From Exclusion to Erasure

I am writing this on Israel's seventy-fifth anniversary, its democratic future shrouded in fog. Sections of society that failed to gain recognition, excluded for years from the main public discourse and centers of power, are now seeking to dismantle it from within. They are enraged: they seek to use their power, this time not just to exclude others (as they themselves were excluded) but to wreak destruction and erase everything they perceived as other than them. A striving for solidarity, which was characteristic of Israel for generations, is now crumbling.

Some of that withering rage I know through personal experience. My mother's parents participated in Israel's pre-state revisionist underground and were excluded from the mainstream social, political, and professional discourse for many years.1 To avoid being persecuted for his past, my grandfather changed his name. He and my grandmother felt their all-out effort during the foundation of the state went unacknowledged and that they and their friends were not granted the place they deserved in the new society. They were often treated with contempt, and this had repercussions, economic as well as psychological.

Two generations after that, I found myself living in a town where most of the population was Mizrahi and right-wing, unlike myself (having an Ashkenazi background). I often felt excluded and alienated there.2 Later, I also grew aware of how outraged my Mizrahi friends felt because of the discrimination and lack of due recognition they and their parents frequently had to face.

This sentiment has been fermenting over the years, quietly murmuring below the surface. I see it unfolding on two parallel planes: social and intrapsychic. On the first, social level, rage is associated with social injustice. It is triggered whenever people do not get the recognition they expect and feel they deserve. Revisionists, Mizrahis, Ethiopian Jews, 3 women, citizens living on the periphery of Israel, Arab citizens of Israel, and