Wrapped in the Flag of Israel: Mizraḥi Single Mothers and Bureaucratic Torture by Smadar Lavie (review)

Why does an oppressed and beleaguered majority population, bureaucratically tortured by the dominant minority authoritarian government in its own nation, still continue staunchly to support that government? This is the intriguing paradoxical question addressed by Smadar Lavie in her remarkable study of Israeli society.

The Jewish population of Israel is divided into two communities: European Jews (Ashkenazim), and Jews of Asian and African origin (Mizraḥim, widely called Sephardim in much conventional literature). Although the Mizraḥi constitute the majority of the Jewish inhabitants of Israel, they face intense discrimination, poverty, and repression. They are not quiescent. They regularly demonstrate against the government policies that so disadvantage them. However, despite their unfortunate situation, they are also strong supporters of majoritarian Israeli policies, including those that result in the oppression of another Israeli population: the Palestinian community.

Lavie, an award-winning American-trained anthropologist, is herself Mizraḥi. Her now-classic monograph, The Poetics of Military Occupation: Mzeina Allegories of Beouin Identity Under Israeli and Egyptian Rule (University of California Press 1991), is a masterful examination of another oppressed population—Bedouin Arabs living in the Sinai Peninsula, where they cope with living disadvantageously under vastly different and shifting governmental authorities.

In her current study, she finds herself again among the oppressed, but this time she is compelled by personal circumstance to live under this duress, thus cementing her status as the ultimate participant observer in her own study. Having fled to her native Israel with her young son to escape spousal abuse, she abandoned a tenured academic position and a highly successful career in the US to face virtual unemployment and social relegation to the Mizraḥi underclass that allowed her to pursue her career only with extreme difficulty.

Lavie modestly characterizes her methodology as using “the toolset of the Manchester Extended-Case Study” (20), tracing her pedigree to the 1960s work of Max Gluckman, who formed the Bernstein Research Project in Israel to undertake the first explorations of the Ashkenazi–Mizraḥi conflict. Although she carries on this thread of research, she provides a much richer and more personal contemporary account than was possible in Gluckman’s time.

She found that her status as a single Mizraḥi mother in Israel was not unique. Single mothers are unfortunately common in Israel due to divorce and abandonment, and Mizraḥi single mothers are by far the largest subgroup. Mizraḥi mothers often are unable to work full-time or at all due to the need to care for children and are utterly dependent for support on the Israeli State, which is ineffectual in pursuing child support claims from deadbeat fathers (6–7). The National Security Bureau (NSB) is thus the principal bureaucratic body these mothers must deal with to secure the lives of their families.

In many ways, the group of Mizraḥi single mothers detailed in Lavie’s study are perfectly emblematic of the difficulties endured by the Mizraḥi population as a whole. The NSB has been subject to the vagaries of national politics, and in 2003 the assistance to these Mizraḥi families was severely slashed in a budget-cutting measure. With no political defenders and no meaningful way to challenge these cuts, the mothers have been devastated and demoralized.

Lavie opens her study with a major demonstration that arose to protest these conditions—a march on Jerusalem organized in 2003 by single Mizraḥi mother, Vicky Knafo. It is Vicky’s march that gives Lavie’s book its title. As she describes it:

[Knafo] started her march on Jerusalem wearing a black baseball cap and wrapping herself in the Israeli flag—a made-in-China rectangle of white cloth sporting twin blue stripes and the blue Star of David at its center.

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Joined by other Mizraḥi mothers, Knafo eventually reached Wohl Rose Park in Jerusalem, where she and her group established a protest shantytown to bring...