Defining Displacement: The Politics of Arab Jewish Refugee Discourse

• In Event: War and Nationalism: Sephardim/Mizrahim in Between

Abstract

Why has the term “refugee” been vigorously contested when describing the displacement of Jews from Arab countries following the creation of the state of Israel? What does it imply to refer to Arab Jews as refugees rather than emigrants, or to describe their displacement as forced rather than voluntary? This article explores the implications of these questions for characterizing the Zionist project and Arab Jewish agency. Specifically, I try to untangle the complex discursive politics surrounding the departure of Jews from Arab countries by analyzing the “refugee” question from within the frameworks of Zionism, the Holocaust, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and international human rights. Drawing upon governmental, organizational and scholarly literature, as well as personal interviews, I argue that in the Arab Jewish case, the refugee has signified, and currently and simultaneously signifies, both belonging to the national Jewish community and being a designated ‘other.’ This tension plays out in each eruption of refugee introspection—the early 1950s, the mid-1970s and the late 2000s—and can be found within identifying (non-Arab Jewish) and self-identifying (Arab Jewish) refugee discourses. By exploring the question of how to define Arab Jewish displacement, this article helps illuminate a neglected area of research namely, the exodus of Jews from Arab countries from the political standpoint of Arab Jews.

author

• Shayna Zamkanei, University of Chicago