite Children Affair: A Moral Call* Tova Gamliel, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel
Abstract
The immigration to Israel of most of Yemenite Jewry in 1948–1950, titled “Operation Magic Carpet” is symbolic of a miraculous leap in space and time from distant Yemen to the modern Jewish state. The Yemenite Jews’ utopian ethos, however, was far from able to foresee the trauma that awaited them in the transit camps where they were placed after their arrival in Israel: the kidnapping of thousands of infants in what became known as the “missing Yemenite-Jewish children affair.”
Introduction1 The immigration to Israel of most of Yemenite Jewry in 1948–1950, titled “Operation Magic Carpet” by Israel, is symbolic of a miraculous leap in space and time from distant Yemen to the modern Jewish state. The Yemenite Jews’ utopian ethos, however, was far from able to foresee the trauma that awaited them in the transit camps where they were placed after their arrival in Israel: the kidnapping of thousands of infants in what became known as the “missing Yemenite-Jewish children affair.” Parents’ testimonies about the abductions reveal a similar pattern of deception: they were asked to surrender their children to “infants’ hostels” or medical facilities on the pretext that the youngsters needed better care than the parents could provide in the shacks where they had been housed. Some babies were forcibly seized by care workers, loaded into ambulances, and whisked away to clinics or hospitals. Several days later, the parents were told that their offspring had died. The parents were never shown the children’s bodies and, of course, had no opportunity to bury them. Few received death certificates and the isolated exceptions were tardy and after-the-fact. Several dozen children were returned to their parents after raucous protestations; the fate of most of the others remains unknown. Repeated overtures to law authorities, government offices, and sundry
* I am immensely grateful to Dr. Yigal Ben-Shalom, President of the Association for the Cultivation of Society, Culture, Documentation, and Research, for his welcome activity in promoting research into the culture of Yemenite Jewry, for generously funding the collection and the translation of this article, and for his extraordinary involvement at all stages of this endeavor. 1 This article is an abridged and revised version of the introductory chapter to Children of the Heart: New Aspects of Research on the Yemenite Children Affair. Edited by Tova Gamliel and Nathan Shifriss. Tel Aviv: Resling, [2019] (Hebrew).
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The Yemenite Children Affair: A Moral Call*
officials turned up nothing. The children were not traced and no proof of their death was given. Some were found years later in the custody of other families. Is the Affair worthy of Israeli intellectuals’ attention? Does it offer room for intellectualization? And, to paraphrase Gayatri Spivak’s famous question, can the subaltern win over the intellectuals in their aspiration to reveal the truth? The answer that Israeli academia has invented for these questions, although complex, sheds precious light onto this book, a collection of articles that is largely the outcome of an academic conference held at Bar- Ilan University in the winter of 2013. The sociopolitical value of this collection rests on two contrasting fundaments. One is the increasingly solid status of the Affair in the Israeli public mind, a process recently allowing the question of the victims’ entitlement to recognition of their narrative and, in turn, of their struggle to uncover the truth, to rise to the surface. The other is the nature and tendencies of the Israeli field of knowledge-creation, which leaves the Affair outside its boundaries and, by so doing, strengthens its being labeled “aberrant.” In my eyes, the Affair is analogous to the Dreyfus affair: it carries a narrative of injustice that fragments the intellectual discourse in Israel and demands self-contemplation and soul- searching. My self-contemplation is years long. From the time the kidnapped children became a distant memory until the parents found it necessary to talk about them once again, they had children ,( ﺐﻠﻘﻟا ﺪﻟو ) become the world’s orphans. Their parents spoke of them as walad al-kalb of the heart (the title of this collection), an expression that reflects both parents’ love, and natural ownership, of their children. For years, alongside social activists, I tried to arrange their “adoption” by academia and the arts—but my efforts fell short. Academia and the arts proved to be not only arenas of expression but also arenas of power. The “children of the heart” were crowded out by silence and letters of rejection by the editors of publishing houses and journals, professors, artists, and film directors—evoking Rabbi Shalom Shabazi’s words: “The doors of the generous were locked.” My efforts at advocacy made demands of me and were powerfully manifested in the emotional-ethical work I performed as I edited this collection up to the last moments of proofing. As an editor, I undertake a dual demarche: to invite the readers to an unbiased discussion, as far as possible, of this fraught Affair, and to note—reveal—the inner impetus, the motive force that prompted my decision ab initio to enlist in a discussion of this kind and
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The Yemenite Children Affair: A Moral Call*
