Yinon Magal is an exemplary figure for the Israeli Right, by which I mean that day in day out he goes on TV and says objectively retarded nonsense that degrades everyone who hears it and, indeed, the entire human race, and perhaps all matter which shares with him a position within the fundamental structure of reality (but I’ll agree to let that one go so as not be to dragged down into the weeds of a philosophical discussion). His particular talent is a total lack of shame in contradicting himself, observable reality, common sense etc. to say whatever is in Bibi’s political interest today, and then the opposite thing tomorrow if necessary. I say ‘particular talent’, but that’s actually common enough, however, Magal also talks a good game and is a high-energy guy. His programme, The Patriots, is a veritable institution, where different pundits appear and have debates on intra-Right issues before a studio audience, with the inevitable result that the most stupid and insane opinion wins out. It often provides great content for Arab social media influencers to clip and parade before the world what a bunch of psychos we are.
Yinon Magal is also a proud traditional Jew. He was very outraged that the daughter of R. Ovadya Yosef shook hands with a man, because that’s against the Shulhan Aruch. He’s known for a schtick where he pulls a kappel out of his pocket and interrupts the show to count the Omer or whatnot. And of course, because of course.
Anyway, Magal was back in the news last week because he said that Eizenkot was a monkey. This is purportedly racist against Eizenkot, who is of Moroccan Jewish ancestry and this scandal showed that the Right are the real racists after all. This was seized upon by Eizenkot, whose core target audience is right-leaning Mizrahi voters who vote Likud because Begin was nice to them, but find the open criminality and clownishness of the Bibi coalition a bit much.
This is all a bit silly though. Magal has pointed out that the term ‘monkey’, which is not commonly used as a derogatory term against MENA Jews, is standard Israeli slang for a frontman or patsy. Yinon Magal is calling Eizenkot a ‘Moroccan patsy’ for Ashkenazim behind the scenes. Critics on the Left know that’s what he meant, and they are counting on swing voters being too inattentive or emotional to notice, which is no doubt smart.
Yinon Magal is, though, obviously correct. The electoral campaign of Yashar has perhaps been unparalleled in history in simultaneously putting all of its emphasis on the leader (who can even name 5 prospective Yashar MKs?), while also having a leader who doesn’t express any opinions or really do anything except point out he’s a Mizrahi who used to be high up in the army. And yet, for all the transparent reliance on identity politics, Eizenkot clearly is the frontman for a party which will substantially increase the political power of ‘heritage Israelis’ that is to say, the secular Ashkenazi descendants of the people who built the country.
OK, so pretending to be offended by stuff to win round dopes is just what electoral politics is (which is one of many reasons why it’s a BAD THING that should be abolished). However, there is something rather more sinister about the whole thing. What Magal is saying is that, while Eizenkot is himself a Mizrahi (which is good), he is really controlled by Ashkenazim (which is bad). The wicked European Jews hide behind the face of a sturdy MENA general in a polo shirt who likes nothing better than to banter with illiterates in a falafel shop, but, in truth, behind him there they are pulling the strings, grinning as they contemplate their evil plans to kill slightly fewer people in Gaza or whatnot.
The sinister bit is this. Obviously, this is an example of hostile sentiment being directed against Ashkenazim. One can debate whether it rises to the level of ‘racism’ or ‘bigotry’; one can even say it’s justified based on the misdeeds of said Ashkenazim, if you will. But that’s what it objectively, clearly is. However, when the opposition reacted to it, they did not accuse Magal of fanning the flames of ethnic resentment and hatred against the people he was actually fanning it towards. Rather, they accused Magal of being racist towards Mizrahim. ‘Who are you to say a proud brown man can’t become Prime Minister on his own without whitey backing him up?’.
