Dror Mish Ani: Be-Kol Ha- Inyan Ha-Mizrahi Yesh Eize Absurd (The Ethnic Unconscious: The

Dror Mish‘ani: Be-kol Ha-‘Inyan Ha-Mizrahi Yesh Eize Absurd (The Ethnic Unconscious: The Emergence of ‘Mizrahiut in the Hebrew Literature of the Eighties) pp. 32-33

Post-colonial language, in contrast with colonial language, understood that blackness or whiteness in an of themselves are meaningless, and that the meaning of color -- that is, the way in which individuals experience their blackness and whiteness or the blackness and whiteness of others -- is a product of colonial imagination active even in places where blackness and whiteness do not exist as colors (and they never exist only as colors).

Thus, the fact the Ashkenazim who came to the land with Zionism perhaps not really “European people,” and the fact that in Israel today there are no “blacks” and “whites,” have no meaning if Israeli culture makes use of colonial imagination to understand itself and its limits and never ceases to produce stories and experiences of blackness and whiteness, of blackening and whitening. The “not really European” Ashkenazim indeed create for themselves… their experience of whiteness, through the blackness of the Arabs and that of the Mizrahim.

Therefore, the changes over the years in the structure of the relations between Mizrahiut and Ashkenaziut in Israeli culture are no reason to depart from post-colonial language or from the language of Mizrahi critique; they just show the experiences of blackness and whiteness in Israeli society as placed in history; they show the changes in the possibilities of blackening and whitening.

This history did not eliminate these experiences and their meaning. It just changed their patterns of production. In recent years, when more an more Mizrahim are given the possibility to take part in the creation of Hebrew culture, they themselves make these experiences visible only to rewrite them and tell their story differently -- they play with the limit of color of Hebrew, identify with and reject them, accept and resist them, bow their head to them and violently shake them off, blackening and whitening themselves, in any case they do not stop using these colors of Mizrahiut and Ashkenaziut to construct out of them masks of identity, in any case they do not let Israeli culture forget its (post) colonial imagination.