to pledge the best of my ability to it. I intend this be an engagement in the discovery of knowledge, one vested with nothing apart from the discovery itself, the reflection. The remarks that follow are prefaced by comments about the status of the truth as seen by me and by many among the second and third generations—the offspring of parents who reached Israel in the great immigration wave that immediately followed the founding of the country. For us, the story given over and accepted in the family transmission is personal and, as such, known in its full experiential sense. Even as it retains the label of capital-I injustice, it continues to hemorrhage, although compressed in our memories of the failures of that immigration wave. The Injustice, no longer repressible, is seen among us as a traumatic truth of truths, an axiom that by definition needs no confirmation and, insulted, refuses to bestir itself in defense of its credibility. From my childhood days to this moment, the forlorn sight and voice of my paternal grandmother Sa’ada, now deceased, became part of my psyche; repeatedly they cry out to me, imploring me to do whatever I could to remember and not to forget. My Uncle Haim, the son of her old age, was three years old or so and amazingly healthy in 1949, when she was ordered to deliver him to the crèche at the Rosh Ha’Ayin immigrant camp. Although she did not understand the reason for this, it took little prodding for her to obey the directive of the nurses in their white uniforms. My grandmother related that she had been placed under immense psychological pressure that left her no choice. Like other women in the camp, she convinced herself that the nurses knew what they were demanding; after all, they were in charge. They were good Jews like Jews everywhere, dedicated to bringing over the members of my grandmother’s family and community to the Holy Land. After surrendering her son to the infants’ home, she visited him there every day for a few days, until the morning he disappeared. That morning, she arrived as usual and asked to see him. Not as usual, however, the nurses approached her and told her flatly that the boy had died. “Died?” she cried, stunned. “How? Yesterday he was cheery and looked fine!” The nurses offered no answer that might assuage her dismay, and she never saw her son again. For much time to come, she repeatedly told me about that bitter day and the days of dismay that followed. In midday she would erupt in sudden and unexplained weeping, wailing out her inner anguish. So, it went until the day of her death. In the tableau of my memory, I imagine her back then, stunned to hear of Haim’s death, pounding her palms, sobbing piteously, rushing to and fro, banging on the windows of the infants’ home, throwing herself against the door. If her son is dead, if it is really so, then would 3 Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary e-Journal Volume 17 Number 2 (2020) ISSN 1209-9392 © 2021 Women in Judaism, Inc. All material in the journal is subject to copyright; copyright is held by the journal except where otherwise indicated. There is to be no reproduction or distribution of contents by any means without prior permission. Contents do not necessarily reflect the views of the editors.
The Yemenite Children Affair: A Moral Call*
they just do her the kindness of letting her say goodbye? she cries. Then she is torn away from the site with much difficulty. Her children and husband clutch her. They despair of finding the heart to speak to her. But she will return to the infants’ home, to and fro, again and again, beseeching. It is to no avail. The shack allocated to her and her family for housing will remain devoid of the boy, of Haim, of her life. She will stare and stare into the void that had opened up. Her son had been and was gone. The void will slice into her flesh. Sometimes she will leap upon his tiny clothing and shoes, drawing their scent into her insides. Then she will tumble to the floor on the little mattress on which she had put him to sleep on and pound her head until it hurts. Shattered by her rage, again she bursts into wailing and wallows in the flood of tears and broken words. It is this unmediated knowledge and experience that underlies my statement in another article in this collection: that this happened to mothers and fathers at the onset of the melancholy that ensued. These are the bitter roots that I call Civil Melancholia. From Narrative to Truth The affair of the missing Yemenite-Jewish children, born in Israel’s early years, now encompasses some 2,050 children—around 1,160 from Yemen, some 740 from other MENA countries, and approximately 150 of Ashkenazi extraction. Additional complaints that surface regularly show that its full extent remains undetermined. The Affair, a soft-pedal epithet for a narrative about extreme and systematic repression in Zionist and early Israeli history, has become a fixture on the Israeli public agenda. Despite three commissions of inquiry and the declassification of many documents pursuant to the December 2016 government resolution, the narrative of the abduction of immigrants’ children remains largely couched in fragments of truths and half-truths in the Israeli public discourse. The uncertainty surrounding the true status of this narrative encouraged clashing and competing views for nearly seven decades. Some maintained that none of it ever happened. For them, the Affair was something like an urban legend, a myth, or a conspiracy theory that had nothing in common with reality. Others believed that “the Affair” did denote a historical event in which many children were lost; they, however, were divided between the hypotheses of “disappearance” and “abduction,” their reasoning based on the few fragmentary testimonies and documents available to them. The declassification of the documents of the State Commission of Inquiry—which curate, among other things, testimonies about the handover of children for adoption without their parents’ knowledge—leave no more room for the slash that used to separate the conjectures of disappearance or abduction; they reinforce the claim that an injustice had been perpetrated. The 4 Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary e-Journal Volume 17 Number 2 (2020) ISSN 1209-9392 © 2021 Women in Judaism, Inc. All material in the journal is subject to copyright; copyright is held by the journal except where otherwise indicated. There is to be no reproduction or distribution of contents by any means without prior permission. Contents do not necessarily reflect the views of the editors.
