Abstract
On 10 May 1994, a month-long stand-off in the Israeli town of Yehud ended when a police sniper shot and killed an armed man and the police stormed the barricaded compound. This was not the first time that Israeli security forces faced an armed group in a stand-off. However, this was the first time that the group was Jewish. However, the besieged compound was less of a garrison than it was a site of protest. It was the private home of Rabbi Uzi Meshulam, where he and several dozens of his followers barricaded themselves and refused to come out. The gates were adorned with posters and artful displays made for onlookers and for the media, which reported on the happenings daily. Provisions were brought inside by sympathetic members of the public and the fabric of life around the Rabbi’s home gave no sign of the violence to come.
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Notes
- 1.
As we will demonstrate below, this is no longer a contentious claim. Most of the evidence was both given in public and released in 2016 and government ministers have referred to the Cohen-Kedmi Committee as a ‘cover up committee’.
- 2.
About one million Jewish immigrants immigrated to the state in its first decade, about half of whom were Mizrahim, and many immigrated under duress, including 43,000 immigrants from Yemen who arrived between 1948 and 1949 (Chetrit 2009, 82–83).
- 3.
Yosef further hints that the harm done to the Yemenites was legitimised with the needs of ‘childless Holocaust survivors’, a telling enjoinder that falls beyond the scope of this chapter.
- 4.
Later, in the Israeli camps, Mizrahi immigrants were coerced to participate in a dangerous, and now redundant, large-scale hygienic project. Between 1948 and 1959, tens of thousands (and possibly hundreds of thousands) of children of Mizrahi descent were forcefully treated for ringworm, a minor illness, with powerful x-ray projections on their heads that caused them severe physical and mental ailments (Amir 2015, 108–109; Davidovich and Margalit 2008).
- 5.
The Yishuv is the pre-state settlement in Palestine that was consolidated into the state of Israel after the declaration of independence in May 1948.
- 6.
For a reading of David Shimonovich’s poems that delineate the Ashkenazi–Yemenite relations of the second ‘Aliya and sought to conceal the ethnic conflict between the two communities’, see Hever (2015). It is important to note here that the Ashlenazi–Yemenite relations of the second Aliya were also dubbed an ‘affair’ in the Israeli discourse—this time as the ‘Kinnereth Yemenite Affair’, which refers to those workers who were subjugated and abused by their Jewish landlords in communities near the see of Galilee (Kinnereth). A more grievous account, known as the ‘Makub Affair’, was composed by the singer Izhar Cohen (who was also the first Israeli to win the Eurovision Song Contest) to words by Dan Almagor in the song Zmorot Yeveshot (Dry Twigs). The song tells of three Yemenite women workers who were abused by their employer, Yonatan Makub, after they stole some dry twigs to heat their homes.
- 7.
Recently, in the film Philomena (2013), the background for such an abduction is social and not necessarily ethnic; in the Lebanese film Capernaum (2018) the neglect of children of refugees exposes them to trade. In one way or another, the danger of separation seems always to loom over impoverished families.
- 8.
Conversely, the recent round of activism was accompanied by a substantial flow of artistic reflections. A partial includes the play, Abducted, written by Yoav Levi, the book Galbi by Iris Eliya-Cohen, both debuting in 2016.
- 9.
The song was first performed in 1987 by the singer Sasi Ya’ish, whose older sister was abducted.
- 10.
More recently, a version of the song true to the original lyrics and intent was produced by singer Yuval Sela.
- 11.
For the hegemonic structures in Israeli society, Kimmerling (2004) is still the authoritative source.
- 12.
The term ‘cultural genocide’ is highly contentious. Still, Novic writes about the forcible transfer of children that ‘So far, these cases have gathered some form of consensus around labelling the process as “cultural genocide”’ (2016, 228).
- 13.
Hanegbi himself recognised the efforts by Matzliah, the NGOs and MK Koren when he said: ‘your media struggle and Nurit’s parliamentary struggle and the public struggle of the NGOs together have created a moment of awakening’ (Hanegbi in Matzliah 2016).
- 14.
What makes the combination curious is that the word ‘Balkan’ represents Ashkenazi Jews who were also abducted, albeit in smaller numbers. Much like the Hebrew word ‘Zarfat’ denotes France, but originally referred to a town in present-day Lebanon, ‘Balkan’ pushes Europe beyond the horizon, somewhere beyond the Balkan Mountains, a provincialisation of the dominant group in Israeli society.
- 15.
According to Molchadsky (2018, 73), this framing is hostile towards non-Mizrahi Israelis.
- 16.
Darshani is a common turn of phrase in Hebrew that stems from religious Jewish hermeneutical practice. It literally means ‘Drash me’, Drash being the explication of the connotative rather than a denotative meaning.
- 17.
The report of the commission stated that: ‘in contrast to the position of the Parents, the commission gives its full trust to the documentation of the deaths of the “missing”. Moreover, objectively [bold letters in original], the scale of the “disappearance” is limited to those babies whose fate is still unknown’ (Cohen-Kedmi Commission 2001, 292–293).
- 18.
Zahalka argued that this appendiceal integration into the existing Zionist story of success follows an orientalist worldview that characterises the way in which the Yemenite community is allowed to accumulate cultural capital in Israel in general. He gave the example of the ‘the smallest street in Jerusalem’ named after the Jewish Yemenite King Dhu Nowas, in contrast with the commitment of current minister of culture in Yemen to commemorate the grandeur of Yemenite Jewry as an integral part of Yemenite cultural memory, despite the current small number of Jews in Yemen (SC 8/29).
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Galai, Y., Ben Yehuda, O. (2021). The Resolution of Doubts: Towards Recognition of the Systematic Abduction of Yemenite Children in Israel. In: Otele, O., Gandolfo, L., Galai, Y. (eds) Post-Conflict Memorialization. Memory Politics and Transitional Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54887-2_7
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