On May 1st, at Suburban Club, from 8
Stand With Us at the corner of
For peace, justice & equality for Palestinians & Israelis
Call for an END TO THE OCCUPATION
Please make sure all signs have a message of peace and nonviolence.
Young Mizrahi Israelis' open letter to Arab peers
"We wish to express our identification with and
hopes for this stage of generational transition in
the history of the Middle East and
we hope that it will open the gates to freedom and
justice and a fair distribution of the region's
resources."
+972 Magazine Blog
April 24, 2011
Translated from Hebrew; English edited by Chana Morgenstern
http://972mag.com/young-mizrahi-israelis-open-letter-to-arab-peers/
In a letter titled "Ruh Jedida
young Jewish descendants of the Arab and Islamic world
living in
We, as the descendents of the Jewish communities of the Arab
and Muslim world, the Middle East and the
the second and third generation of Mizrahi Jews in
are watching with great excitement and curiosity the major
role that the men and women of our generation are playing so
courageously in the demonstrations for freedom and change
across the Arab world. We identify with you and are
extremely hopeful for the future of the revolutions that
have already succeeded in
pained and worried at the great loss of life in
Bahrain, Yemen, Syria, and many other places in the region.
Our generation's protest against repression and oppressive
and abusive regimes, and its call for change, freedom, and
the establishment of democratic governments that foster
citizen participation in the political process, marks a
dramatic moment in the history of the
various forces, internal and external, and whose leaders
have often trampled the political, economic, and cultural
rights of its citizens.
We are Israelis, the children and grandchildren of Jews who
lived in the Middle East and
thousands of years. Our forefathers and mothers contributed
to the development of this region's culture, and were part
and parcel of it. Thus the culture of the Islamic world and
the multigenerational connection and identification with
this region is an inseparable part of our own identity.
We are a part of the religious, cultural, and linguistic
history of the Middle East and
seems that we are the forgotten children of its history
First in
somewhere between continental Europe and
in the Arab world, which often accepts the dichotomy of Jews
and Arabs and the imagined view of all Jews as Europeans,
and has preferred to repress the history of the Arab-Jews as
a minor or even nonexistent chapter in its history; and
finally within the Mizrahi communities themselves, who in
the wake of Western colonialism, Jewish nationalism and Arab
nationalism, became ashamed of their past in the Arab world.
Consequently we often tried to blend into the mainstream of
society while erasing or minimizing our own past. The mutual
influences and relationships between Jewish and Arab
cultures were subjected to forceful attempts at erasure in
recent generations, but evidence of them can still be found
in many spheres of our lives, including music, prayer,
language, and literature.
We wish to express our identification with and hopes for
this stage of generational transition in the history of the
Middle East and North Africa, and we hope that it will open
the gates to freedom and justice and a fair distribution of
the region's resources.
We turn to you, our generational peers in the Arab and
Muslim world, striving for an honest dialog which will
include us in the history and culture of the region. We
looked enviously at the pictures from
Tahrir square, admiring your ability to bring forth and
organize a nonviolent civil resistance that has brought
hundreds of thousands of people out into the streets and the
squares, and finally forced your rulers to step down.
We, too, live in a regime that in reality-despite its
pretensions to being "enlightened" and "democratic"-does not
represent large sections of its actual population in the
Occupied Territories and inside of the Green Line border(s).
This regime tramples the economic and social rights of most
of its citizens, is in an ongoing process of minimizing
democratic liberties, and constructs racist barriers against
Arab-Jews, the Arab people, and Arabic culture. Unlike the
citizens of
the capacity to build the kind of solidarity between various
groups that we see in these countries, a solidarity movement
that would allow us to unite and march together-all who
reside here-into the public squares, to demand a civil
regime that is culturally, socially, and economically just
and inclusive.
We believe that, as Mizrahi Jews in
economic, social, and cultural rights rests on the
understanding that political change cannot depend on the
Western powers who have exploited our region and its
residents for many generations. True change can only come
from an intra-regional and inter-religious dialog that is in
connection with the different struggles and movements
currently active in the Arab world. Specifically, we must be
in dialog and solidarity with struggles of the Palestinians
citizens of
economic rights and for the termination of racist laws, and
the struggle of the Palestinian people living under Israeli
military occupation in the West Bank and in
demand to end the occupation and to gain Palestinian
national independence.
In our previous letter written following Obama's
speech in 2009, we called for the rise of the democratic
Middle Eastern identity and for our inclusion in such an
identity. We now express the hope that our generation -
throughout the Arab, Muslim, and Jewish world - will be a
generation of renewed bridges that will leap over the walls
and hostility created by previous generations and will renew
the deep human dialog without which we cannot understand
ourselves
between Kurds, Berbers, Turks, and Persians, between
Mizrahis and Ashkenazis, and between Palestinians and
Israelis. We draw on our shared past in order to look
forward hopefully towards a shared future.
We have faith in intra-regional dialog-whose purpose is to
repair and rehabilitate what was destroyed in recent
generations-as a catalyst towards renewing the Andalusian
model of Muslim-Jewish-Christian partnership, God willing,
Insha'Allah, and as a pathway to a cultural and historical
golden era for our countries. This golden era cannot come to
pass without equal, democratic citizenship, equal
distribution of resources, opportunities, and education,
equality between women and men, and the acceptance of all
people regardless of faith, race, status, gender, sexual
orientation, or ethnic affiliation. All of these rights play
equal parts in constructing the new society to which we
aspire. We are committed to achieving these goals within a
process of dialog between all of the people of
and
different Jewish communities in
We, the undersigned
Shva Salhoov (
Ben-Yefet (
Berda (
Yosi Ohana (born in
Yonit Naaman (
Alghazi (
Ophir Tubul (
Lir (
Moshe (
(
Taharlev (
Iranian Kurdistan), Mois Benarroch (born in
David (
(Iraqi Kurdistan), Aviv Deri (
Fogel (
Daniel (
Elyakim Nitzani (
(
(
(
(
Atrakzy (
Maya Peretz (
Nitzan Manjam (
Zamira Ron David (
Madar (
Behar (
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