The Yemenite Children Affair: A Moral Call*
disclosure of the documents, however, abetted the onset of a new phase in the struggle to find the truth and draw the finish line of the Affair. The remarks of the director of the Legal Unit for Freedom of Information at the Israel Ministry of Justice, who accompanied the opening of the State Archives, give telling indication of this:
What we have here is a bleeding affair that isn’t over. Accordingly, revealing the documents is the first but not necessarily the last step in the affair. ... It is clear to us that this won’t put the story to an end. On the contrary: The publicity may bring new matters to the surface. We have no doubt that additional questions will arise after we reveal the information in our possession. Seemingly, however, the attorney’s affirmation did not signal anything new in state policies concerning the Affair; only future government measures would make that correction. Reading the systematically articulated insights of Boaz Sanjero and Sigal Ozery-Roitberg about the conduct of the judicial and political systems in the Affair, one suspects that the renewed demand for recognition of the families’ suffering remains naïve. Possibly, too, the statement of the Ministry of Justice representative is still submerged in the same ritualistic practice. Namely, it may suggest that the struggle for the disclosure of confirmable truth is once again placed in the hands of representatives of the families, members of the second and third generations to the injustice, whose struggle had led to the declassification and public disclosure of documents that otherwise would have remained classified for another seventy years. Those “additional questions,” as the attorney called them, have been there ever since the Yemenite Jewish Federation of America first cried out in 1950, and from the standpoint of the families’ representatives they remain valid today. For them, the still-unanswered questions are permanent signifiers of establishmentarian fraud that reflects contempt for the victims’ suffering and intelligence. The declassification of the State Commission of Inquiry’s documents is not enough to stop believers in the abduction narrative from continuing to expect the Government of Israel and Israeli society to recognize their suffering. Many still cling to a position that implies and warns against continuing to be misled. The Minister Tzachi Hanegbi, who headed the commission, defined the opening of the archives as “a bold and unprecedented [act] in the history of commissions of inquiry in Israel.” To these people, however, the commission’s decision was more of the same, the latest of the establishment’s concealment-by-disclosure tricks. So, the victims’ representatives alleged at the time of the State Commission of Inquiry in 1996, in remarks that remain valid today:
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The Yemenite Children Affair: A Moral Call*
The time is ripe for the government to come forward and admit that these [child kidnappings] happened. How many died and how many were adopted are matters for the various commissions of examination. Here, however, there has to be an unqualified admission that these things [abductions of children] existed, [an admission] that the families will accept in full. Many, not only among the victims of the Affair, believe that those in the establishment, if they so desire, can redeem the truth, expose it to light of day, and, in consequence, acknowledge the suffering, make amends, and effect reconciliation. One increasingly hears references to the well-known Australian example in the various discourse groups; it is emphasized as a worthy model for both moral and civil emulation. Australia’s annual National Sorry Day, established by the Government in 1998 to mark the “Stolen Generations” affair involving tens of thousands of children from the continent’s indigenous peoples, is the outcome of the recommendations of an Australian commission of inquiry and is meant to instigate a healing and schism-knitting process. In the eyes of those who promote Israel’s child-abduction narrative, the Australian example rationalizes and humanizes the demand for recognition of the suffering on a universal scale. For them, it should belong to the struggle of human-rights activists. Establishment acknowledgment is needed to rescue the state of victimhood from its relative status as one narrative among alternative narratives that doubt the very occurrence of the injustice. The decades-long occurrences of civil-political dialogue between the families and the Israeli state institutions attest to futile efforts to communicate, couched in scripted rhetoric that ends in an impasse. Along the continuum of these occurrences, I find that the Affair translates well into terms of social-drama theory. This theory, set forth by the anthropologist Victor Turner and invoked to understand social conflicts, comprises four successive stages that come with no assurance of the fulfillment of hopes at their end. The stages are breach, crisis, redressive action, and reintegration or schism. Breach is an event that brings about an initial situation that threatens to destabilize the social unit. In crisis, the breach widens into public and open demonstrations and spawns successive crises, each possibly more threatening than its precursor. Redressive action is meant to cope with the crisis—to resolve or heal the breach— while an unredressed crisis is likely to trigger further and more acute crises. Reintegration means resolving the original breach in the direction of reuniting the social unit; the absence of a solution means a schism of unimaginable outcome (Turner, 2004). The Affair easily translates into these stages even for those not fully versed in the particulars of its progression. The aim of the families and their representatives in the Affair is socio-civic reintegration, which may be attained only in the course of a political transformation in which redressive action becomes the
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The Yemenite Children Affair: A Moral Call*
