Between others and brothers

Some fifteen years ago, the Israel Museum exhibition To the East: Orientalism in the Arts in Israel featured a photograph by the Israeli artist Meir Gal entitled Nine Out of Four Hundred: The West and the Rest. At the center of the photograph was Gal, holding the nine pages that dealt with the history of Jews in the Middle East in a textbook of Jewish history used in Israel's education system. As Gal viscerally argued, these books helped establish a consciousness that the history of the Jewish people took place in Eastern Europe and that Mizrahim have no history worthy of remembering. More damningly, he wrote that the advent of Zionism and the establishment of the Israeli State drove a wedge between Mizrahim and their origins, and replaced their Jewish-Arab identity with a new Israeli identity based on European ideals as well as hatred of the Arab world.