In an incident too ridiculous to be serious and too serious to be ridiculous, a 27-year-old man, Mordechai Brafman, attempted to murder two people he thought were Palestinian Arabs in Miami, Fla., on Sat., Feb. 15.
From his online social media profile, it is not hard to discern that Brafman is a rabid anti-Arab racist and hardcore supporter of the most right-wing fascistic trends of the American Zionist movement.
Brafman clearly intended to commit a murderous hate crime against Arab Palestinians for the intolerable affront of existing. The only problem was, the two people he shot weren’t Palestinian Arabs; they were Mizrahi Israeli Jews on vacation in Florida from Israel.
Let’s do a little deep probing into this most curious incident.
Worldwide, Jewish communities are culturally, ethnically, linguistically, and even liturgically quite diverse. In the diaspora from the ancient lands we now know as Palestine and Israel, Jews settled all over Asia, Africa, and Europe. Ashkenazi Jews lived in Central and Eastern Europe and most spoke Yiddish as their first language. Sephardic Jews settled in Spain and Portugal and developed their own Judeo-Spanish language, sometimes called Ladino, which they took with them when they were expelled from Spain in 1492 and started settling in North Africa, the Netherlands, Italy, the Balkans, and the Ottoman Empire. Mizrahi (Eastern) Jews came from such places as Persia, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Egypt, India, Uzbekistan, and the Caucasus. Many spoke Arabic, Farsi, or the local languages where they lived. After other continents were found (the Americas, Australia), Jews formed part of the immigration and settlement movements and similarly adopted local languages. In all these communities, they upheld the Jewish religion based on the Torah and later texts, but Hebrew had all but ceased to be a spoken language anywhere.
The Zionist movement was a relatively late development in Jewish life. It emerged as a response to unremitting anti-Semitism in Europe at a time when national consciousness grew amidst the great empires of Russia and Austro-Hungary. Thus, in the wake of World War I we see the establishment of independent nations such as Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and the Baltic states. Some Jews, considering themselves a nation as much as a religion, also sought their own independent political identity in some territory of the world, not necessarily in the ancient land of Zion, where only a few thousand Jews still lived. Most Jews, however, preferred to remain where they were but participate in movements for social change, such as the Bund, that would eliminate anti-Semitism and preserve Jewish autonomy, or emigrate to new lands (especially the Americas) where they could recreate themselves under more democratic conditions.
In the wake of pogroms and anti-Jewish laws and practices, the Zionist movement (founded in 1897) started focusing more and more on Palestine, and Jewish immigration gradually increased. The original cultural orientation of Zionism echoed that of all the other European colonialist movements aimed at the Middle East, basically Orientalist. European Zionists, many of them secular and politically progressive, would uplift the lowly condition of the Jews with modern approaches, such as the famous socialistic kibbutz movement to help disperse the population, purchasing land from Ottoman or Arab landowners, and expelling the Palestinian farmers. Using the pseudo-scientific racist logic of the day, the early Zionists assumed that Sephardic Jews had culture and practices closer to ancient Judea, and so they created a new language (modern Hebrew) which adopted Sephardic pronunciation. Thus, for example, Sha-BAT instead of SHA-bes for the Sabbath.
This form of cultural “brownface” was then asserted over the actually existing vernacular languages of Jews from their many places of origin as the official norm for the “New Jew.” This invented cultural pantomime was used to fashion a hardy, militant Israeli identity as well as paper over the cultural, religious, and historic differences within traditional Judaism. It was also used to mask the dominance the European Zionist community had over the Israeli government, especially as boatloads of immigrants landed in flight from fascism before and increasingly after World War II. Later waves of Mizrahi immigrants came from North Africa and other Muslim countries, as well as, later, from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The reins of governance, though, were almost always tightly held in European Ashkenazi hands.
White European Jews used this newly invented “Israeli” identity to marginalize Sephardic and Mizrahi culture as well as Ashkenazi working-class Yiddish culture, going so far as to enact a formal ban, only fitfully effective, on Yiddish in Israeli public spaces.
Thus the “quiet part”—that is, the racist essence of the revisionist Zionist project—was “said out loud” when Brafman (of Ashkenazi descent) tried to shoot two people he thought were Arab, and instead shot two Arab Jews.
The twisted logic of this cultural project led to Mizrahi Jewish immigrants and refugees being marginalized from the ruling “liberal” Zionist coalition which governed Israel for 40 years, resulting in large portions of Israel’s Mizrahi community becoming more and more nationalistic, religious, and right-wing.
Accordingly, it became commonplace among the educated, Western-oriented Ashkenazi ruling elite in Israel to blame Israel’s rightward turn on the Mizrahi community’s supposed “Arabness,” as opposed to acknowledging the discrimination that community faced at the hands of the “liberal” elite. The result has been that the largest voting bloc which backs Netanyahu (an Ashkenazi) is in fact the Mizrahi community, the so-called Arab Jews inside Israel.
Another twist in the story
This leads to the second twist in this story. Not to be outdone in murderous racist sentiment, one of the Mizrahi victims of Mordechai Brafman’s gun asserted his Zionist credentials with a post on X declaring “Death to the Arabs” by way of maintaining that the attack was not anti-Jewish in origin.
Both the attack and the victim’s horrendous response, reflect the entire racist, colonialist logic of the Zionist project, whose essence, after all, is an exclusive nationalism. The Zionist movement’s legitimacy, empowered by the British Empire to attack Palestinians in constant encroachment and encirclement, not to mention expulsion, relied on elevating a certain brand of Jewish chauvinism to the detriment of many other strands of Jewish thought and expression, such as Jewish working-class solidarity with labor of all lands, the Jewish religious tradition that sees all humanity as the children of Adam and Eve, and the striving for equality, justice, and peace.
This is the logical conclusion of revisionist Zionism’s values. A Jewish man attempts to kill two other Jewish men because they “look too Arab.” When the attack fails, both sides proclaim “Death to the Arabs” and “Am Yisrael Chai” (long life to the Jewish people).
What an outrageous state of affairs. What a death cult! And how much clearer could it get that the relentless campaign against the Palestinians resident on their own land for millennia would eventually turn against segments of the Jewish population itself? The overwhelming majority of Jews everywhere must fight back against what we can honestly call the fascist movement in our midst, a movement which has the audacity to cloak itself in our history and traditions.
Jews have stood tall among the resistance to the modern genocide we are seeing in Gaza and the West Bank. The Jewish people and the people of Palestine all have the right to live full lives with justice and equality, but it will take confronting the apartheid logic of Zionism swiftly and in our time.
As with all op-eds published by People’s World, this article reflects the views of its author.
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