state establishment’s goal. At the present writing, after the State Commission of Inquiry declassified its documents, no one continues to dispute the existence of the crisis in the early 1950s and its metamorphoses since then. The Affair is unique in that the meaning of the breach that started it all is still susceptible to failures of discourse and practice manifested in gagging, concealment, and denial. The question is, where does the Israeli intelligentsia stand in this sad civic-political drama? Turner did not assign intellectuals an explicit role in social dramas, but history has done so. This preface focuses on the challenge of mediating between the victims of the Affair and the public and the State—a challenge that rests at the doorsteps of Israel’s intellectuals. An Outcry as a Moral Call From his place of imprisonment, as he served a sentence for his struggle to reveal the truth in the Affair, the historian Nathan Shifriss, the co-editor of the collection, published an article titled “Will the Israeli Émile Zola Be Found?” He wrote it pursuant to the affair of the abducted Yemenite, Mizrahi, and Balkan Jewish children and its resurrection by Rabbi Uzi Meshullam and the Mishkan Ohalim association. Here are some passages from his remarks:
What can be done to spread word of ... the real picture of the affair, in a situation where the media, both electronic and print (foremost the three large newspapers) ... cannot give the affair real treatment due to severe censorship limitations ...? I decided first to refer the findings to the country’s spiritual elite. I knew that this sociocultural stratum displays much sensitivity to matters of morals and conscience and comes out vehemently to decry injustices and demand their redress. ... Accordingly, the findings were presented ... in meetings with prominent personages in the Israeli intellectual and academic world. Usually, they greeted me with horror and shock as they became aware of the affair, and some offered to collect signatures for a petition to be presented to the Government with the demand to set up a state commission of inquiry. ... I forwarded the findings in two memoranda ..., containing the wording of the petition, to most of Israel’s prominent intellectuals and academics (Israel Prize laureates, members of the Hebrew Writers Association, lecturers at university faculties of humanities and social sciences). ... The response to the material that was sent by mail was minuscule. The intellectuals’ silence ... dealt me a stunning blow, particularly in view of their hyperactivity in the political domain. ... Will anyone of the stature of Émile Zola stand up to defend the Dreyfus of the State of Israel [Rabbi Uzi Meshullam] and again demand a solution to the affair? Will any of the few intellectuals who responded to my memoranda (fewer than 5 percent) mobilize for this lofty project, and in time? The pioneering collection of articles accepts the moral summons that erupts from this outcry, which identifies with a collective narrative about an injustice that some have described as an inconceivable, extreme configuration of the negativity of humanness that may have occurred amid the fulfillment of rights and the consummation of a national ideology. The 7 Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary e-Journal Volume 17 Number 2 (2020) ISSN 1209-9392 © 2021 Women in Judaism, Inc. All material in the journal is subject to copyright; copyright is held by the journal except where otherwise indicated. There is to be no reproduction or distribution of contents by any means without prior permission. Contents do not necessarily reflect the views of the editors.
The Yemenite Children Affair: A Moral Call*
intellectual response given in this collection lacks all pretense of the Émile Zola variety and comes to fruition much in arrears, at least a generation since Shifriss first cried out. Yet its importance is hard to overstate. Again, it demands that the Affair be given its proper historical place in the Israeli current scene. This response is attentive to the unrelenting anguish, the hoarse outcry to feel the distress of those wrongly deprived of that which is theirs as a matter of course. Researchers in various disciplines have paused on their intellectual journeys to honor the call of their conscience and trace the ineradicable indications of the Affair and its manifestations and occurrences. This collection is grounded in research, probing study, and, above all, academic involvement that crosses cultural and discursive borders, anchored in values of tolerance and solidarity. By presenting the full breadth of the Affair with its multicomplexioned historical, social, cultural, legal, psychological, and media aspects, it exposes the public to issues in the narrative of the wronged families and their representatives, provides tools and points of view through which the narrative may be understood, and identifies the bumps and hurdles on the road to the establishment’s recognition of what happened, to redress, and to reconciliation. Before I sketch the academic contours of the collection, I will dwell on its uniqueness in the Israeli intellectual sphere by noting its placement relative to the two intellectual discursive projects that preceded it. After describing these projects, I will argue that even though they drew on the same conceptual sources of theory and criticism, paradoxically they contributed, each in its own way, to the symbolic liquidation of the Affair. I begin with remarks about the “time of the ‘post’” as the first discursive project that addressed the topic by working through issues in Jewish and Israeli nationalism in a challenging way, as do the New Historians and the critical sociologists. At hand here is a broad and ramified discourse, so blunt as to be subversive, that gained intellectual visibility and wielded considerable influence in academia. For protestors in the Affair who yearned for a potentially healing informational infrastructure or redressive action, this discursive endeavor may have spawned expectations of the highest kind. The second discursive project largely derived itself from the first by mobilizing theoretical concepts from the field of the critical stream. This project focused on protesting against the patronizing attitude of the state and social hegemony toward immigrants from the MENA countries generally and those from Yemen particularly. Its main manifestations in
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The Yemenite Children Affair: A Moral Call*
