Notes Introduction 1. The exact Hebrew name for this affair is the “Yemenite children Affair.” I use the word babies instead of children since at least two thirds of the kidnapped were in fact infants. 2. 1,053 complaints were submitted to all three commissions combined (1033 complaints of disappearances from camps and hospitals in Israel, and 20 from camp Hashed in Yemen). Rabbi Meshulam’s organization claimed to have information about 1,700 babies kidnapped prior to 1952 (450 of them from other Mizrahi ethnic groups) and about 4,500 babies kidnapped prior to 1956. These figures were neither discredited nor vali- dated by the last commission (Shoshi Zaid, The Child is Gone [Jerusalem: Geffen Books, 2001], 19–22). 3. During the immigrants’ stay in transit and absorption camps, the babies were taken to stone structures called baby houses. Mothers were allowed entry only a few times each day to nurse their babies. 4. See, for instance, the testimony of Naomi Gavra in Tzipi Talmor’s film Down a One Way Road (1997) and the testimony of Shoshana Farhi on the show Uvda (1996). 5. The transit camp Hashed in Yemen housed most of the immigrants before the flight to Israel. 6. This story is based on my interview with the Ovadiya family for a story I wrote for the newspaper Shishi in 1994 and a subsequent interview for the show Uvda in 1996. I should also note that this story as well as my aunt’s story does not represent the typical kidnapping scenario. 7. The Hebrew term “Sephardic” means “from Spain.” 8. For more on the problems with both terms, Mizrahim and Sepharadim, see Ella Shohat’s work in Taboo Memories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 333–336. 9. It becomes hard to gather accurate data on ethnic origin since the Statistical Bureau in Israel now refers to all third-generation children as “Israelis.” 10. Israeli army pilots are considered the elite. 11. The selection regulations governing the immigration from North Africa lasted from 1951 to 1956. 12. Giyora Yoseftal was a powerful man within the Jewish Agency at the time. He was the treasurer and chairman of the Israeli Absorption Department. He is quoted in Malka 1998, 78. 194 Notes 13. The Yemenites, however, were always perceived as hard workers and were even defined by the Zionists as “natural workers,” which is why they were brought in 1911 to work the land. See more on this topic in the next chapter. 14. See also Shohat, “The Narrative of the Nation and the Discourse of Modernization: The Case of the Mizrahim,” Critique 10 (1997): 3–18. 15. In 2006, the newspapers reported that Ashkenazi people in an affluent town near Tel Aviv (Ramat Efal) would not allow Ethiopian children to swim in the community pool. In the town of Petah-Tiqva, Ashkenazi par- ents insisted that their girls, who attended a public religious school, would not study in classes with Mizrahi girls. In September 2007, 80 Ethiopian kids were rejected from the public school system in Petah-Tiqva. 16. In March 2004, Lavie with the Mizrahi-Palestinian Coalition against Apartheid in Israeli Anthropology (CAAIA) filed a complaint with Israel’s State Comptroller asking the state to explain the nearly total absence of Mizrahim and Palestinians in Israeli universities. See also Shlomo Swirski’s book Education in Israel: Schooling for Inequality (Tel Aviv: Breirot, 1990) (Hebrew). 17. Lavie delivered this speech at a rally protesting the demolition of 30 homes in the neighborhood of Kfar Shalem in southern Tel Aviv on July 7, 2007. The speech was also published in The Electronic Intifada, August 3, 2007. 18. Housing policies and unequal distribution of land are major reasons for Mizrahim’s marginal economic and social position. For a detailed analysis see Claris Harbon, “Affirmative Squatting: Women Correcting Past Injustice,” in Studies in Law, Gender and Feminism, eds. Daphne Baraq-Erez (Tel Aviv: Nevo publishing, 2007), 413–462 (Hebrew), and Oren Yiftachel, “Nation-Building and National Land: Social and Legal Dimensions,” Iyunei Mishpat 21 (1998): 637–647 (Hebrew). 19. For the full legal analysis of the last commission’s (Kedmi) report, see Boaz Sanjero “When There Is No Suspicion There Is No Real Investigation,” Teoriya Ubikoret 21 (2002): 47–76 (Hebrew). 20. This is mainly the media’s version of the Meshulam protest. Meshulam’s organization reported a very different chain of events, claiming the affair started as a simple neighbors dispute that escalated into the violent event in Yahud due to police provocation. This Affair is discussed in detail in Chapter 5. 21. The data are from the Kedmi Commission report (Jerusalem 2001, 21–27). 22. “Absorbed” is the official term used in Israel. A more accurate description would be “forced integration.” For the sake of simplicity, I will use the term “absorption.” 