The Idea of Israel Read Online Free Page A

especially Egyptian and Iraqi culture. An example of this is the fiim Desperado Square by Benny Toraty, a feature film about one of Tel Aviv’s poorest neighbourhoods, Shechunat Hatikva, which ironically means ‘neighbourhood of hope’. Hatikva, located on the southern outskirts of the city, was populated by North African Jews in the 1950s; lately the government has dumped tens of thousands of Eritrean refugees there, a move that is the source of constant friction between two disadvantaged communities locked in a slum separated from the rest of Tel Aviv by a highway.
    The film tells the story of the neighbourhood through the chronicles of one family. The father used to own a cinema and, after itclosed, beseeched his children never to operate it again. There are two sons, who, after their father’s death, decide to defy his request, as one of them claims he was granted permission to do so by his dead father in a dream. To celebrate the reopening of the cinema, the brothers look for a copy of the Raj Kapoor film Sangam . The search for the rare copy reveals the neighbourhood’s subculture, in which dreams are fulfilled only on the screen.
    Many Mizrachi film-makers and visual artists regarded themselves in the 1990s as Arab Jews. But the Arabic language appeared only as it does in the testimony of a prominent Arab Jewish author, Shimon Ballas – in a dream, or rather a nightmare.
    In addition to including Arab Jews, the Mother Tongue Festival featured North African Jewish writers who asserted that it was not only the relearning or re-respecting of Arabic that could pose a linguistic challenge to the idea of Israel. Some of them regarded French similarly. Before emigrating to Israel and becoming Zionised, North African Jews conversed mainly in French. The Mizrachi author Dror Mishani even suggested that a return to French as the strategy for cultural definition might be less alienating to the general Israeli Jewish public. After all, it was not the language of the enemy. Or, as Mishani put it, it would create a linguistic space ‘where the Mizrachi Jew is not disturbing the cultural scene’. 3
    In fact, the Mizrachi Jews had not only lost their Arabic or French; they also lost their ability to speak Hebrew in an accent that could capture the similarities among the Semitic languages, especially the closeness of Arabic to Hebrew. This loss is beautifully expressed in a poem by Sami Shalom Chetrit:
On the way to ’Ayn Harod [a veteran Zionist settlement]
l lost my trilled resh [the letter ‘r’ in Hebrew].
Afterwards I didn’t feel the loss of my guttural ’ayn
And the breathy het [the letter ‘h’ in Hebrew)
I inherited from my father
Who himself picked it up
On his way to the Land. 4
    Post-Zionist Music
    If there was a clear point of dialogue between the Mizrachi constituency that emerged in the 1990s and the post-Zionist challengers, it was a longing for the music they had left behind but could still listen to on the radio and television and more recently via the Internet. There has been a concerted attempt to market Israel as a Western, modern state in the midst of a sea of Arab primitivism and barbarism. But music is part of the local culture and, like Arabic food, it may have the potential to play a more significant role some day in integrating a new kind of Israel into the Arab world. At present, however, it serves no such purpose.
    This was the motivation behind the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, the Arab–Israeli philharmonic orchestra founded by Edward Said and Daniel Barenboim. If the fortunes of Arabic music in Israel are any indicator, one cannot be too sanguine about the prospects. The popularity of Arabic music demonstrates a process of appropriation by local Mizrachi musicians of Arabic music as exclusively Mizrachi music. Yet the music had no political or substantial cultural implications for the identity or behaviour of the society or state, and indeed, on occasion, right-wing parties have played it