relation to the Affair emerged from several conferences, content on the internet, and media interviews (Ozery, 2003). As a bold and trailblazing intellectual, Edward Said is a fount of inspiration for scholars of the critical school. In these erudites’ writings, the thinking of savants and spiritualities who deserve to be called intellectuals according to the classic definition of Julian Benda—those who pledge all their loyalty to truth only—is amply rephrased and quoted. Said’s stance, echoing the ideas of favored and highly influential intellectuals such as Bourdieu, Foucault, Gramsci, and Fanon, among others, is that intellectuals cannot be counted among those who disregard the outcries of those reduced to whimpering by oppression, wrong, and injustice. Above all, they belong to the camp that has the courage and integrity “to speak the truth to power” (Said, 1994: 69–70). In our times, Said contends, when everyone subscribes cloyingly to liberal rhetoric of equality and harmony, it is the intellectuals’ duty to fulfill their moral responsibility in current situations where the gap between ideas of equality and justice and reality is very wide. Although an intellectual enlightenment of such nature is broadly worshipped in writings and conferences, it is a fact that references to the kidnapping narrative, indicative of extreme and systematic oppression in the history of Zionism, are close to nil in the scholarly discourse of the New Historians and the critical sociologists. One cannot overstate the acute devaluation of the abduction narrative by its conspicuous absence even in the home that is ostensibly interested in accommodating it, the Mizrahi Postcolonialist oeuvre1 that devotes itself to the multifaceted disempowerment that Zionism brought about—works of immense social and political value (Ram, 2006).2 Drawing on the historical persona of Émile Zola, I suppose that had this man, the epitome of the fearless intellectual, become aware the exclusion of the Affair from the post-Israeli discursive project (Ram, 2006), he would have honored the blatant dissonance by hoisting a black flag. This critique of the critical stream is necessary because it calls readers’ attention to the gravity of the kidnapping narrative and the legal and public manifestations that it has evinced since it first became public, and, conversely, to the gravity of the pride that scholars take in the moral mission that comes along with the appellation “intellectual” even as they choke on their silence. The gravity of the narrative from the Zionist national standpoint receives the clarity it deserves from the articles in this collection. To demonstrate this point here, I content myself with two allusions in scholarship. The first emerges from a rare stance in the Mizrahi 9 Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary e-Journal Volume 17 Number 2 (2020) ISSN 1209-9392 © 2021 Women in Judaism, Inc. All material in the journal is subject to copyright; copyright is held by the journal except where otherwise indicated. There is to be no reproduction or distribution of contents by any means without prior permission. Contents do not necessarily reflect the views of the editors.
The Yemenite Children Affair: A Moral Call*
Postcolonialist literature, expressed by the researcher Ella Shohat. In her book Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices (2006), she illuminates the wrongdoing by describing it in trenchant, sensationalist, and accusatory terms, far from flattering, as Said demands, and lends the victimhood narrative the stature of truth. Thus, she writes:
Disoriented by the new reality in Israel, Yemenis, as well as other Jews from Arab and Muslim countries, fell prey to doctors, nurses, and social workers, most of them on the state payroll. These representatives of the state’s welfare institutions were involved in providing babies for adoption by Ashkenazi parents largely in Israel and the United States while telling the biological parents that the babies had died. The conspiracy was extensive enough to include the systematic issuance of fraudulent death certificates for the adopted babies and at times even fake burial sites for the babies who presumably had died, although the parents were never presented with the proof—the body. In this way, the government attempted to ensure that over several decades Mizrahi demands for investigation were silenced while information was hidden and manipulated by government bureaus. ... A severe human-rights violation—kidnapping—was subjected to systematic silencing and censorship (p. 349). The gravity of the historical narrative, wrapped in the truthfulness of Taboo Memories, takes a much more acrid turn in the global perspective, according to the researcher Ruth Amir. Amir cleanses the Affair of the parochial and narrow outlines that typify the public discourse and resets its contours in the domain of international law as it relates to human rights. At the focus of her discussion is the 1948 Genocide Convention, in view of which she sketches the similarity of the missing Yemenite-Jewish children affair to the forced labor of children from economically disempowered strata, the offspring of political opponents, and children of indigenous peoples, perpetrated by hegemonic groups in other countries. In an exactingly systematic quasi-genealogical demarche, this work provides a rationale for the stances of Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish jurist whose intellectual devotion undergirds the Convention, and annotates the children’s clause of the Convention as follows:
Lemkin took up the question of whether genocide can be committed by kidnapping children and argued that kidnapping is a form of biological genocide because there is no difference between directly killing children and kidnapping them for the group, [the latter] being tantamount to a time bomb that threatens [the group] with annihilation by delayed action. The kidnapping narrative was translated into outcries at the gate. It became information that pounded on Israeli intellectuals’ doors twice: in the public struggle of Rabbi Uzi Meshullam and his followers in the 1990s and in the solo endeavors of intellectuals who, awakening to the narrative including its moral imperatives, had to surmount bygone premises and ancient fears.