23. On the flip side, Ashkenazi pride as the pioneers of the state is accepted naturally; any attempt to deconstruct this image is perceived as damaging their pride and is usually answered with almost violent counter discourse. 24. What he meant is they are more Ashkenazi in character. 25. This, however, was part of an election campaign to get Mizrahi votes and basically meant “sorry we didn’t respect you.” No action was taken by the Labor Party to correct this inequality or convey its repentance. Notes 195 26. Likud is a right wing party associated with Menachem Begin, who won the election for the first time in 1977. This victory was associated with Mizrahim finally breaking off the ruling power of the Labor Party and protesting racism. Shas is a Mizrahi religious party that gained political power in the 1990s, and its members are depicted as the ultimate Mizrahi “bad guys.” 27. Shimon Peres is a former prime minister and Rabin’s foreign minister at the time. In 2007, he was elected to be the president of Israel. 28. For more on Mizrahi identity and relationship with the right, see chapters 1 and 6. 29. The tendency to dismiss Yemenite narratives is part of the overall approach that assumes Mizrahim are subjective and emotional as opposed to Ashkenazim, who are objective and rational. This is also part of the reason why Mizrahi oral history is considered an inferior form of historiography. 30. For the print media discourse I had access to the inclusive archives of the newspapers Yediot Aharonot and Maariv,, which included newspaper clippings from all daily newspapers (and magazines) that published stories on this Affair. This includes Haaretz Davar Al Hamishmar Ha’olam Haze Laisha and some local newspapers. 31. I conducted most of my interviews during June–July 2001. I spoke with most interviewees again during May–June of 2008. Some interviews were conducted for the first time during the summer of 2008. All my intervie- wees agreed to be quoted in their full name. 32. See Shlomo Swirski, Orientals and Ashkenazim in Israel: The Ethnic Divisions of Labor (Tel Aviv: Segal,1981) (Hebrew). 33. Although Israeli academics have sometimes characterized her work as dichotomous, in fact, it is quite the opposite; her work rejected essen- tialism and deconstructed the received binarism of East versus West. She has especially elaborated on the question of Mizrahi identity as hybrid in “The Invention of the Mizrahim,” Journal of Palestine Studies 1 (1999): 5–20. 34. For Shohat’s argument for a cross-border analysis on the question of Arab Jews, see “Staging the Quincentenary: The Middle East and the Americas,” Third Text (London) 21 (1992–1993): 95–105. 35. For Shohat’s proposal for critical Mizrahi studies, “Rupture and Return: The Shaping of a Mizrahi Epistemology,” Hagar: International Social Science Review 2:1 (2001) 61–92 and “The Shaping of Mizrahi Studies: A Relational Approach,” Israeli Studies Forum: An Interdisciplinary Journal 17 (2002): 86–93. 36. Shohat examined the analogies between the two “posts,” that is, postcolo- nialism and post-Zionism. The essay also critically examines the way Said and Bhabha have been represented by recent Hebrew postcolonial writers, often portraying Said as dichotomous and Bhabha as complex, in a con- text where Bhabha was translated into Hebrew before Said’s Orientalism and before Fanon’s work. See Shohat, “The Postcolonial in Translation: Reading Said in Hebrew” Journal of Palestine Studies 33 (2004): 55–75. 196 Notes 37. See Shohat, “Anomalies of the National: Representing Israel/Palestine,” Wide Angle 11:3 (1989): 33–41 and “Exile, Diaspora, and Return,” in Discourse and Palestine, eds. Annelies Moors, Toine van Teeffelen, Sharif Kanaana, and Ilham Abu Ghazaleh (Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis Press, 1995), 221–236. 38. See Shohat’s postscript to Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, Hebrew transla- tion by Bavel Press, Tel Aviv, 2006. 39. Shohat, “Kidnapped Memories: A Mizrahi Critique of Gender and Zionist Discourse,” in Women and Gender in the Middle East and the Islamic World Today, ed. Sherifa Zuhur (Berkeley: Center for International and Area Studies, University of California, UCIAS Digital Collection, Spring 2004), http://repositories.cdlib.org/uciaspubs/editedvolumes/ Chapter 1 1. Quoted in Ammiel Alcalay, After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 43. 2. Quoted in Sami Shalom Chetrit, The Mizrahi Struggle in Israel (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2004), 49 (Hebrew). 3. The above quotes are from Hayim Malka’s book The Selection (Israel: Self Published, 1998), 51–52. 4. For a further elaboration on Mizrahi-Ashkenazi conflicts in Israel, see Ella Shohat, Israeli Cinema: East / West and the Politics of Representation (Texas: University of Texas Press, 1989); Shlomo Swirski, Orientals and Ashkenazim in Israel: The Ethnic Division of Labor (Haifa: Machbarot L’ Mehkar Ulbikoret, 1981); and Sami Shalom Chetrit, The Mizrahi Struggle in Israel.