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46 4 Arab Jews, Diasporas, and Multicultural Feminism An Interview with Ella Shohat Evelyn Alsultany In this interview, Ella Shohat discusses her family’s multiple displacements from Iraq to Israel and to the United States. She articulates the relevance of the question of Arab Jews to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as well as to the Middle Eastern–American diaspora. Shohat discusses the fraught position of Arab Jews in a historical context in which “Arab versus Jew” became the operating framework for identities with the emergence of Zionism. In addition to discussing the dislocation from Iraq to Israel of her own family, Shohat also addresses her scholarly work on the question of Arab Jews, as part of her broader work on postcolonial displacements. She addresses her writing on multicultural feminism within her broader work on the critique of Eurocentrism—for example, the tendency of Eurocentric feminism to frame the debate within the rescue fantasy of saving brown women from brown men. Shohat concludes this interview by discussing the potential of multiculturalism as an epistemological project for critical thinking and social change. Evelyn Alsultany: Your writing often highlights the paradoxes of exile and home. I wanted to begin with your own Arab Jewish background and your family ’s history in Iraq, Israel, and then the U.S. What was your family’s experience of coming to Israel from Iraq? Ella Shohat: I was born into a situation of displacement. In the early 1950s, my parents had to depart from Iraq, and went to Israel via Cyprus. My grandparents, uncles, aunts, and different members of the larger family arrived, dispersed and separately, to the point that it took a good while for them to locate each other. My parents carried only a suitcase and their baby—my sister—as they descended from the plane in the airport of Lod, in Hebrew and in Arabic, Lydda. Some of my relatives were sprayed with DDT because it was assumed that they were disease Arab Jews, Diasporas, and Multicultural Feminism | 47 ridden. The Iraqi Jews descended into a whole new world, a world that had its own lexicon and cultural repertoires, and that aggressively shaped a new collective identity, which Arab Jews were supposed to join. The first period in Israel was full of rude shocks for our family and for most families like ours. Within a few months of our arrival, the authorities at the Ma’abara [transit camp] removed my sister from the baby-care center [where parents were obliged to leave their babies under the care of state workers] without my parents’ knowledge and on false pretenses. In a combination of luck and help, my parents were able to locate my sister in another city, in a hospital in Haifa. But my grandmother was less fortunate . She gave birth to her last child in Israel, and was told that the baby died, and yet she was never given a body or issued a death certificate. Later we learned that such experiences had been common, and that many babies—some say in the thousands—had been taken away by the authorities and sold for adoption. The assumption was that one group—us—was having too many children, while another group needed children and could offer a better life than the biological parents, seen as primitive breeders. Activists claim that the payments went to the state, which obviously hasn’t been eager to investigate itself. The scandal, which is still a major unresolved sore point, is known as the case of the “kidnapped Yemeni and Sephardi-Mizrahi babies.” In Israel, partly because of racism and partially because theirs was the culture of the Arab enemy, my family felt out of place. My parents used to say: “In Iraq we were Jews, and in Israel we are Arabs.” Our Arab culture was taboo in Israel. Yet, even if we tried, we could not easily escape the mark of otherness. It was written all over our bodies, our looks, our accents. My parents didn’t dare put my Arabic name, Habiba, from my maternal grandmother who passed away soon after their arrival to Israel, on my birth certificate. If in the Arab world the Jewishness of Arabs gradually came to be associated with Zionism, and therefore was subjected to surveillance, in Israel their Arab culture was under watchful eyes, disciplined and punished. Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel, referred to Levantine Jews as “savages,” and many scholars during that period wrote about the need to...

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