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The Yemenite Children Affair: A Moral Call*
Among the examples of my acquaintance are Tuvia Sulami’s vanguard protest operation and protracted protests by Esther Herzog, Nathan Shifriss, Shoshana Madmoni-Gerber, and Shoshi Zaid, contributors to this collection, and of Sampson (Shimshon) Giat and Rafi Shovali. As a researcher and expert on Yemenite Jewish history, culture, and literature, Tuvia Sulami edited the journal Afikimi in 1965–1969. After publishing a vitriolic editorial in his journal calling for the investigation of the Affair, he became a major activist in demanding the exposure of the matter. There is good reason, Sulami argued, to recognize the vanished children as sacrifices on the altar of the Jewish national resurrection, much as one would recognize war casualties. As an involved anthropologist and feminist, Esther Herzog has been contributing to the protest discourse in various forums for years, enriching it with the unique voice of a woman activist who labors to empower the status and rights of children and parents and to prevent the disempowerment of parents by welfare institutions and courts of law. Below are excerpts from remarks that she published in the newspaper Ma’ariv when the State Commission of Inquiry released its conclusions in 2001:
... How could hundreds or thousands of children (the Mishkan Ohalim activists gathered 1,500 complaints) vanish so quietly? Were there no police? And where were the local authorities? Had no one known, and was it only by chance that “cases” of children’s “disappearance” were discovered many years later? The falsehood literally cries out. It took the authorities six and a half years to whitewash the Yemenite children affair this time. They imprisoned Rabbi Uzi Meshullam and his supporters for years on end, incomparable with and disproportionate to what they did. Even in attributing the acts to them there was more falsity than truth; they managed to emasculate this charismatic and devoted leader and made him a shadow of a man. Meshullam and his supporters were forced to “sit down and shut up”; otherwise, the rabbi would be taken back to prison and then, almost certainly, he would leave only to the cemetery. But even today, with Meshullam’s voice no longer being heard, his righteousness cries to the heavens. Sampson Giat was president of the Yemenite Jewish Federation of America in 1993–1998. Ex officio and assuming the role of a journalist and an ethnologist, Giat became an extraordinary social activist who operated indefatigably to bring the truth about the Yemenite- Jewish children affair to light. At the request of the Cohen-Kedmi Committee, he tracked down one of the kidnapped girls in the United States and, by means of DNA testing, reunited her with her mother after forty-nine years of separation. “With [his] vision and doggedness,” the Minister of Justice, Tzachi Hanegbi, wrote in 1997, Giat managed to reunite a family (as the commission had failed to do). Furthermore, Giat sent pointed letters to the Israeli prime ministers and Supreme Court concerning the soundness of the commissions’ doings, maintained close contact with Rabbi Uzi Meshullam and his followers in prison, interviewed 11 Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary e-Journal Volume 17 Number 2 (2020) ISSN 1209-9392 © 2021 Women in Judaism, Inc. All material in the journal is subject to copyright; copyright is held by the journal except where otherwise indicated. There is to be no reproduction or distribution of contents by any means without prior permission. Contents do not necessarily reflect the views of the editors.
The Yemenite Children Affair: A Moral Call*
abducted children’s mothers, and, by advertising in The New York Times on behalf of the federation that he headed, urged American Jewry to display solidarity with the victims’ families and apply concerted pressure on the Government of Israel to make progress toward solving the Affair. These are but a few of his actions as described in his book My Memories as an Activist for Israel and for Yemenite Jewry (Hebrew). Raffi Shovali is a social activist, a member of the Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow Coalition, and an independent investigator of the Affair. In a television interview, Shovali explained his protest in the trenchant manner that has long been his:
The thing that stands behind [the Affair] is an ideological background that’s much deeper, touching the roots of that great word “Zionism,” which came from Europe and observed the East as it did, prompting [Zionism] to do a great many things that we know today were very grave. ... The founders of the state [of Israel] subverted everything: the culture, the quality, the parenting, everything associated with the East and the Jews of the East. ... The affair of the Yemenite-Jewish children is Zionism’s success. It’s not a system failure. It’s what you ask for when you adhere to that ideology. Masses of intellectuals and academics could not but discover the details of the narrative that Shovali presented them in his learned language. As stated, however, the well-known narrative concerning its dire implications still awaits appropriation by the critical-stream agendas, the studies of which carry the banner of the “hermeneutics of the devil” (Silberstein, 1996: 107). Given that this radical narrative of child kidnapping has been debated in the public discourse for decades, the moral reading that flows from it to critical inquiry and research reverberates. When the narrative is disregarded, one gets the sneaking suspicion that it lacks sufficient support to test the victims’ entitlement to challenge the implementation of the Zionist ideology and its crude violation of human rights. Is there really no room to examine, by means of this narrative, the yawning gap between Zionist enlightenment rhetoric and reality, an abyss that Israel’s establishment sociology generally ignores? Is this narrative not in fact a case worthy of full-bore study with the critical and linguistic tools in which the New Historians and the critical sociologists are trained? The following statement amplifies the puzzlement:
Those who adopt the post-Zionist label wish to transcend the Zionist discourse in their quest for worthier ways to speak about Israeli culture, identity, and history and, in certain cases, Jewish culture, identity, and history (Silberstein, 1996: 110). The kidnapping narrative is a political outlier in the critical intellectuals’ discursive project (Shenhav, 2009). It thrives intellectually in sectorial journals outside the “post” camp and recently, fortunately, in the electronic and print media. In the final reckoning, the critical writings about this accumulation of important insights propose only an indirect reading for 12 Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary e-Journal Volume 17 Number 2 (2020) ISSN 1209-9392 © 2021 Women in Judaism, Inc. All material in the journal is subject to copyright; copyright is held by the journal except where otherwise indicated. There is to be no reproduction or distribution of contents by any means without prior permission. Contents do not necessarily reflect the views of the editors.