Anyone familiar with American politics will know this game. When Republicans say ‘the Left are the real racists’ they never mean (or at any rate never meant until recently) that this is because they were racist against whites. The huge volume of invective, ranging from mildly demeaning to, at times, overtly murderous, directed against white Americans, as well as policies explicitly advocated in terms of benefitting everyone except white Americans would lead one to think precisely that, but you know better. What it means is ‘when the Left say that white people cause blacks to be poor because of mind rays, and that whites should therefore be expropriated to give blacks the money due to them, this means that they are really racist against black people, because they are saying that a black man can’t stand on his own two feet without gibs and affirmative action’. The appropriate response, obviously, is that while this may be true at some deeper level, it’s not the most pressing matter. We can discuss whether liberal attitudes to African Americans subtly diminish them through being patronising and creating an environment of low standards, but more to the point is that they are explicitly racist against white people and they should stop because it’s wrong.
Israel is, in so many ways, a kind of weird funhouse mirror of western democracy. One of the more amusing ways that this manifests itself is the endless demonisation of anything and everything as racist by the Right-wing coalition, in between calling for the extermination of millions of Arabs. There are so many examples, but one that sticks in my mind is this:
Yoaz Hendel today is heading up the Reservists party, which combines technocratic liberal conservatism with the idea of denying civil rights to those who don’t serve in the army (don’t ask), but back then he was on the right end of the many centrist parties headed by ex-generals that have tried and failed to unseat Netanyahu. He was giving an interview talking about how awesome Israel is, especially compared to the Arab world (including Israeli Arabs), and he remarked in passing on the challenges that Israeli society had faced creating a common culture at a time when ‘some came here with a mentality of Vienna concerts and some came with a mentality of darbukas’. During the conversation, he made other comments that were explicitly critical of Arabs (whether or not you think they rise to the level of prejudice or racism) and some Arab MKs did try to make hay of that, but the overwhelming reaction was against Hendel’s completely nonexistent prejudice against Mizrahi Jews. Hendel tried to defend himself from the damning charge of having any preference whatsoever either for his own kind or for objectively superior things by saying he preferred drum banging to Mozart (which, sad to say, is probably true), but it was not enough and his own colleagues condemned him too.
Apropos here are some words of Lawrence Auster:
As I was reading the story, my jaw was literally (not figuratively) hanging open, not because I was shocked that this would happen, and not because I didn’t know that anyone in a mainstream position who says anything in public under his own name that is in the slightest degree “iffy” about blacks is taking his livelihood and his future in his hands, but because, for a few moments, I was at a loss as to how to respond to it. What do you say about a society (Western society) in which you don’t have to say anything actually negative, anything actually biased about a protected group, particularly blacks, to have your career and place in society destroyed, you just have to tell a garden variety joke? A society in which, even if you issue the most profound apology for your garden variety joke, as Papachristou did, that will not rehabilitate you? No. In liberal society, the society that worships not God but the nonwhite Other, there is no forgiveness….
Her joke was not an act of discrimination against anyone, it was a joke. At worst it was in questionable taste. But if you mention blacks in any context which has the slightest negative implication (such as referencing the large number of Africans in Greece in any other way than to celebrate them, or to joke about African mosquitos eating African “food”), that is considered discriminatory, and once you have committed a discriminatory act, you are dead meat.
But really this is not about discrimination. it is about the fact that blacks are sacred objects, and you do not make jokes about sacred objects. But this truth, that in liberal society blacks are sacred objects, cannot be stated aloud because it would reveal too much about the liberal order, so instead it is said that we must “never discriminate between human beings and races.”
And there is no mainstream organized resistance to this reign of fear anywhere in the Western world.
Auster was being a bit hyperbolic. He was prone to that. It isn’t that bad, but it does kind of suck.
Anyway, our own version of sacralising an ethnic group and making them immune even to implied criticism defined by the standards of a paranoiac manifests itself in various ways. The most grotesque is this:
Not much comment here is really required. A more recent example of how stupid and unhinged Israeli discourse is can be found in Itamar Ben Gvir whining that Smotrich doesn’t treat him with sufficient respect, not because he’s a clown recklessly undermining Smotrich’s ambitious settler project with slop for morons, but because he’s Mizrahi, of course.
