We Are Iraqis: Aesthetics and Politics in a Time of War

17. Arab-Jews, Diasporas, and Multicultural Feminism: A Conversation with Ella Habiba Shohat

185 17 Arab-Jews, Diasporas, and Multicultural Feminism A Conversation with Ella Habiba Shohat Evelyn Azeeza Alsultany EV E LY N A L SU LTA N Y: Your writing often highlights the paradoxes of exile and home. I wanted to begin with your own ArabJewish background and your family’s history in Iraq, Israel, and then the United States. What was your family’s experience of coming to Israel from Iraq? EL L A SHOH AT:1 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 Lydda, in Arabic. Some of my relatives were sprayed with DDT because it was assumed that they were disease-ridden. The Iraqi Jews descended into a whole new world—a world that had its own lexicon and cultural repertoires 1. This interview was first published in the MIT Electronic Journal of Middle East Studies 5 (Spring 2005) © the MIT Electronic Journal of Middle East Studies (MIT-EJMES). It is reprinted here with permission. 186  Evelyn Azeeza Alsultany and that aggressively shaped a new collective identity—that ArabJews 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 SephardiMizrahi 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 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 A Conversation with Ella Habiba Shohat  187 wrote about the need to civilize the “backward” Sephardim and “cleanse” them of their orientalness. The new context obliged ArabJews to redefine themselves in relation to new ideological paradigms and an overwhelming new polarity: Arab versus Jew. I was raised among people who, due to the sudden dislocation and disorientation, felt an immense sense of loss; today it would probably be diagnosed as a state of posttraumatic stress. And in many ways I think I lived and internalized my parents’ and grandparents’ pain. To an extent, I believe that my writing about the subject was also a mode of translation: translating their pain into words, giving voice...