The Yemenite Children Affair: A Moral Call*
understanding the kidnapping narrative, the kind that requires the use of derived parallels and inferences from analyses of other injustices.3 In other words, these writings have to be read like negatives of a photograph. The second discursive project was also based on “negative” reading. It centered on lectures in various forums by intellectuals, some Mizrahi, who enriched the discussion of the Affair with critical concepts and perceptions and a dollop of Postmodernity and Postcolonialism. Sigal Ozery-Roitberg’s ethnography, in which four conferences that focused on the Affair in the early “aughts” are analyzed among other topics,4 describes the transport of knowledge and rhetoric from the first discursive project to the second and analyzes the implications of this transposition within a polyphony of voices and views (Ozery, 2003). Salient among the contributions of this ethnography to our discussion is the protest rally5 as an analytical- performative event and an invaluable context for evaluating the response of a discourse to a moral reading. In other words, the protest rally proves to be a performative event in which the context projects itself and the attendees, most identified with victimhood and protest, assume an active role. One expects their responses, those of a sensitive collective, to signify, clearly, the extent of the acceptance or rejection of the messages of the discourse, whether these find expression in outcries, manifestations of rage and contempt, or cheering that replaces a lengthy enforced silence. Many characteristics of the appropriated discourse came to light in the failures to meet the protesting crowd’s expectations or the inescapable outcomes of intellectual apathy toward those who adhere to the kidnapping narrative. The ethnographic explanation that Ozery- Roitberg offers points to the probability of a failure in the intellectual discourse, which weaves on its own authority what Foucault saw as a “network of constraints.” What he meant by this is the speakers’ preference of discussing abstract issues from the fields of politics, law, and social affairs that the crowd of protestors perceives as far from the Affair, or the speakers’ tsk- tsk adoption of a Postmodern tolerance that allows several truths regarding the Affair to coexist—an approach that those who affirm one painful truth cannot accept. The tense disquiet that may ripple between the protestors who attend such rallies and the academics shows how an intellectual discourse, however acquainted it is with the issues of the Affair and however accommodative it may be of the kidnapping narrative, may reach the cupped ears of the victims and their representatives as a configuration that emasculates them. Ozery-Roitberg’s ethnography sheds light on the sin that rests at the doorstep of the “negative” reading. From my standpoint, her work promotes reexamination of this interpretive possibility in regard to the 13 Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary e-Journal Volume 17 Number 2 (2020) ISSN 1209-9392 © 2021 Women in Judaism, Inc. All material in the journal is subject to copyright; copyright is held by the journal except where otherwise indicated. There is to be no reproduction or distribution of contents by any means without prior permission. Contents do not necessarily reflect the views of the editors.
The Yemenite Children Affair: A Moral Call*
path that redressive action should take. Well-intentioned intellectual debates may not fulfill their promise to serve as a moral call. Response: a Third Discursive Project This collection is painted in the colors of the moral-grammar approach, which urges scholars to track the contents of fields of meaning that emerge from suffering and the silencing of suffering, and to insert victims’ testimonies, stances, and emotions into their power-relations equations (Honneth, 1995). The discursive project of concern to us offers a third way to discuss the kidnapping narrative, one that ascribes supreme importance, surpassing any declared social agenda or discursive fad, to the demand of the narrative to be decoded. One who follows this path may find, alongside several works in the collection that draw on sources of the first discursive project, other works that stand independent of the pretentions of that discourse. This discursive openness is associated with the epistemology of anchoring of the stances and the criticism throughout the collection in broad research findings that span multiple disciplines. The research discoveries are too important for their authors to snare in polemics or the temptations of networks of constraints. They should find their culmination by being properly set within the jigsaw puzzle of a tableau of truth that passes the test of readers’ judgment. This collection has three sections. The first deals with the question of the time frame of the Affair: the period that should be seen as its inception and the matter of when it will end. This time frame—between a historical starting point and the endless endpoint demarcated by current affairs—is valuable because it underscores a constant element and because it is suspected as being an obstacle to the attainment of social redress and reconciliation. I refer here to a connection of dispossession between the social images of Mizrahim and, particularly, those from Yemen, and ideological sanction of the use of force, a nexus that, in view of the development of a critical public discourse, merely changes its configurations and is as valid today as ever. The topic of Section 2 is Westernism as a fundamental of space and motion that is evident in migration movements and changes in social identity. Westernism, it seems, is a perspective that contributes to the decoding of two matters: the likelihood that child kidnapping occurred and the focusing of the injustice on Yemenite-Jewish immigrants specifically, and the ways the cachet of power has made migration into a complex and unendurable experience of loss. Section 3 centers on the civic limbo in which the Affair is trapped—the protracted state of tension between feelings of despair and hope that was institutionalized with the help of the 14 Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary e-Journal Volume 17 Number 2 (2020) ISSN 1209-9392 © 2021 Women in Judaism, Inc. All material in the journal is subject to copyright; copyright is held by the journal except where otherwise indicated. There is to be no reproduction or distribution of contents by any means without prior permission. Contents do not necessarily reflect the views of the editors.