How much of a problem is this all really? I guess it depends how much you mind. Most non-Mizrahi Israelis don’t seem to mind very much; if they did, presumably they would say something instead of soaking up abuse and paying taxes like cucks. Of course, it has complicated knock-on effects that percolate through society whereby bad actors can just blame miscellaneous bigotry when caught. But, in truth, Israelis don’t seem to mind politicians embezzling all the money too much either.
What I’ll talk about here is a different issue, which is how much do Ashkenazi Jews deserve it? Now, obviously, if you think that American Blacks should pipe down and stop moaning after slavery and segregation then a fortiori there’s nothing at all here to discuss. And, in truth, there isn’t really. Many MENA immigrants had a rough time because Israel in its first decade was a very poor country trying to maintain a kind of fortress state, emerging from a devastating war and taking in immigrants equal in number to its original population. Some people complain that the Labour Zionists didn’t respect the religious beliefs and practices of Jews from the Middle East and tried to make them irreligious. It’s true enough (though they never ask whether these religious beliefs deserved respect), but MENA Jews in Europe or America aren’t more observant than those in Israel. One might hazard a guess that the total number of Mizrahim who were successfully converted into Labour Zionists who celebrate the liberation of the Hebrew proletariat on Seder night is zero. To the extent that they became less religious, it’s mostly the same reason that most people around the world did: it’s constricting, requires adherence to beliefs that are open to challenge, and is hard to maintain without a supportive community designed (or evolved) to resist the trappings of modernity.
There are, of course, things that Mizrahim could legitimately complain about. The first is that after more than a thousand years, Jewish life from Algeria to Iraq became untenable almost overnight and more or less the whole population emptied out in two decades. There is a good case to be made that, ultimately, they were better off given the disaster zone that the region has been since, but, even if they had to move, simple common sense says it would have been preferable for them to move at a slower pace, under less pressure and with more freedom of choice. Half or more of the descendants of Levantine Christians circa 1900 now live in North or South America. It’s obvious that if they had, instead, been hastily gathered in to bulk out a garrison state somewhere in southern Syria formed by Ukrainian Orthodox Christians, they would be worse, not better, off for it. Apart from the mere fact of its existence and the ethnic cleansing of 700,000 Palestinian Arabs, the details of which were well known and exaggerated throughout the Arab world, the Zionists, at any rate some of them, in their desperation for numbers, took really rather ridiculous steps to expedite what was already an excessively traumatic process (or did so out of depraved indifference).
The other thing the Zionists did wrong was not taking away the religious portion of MENA Jewry’s culture, but just about everything else. As we have discussed, in the same way that an Ashkenazi who doesn’t speak Yiddish is fundamentally damaged, so a Mizrahi who doesn’t speak Judeo-Arabic (or Judeo-Persian, or, most based of all, Judeo-Aramaic) is also cut off and disconnected from his roots, and unfortunately that’s pretty much all of them. The absolute best-case scenario in such a circumstance is the shamelessly extractive franchise Judaism of Shas.1
But, as we have also discussed, when the Shas cartel loses its grip, it can get a whole lot worse, and it so it does. Unironically, Aryeh Deri is a kind of hero.
The thing is, though, Mizrahim (discounting some who work for lib NGOs) never complain about any of these things. Of course, it’s a good thing that the Zionists moved them out of Djerba to live in Teverya. If anything, they should have done it even harder. As for the other stuff, the loss of an ancient culture carried by a language, the destruction of folkways deeply intertwined with a particular place? They prefer not to talk about it. It gets awkward. Funnily enough, Naama Lazimi, responded to the fake Magal scandal in fluent Moroccan Arabic (though it’s only a few sentences and who knows how many times she had to practice it).
But in so doing she really only revealed herself to be whatever the Israeli equivalent of a coconut is. There’s nothing more Ashkenazi elitist than showing any interest whatsoever in MENA Jewish historical culture, as opposed to trinkets, anti-human techno music, Eastern European mystic imbecilism, and recycled American gutter race politics. Can we turn this country off for a bit?
That is at scale. The Aleppo schul in Yerushalayim is nice. There are various examples of this.
The symmetry would be much more satisfying if Eizenkot was a religious Mizrachi general speaking for a secular Ashkenazi elite