Most Mizrahi Jews live enthusiastically in Israel and support its security and prosperity, both before and since the establishment of the Jewish State.
New York, May 12 - Progressive American activists who identify as Jews of European heritage but oppose Jewish sovereignty in the ancestral Jewish homeland resent the presumption of the large non-profit and political action groups that invariably support that sovereignty in their name, while at the same time the progressive activists arrogate for themselves the privilege to represent Jews of non-European heritage, declaring that sympathy with, and support for, Israel, erases the heritage of those non-European communities that refused to support the reestablishment of Jewish sovereignty in the ancestral Jewish homeland - even as the overwhelming majority of such non-European Jews both live under and voice staunch support for that sovereignty.
Members of Jewish Voice for Peace, If Not Now, and other "social justice" organizations in the US styling themselves as Jewish have long bristled at the likes of the America-Israel Public Affairs Committee; the World Zionist Organization; the Jewish Agency for Israel; the Jewish Federation; and numerous other mainstream groups, which, the social justice activists contend, fail to account for the opinions and desires of anti-Zionist Jews who insist Jews in Muslim-majority countries had little interest in Zionism until European Zionists disturbed the peaceful relations Mizrahi Jews had with their host cultures, an insistence that ignores the centuries of pervasive oppression of Jews in Muslim-majority cultures; the structural legal inferiority of Jews in those societies; the numerous massacres, forced conversions, and discriminatory laws targeting Jews; and the robust Zionism of Mizrahi Jews, most of whom live enthusiastically in Israel and support its security and prosperity, both before and since the establishment of the Jewish State.
"Zionist groups distort Mizrahi Jewish legacy!" asserted Yonah Lieberman, who will soon step down from the helm of If Not Now after leading the organization to significant achievement in mediocrity and own-goals. "They speak over Mizrahim and erase the lived experiences of those who dwelled in peaceful coexistence with Muslims for more than a thousand years, by imposing Zionism where it only played a destructive force. Look at what happened to those disappearing communities once Zionism came onto the scene!" he argued, referring to the mass-expulsion of Jews from Arab and Muslim countries following the establishment of Israel in 1948 after those communities suffered fourteen centuries of persecution under Muslim rule, as if the continuous and expressed desire of those Jews for relief from such third-class status and defenselessness through all those centuries, and their embrace of the opportunity to throw off the yoke of Islamic oppression when Zionism offered it, never happened.
To acknowledge it would undermine those social justice organizations' political posturing and propaganda, experts explain, and thus their eligibility for funding from antisemites.