The Yemenite Children Affair: A Moral Call*
establishment’s commissions of inquiry and the Israeli media. Study of these players’ modi operandi evokes such mordant criticism that were it not for the tenacity of those who protested against the Affair, foremost the justice fighter Rabbi Uzi Meshullam; were it not for the onset of contrition over the establishment players’ misdeeds, publicized on television; and were it not for the ascent of the sociopolitical status of the Mizrahim, all hope would probably have been lost. Back to the Ethos of Redemption In the summer of 2016, a manifesto was placed in the Ha’aretz newspaper and fifty Israeli academics responded. Three demands were expressed in the advertisement: track down the missing children, commemorate them, and compensate the wronged families. Since the collection was published (2019), Israeli academics have been joining the debates over the Affair and its implications for Israeli society. Many of those who became scholar- activists are intellectuals who consider themselves representatives of the families. At the present writing, ahead of the publication of this article, associations that deal with the Affair, human and civil rights organizations, social activists, and researchers have come together to issue a petition calling for the declassification of materials concerning the Affair that remain under wraps. Many academics have already affixed their signatures, as did Leon and Cohen (in this collection). Many hope that a transition from politics of incrimination to politics of recognition, redress, and reconciliation will occur. As I sense it, underlying the widening activism, like in the hearts of the victims of the Affair, the ethos of redemption and the grandeur of the ethics of the Jews, the people of the Bible, still pulses despite everything. Mothers and fathers have tellingly phrased this ethos, which we recall once again, when they reached the Holy Land:
When we reached Israel, Lod [Airport], we got off the plane. First, we kissed the ground. […] When we arrived, nurses came with new blankets to take the babies, my twin brothers. Just as they deplaned, they greeted the babies. I told myself […] “What angels, angels in the Land of Israel.” It’s the first moment that I’m in the Land of Israel. So, I told myself, “What a privilege!” Beyond the parents’ bequests—that struggle be waged, that there be remembrance, and that what happened not be forgotten (!)—these remarks light the path of many of us.
15 Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary e-Journal Volume 17 Number 2 (2020) ISSN 1209-9392 © 2021 Women in Judaism, Inc. All material in the journal is subject to copyright; copyright is held by the journal except where otherwise indicated. There is to be no reproduction or distribution of contents by any means without prior permission. Contents do not necessarily reflect the views of the editors.
The Yemenite Children Affair: A Moral Call*
Bibliography Barthes, Roland. The Rustle of Language. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Benda, Julien. The Betrayal of the Intellectuals. Boston: Beacon Press, 1955. Clifford, James, and George E. Marcus. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. New York: Pantheon Books, 1972. Honneth, Axel. The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1995 [1992]. Ozery, Sigal. “Captive Protest: the Yemenite Children Affair 2002.” Master’s thesis, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, 2003: [Hebrew]. Ram, Uri. The Time of the “Post”: Nationalism and the Politics of Knowledge in Israel. Tel Aviv: Resling, 2006. Resnick, J. “Pierre Bourdieu: The Sociological Field as a Combat Sport.” Sotsiologia Yisraelit [Israeli Sociology] 4, no. 3: 427–434 [Hebrew]. Said, Edward W. “Speaking Truth to Power.” In Representations of the Intellectual, edited by Edward W. Said, pp. 63–75. New York: Vintage Books, 1986. Shenhav, Yehuda. “On the Auto-nomies of the Political,” Teoria uBikoret [Theory and Criticism] 34: 181–190 [Hebrew]. Shohat, Ella. Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2006. Silberstein, Lawrence G. “New Historians and Critical Sociologists between Post-Zionism and Postmodernism.” Teoria uBikoret [Theory and Criticism] 8 (Summer 1996): 105–121 [Hebrew]. Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969.
Notes
1 As distinct from the aforementioned protest gatherings that belong to the second discursive project. 2 I exclude Shohat (2006) from this generalization. 3 Notably, the Palestinian victimhood narrative is the most dominant of them. 4 Some of these gatherings were organized by the Yogev Association and the Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow Coalition (Ozery, 2003). 16 Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary e-Journal Volume 17 Number 2 (2020) ISSN 1209-9392 © 2021 Women in Judaism, Inc. All material in the journal is subject to copyright; copyright is held by the journal except where otherwise indicated. There is to be no reproduction or distribution of contents by any means without prior permission. Contents do not necessarily reflect the views of the editors.
The Yemenite Children Affair: A Moral Call*
5 My analysis is based on Ozery-Roitberg’s revelations at a conference held at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute.
17 Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary e-Journal Volume 17 Number 2 (2020) ISSN 1209-9392 © 2021 Women in Judaism, Inc. All material in the journal is subject to copyright; copyright is held by the journal except where otherwise indicated. There is to be no reproduction or distribution of contents by any means without prior permission. Contents do not necessarily reflect the views of the editors.