Epstein files: Why Israel's Mizrahim face an existential battle
In light of former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s long-standing ties with child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein - ties that continued even after the latter’s criminal conviction - no one expected the Barak recordings revealed as part of the Epstein files to focus on virtuous topics, such as eradicating discrimination against women or child slavery.
Yet no one anticipated that what emerged from those recordings would sound almost like a plan for racial engineering in Israel.
In an audio recording that runs for more than three hours, believed to be from the mid-2010s, Barak expresses profound misgivings about Israel’s demographic future, warning of a bi-national state and, ultimately, one with an “Arab majority”.
The prospect of an Arab majority, or even just Israel’s existence within a distinctly Arab region, appears to evoke something in the veteran Labor politician beyond anxiety: it elicits contempt and revulsion.
But in fact, this is not so surprising. It was Barak who coined the phrase “a villa in the jungle” to describe Israel’s position in the Middle East, using the expression in a 1996 speech when he was foreign minister.
What Barak thinks of the region is easily inferred. And if the Middle East is a jungle, then clearly not only its non-Jewish inhabitants, but also many of its ordinary Jewish inhabitants, can be deemed inferior in comparison with the villa’s owners.
Barak’s remarks in the Epstein recording are the distilled essence of this worldview. Israel’s founders and early leaders, Ashkenazi Jews from European backgrounds, he argued, were obliged to absorb Jews from Arab countries in order to “save” them.
But now, he says, it is possible to be selective and to “control the quality much more effectively, much more than the founding fathers of Israel did”. To that end, he proposes stripping the Orthodox establishment of its monopoly over conversion and enabling mass conversions - for the “right” populations. In other words, for white populations.
Demographic balance
How, in his view, is this to be implemented in practice? Quite simply: by absorbing another million Russians, who would permanently alter Israel’s demographic balance. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, roughly one million immigrants from the bloc moved to Israel in the 1990s.
The bonus, according to the child sex trafficker's friend, is that within that million there would be “many young, handsome girls”.
Listening to this conversation, it is hard not to recall Barak’s public apology in 1997, on behalf of the Labor Party, to the children of Mizrahi communities - Jews who migrated to Israel from Middle Eastern countries - for the wrongs done to them in the state’s early years.
Fortifying the walls of an imagined villa is not - and never could have been - in the interests of the Mizrahim
It turns out that, deep down, Barak believes that those wronged were actually the state’s founders - forced, as they were, to absorb all those Jews from the surrounding “jungle”.
But Barak commits a double error. First of all, far from Israel itself having been a response to the deterioration of Mizrahi Jews’ situation in their countries of origin, Israel was more often the agent that precipitated that deterioration.
Secondly, Israel’s founders and Barak’s ideological forebears did not exactly welcome Jews from Arab and Muslim lands with open arms. Some Mizrahi immigrants were subjected to selection tests before being deemed worthy of admission.
Iconic Israeli poet Natan Alterman wrote about this in “The Run of the Immigrant Danino”, about a man who migrated from Morocco to Israel shortly after the state’s founding and was forced to run during a medical examination to determine whether he was physically fit to enter the country; perhaps Barak knows this tale from the haunting rendition by Habrera Hativeet.
'Revolting racism'
But no less offensive than Barak’s derogatory comments was the glee with which figures on the Israeli right have pounced on this recording, as though stumbling upon a great prize.
Channel 14 hastened to broadcast it under the headline “Revolting racism: Epstein archive exposes the shocking recordings of Ehud Barak”.
Barak was also attacked by members of Shas, the ultra-Orthodox party that is a key pillar of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition and claims to speak for many Mizrahi Jews. In a furious speech, Shas Knesset member Yakov Margi branded Barak a “contemptible racist”.
Shas leader Aryeh Deri used the recording to denounce the “Kaplanists” (left-leaning anti-government protesters) and to curry favour with Netanyahu - all in a single tweet.
“Ehud Barak, the chief of the ‘Kaplanists’ tribe and the elite of the left, revealed his racist plan to change the demographics of Israel,” Deri wrote. “If Netanyahu had uttered these racist remarks about Jews of Middle Eastern descent, it would have led every news bulletin.”
Some might see this as selective outrage on Deri’s part. He remained silent in 2020 when a recording was published of Netanyahu’s close adviser, Natan Eshel, making remarks that were widely condemned as racist and discriminatory against Mizrahi Jews.
Nor did he speak out in 2016 after the prime minister’s wife, Sara Netanyahu, was successfully sued by a former caretaker who said she had made derogatory remarks about his Moroccan background.
Deri was publicly silent again in 2017 after Netanyahu responded to criticism by his then-finance minister, who was of Libyan descent, by suggesting that his “Mizrahi gene acted up”. The comment was widely denounced as racist, and Netanyahu was forced to apologise.
Defending the 'villa'
In fact, since Barak coined the phrase, the Israeli leader who has most enthusiastically embraced the metaphor of the “villa in the jungle” is Netanyahu himself.
During a tour of the Jordanian border in 2016, Netanyahu laid out his vision for a separation barrier and declared: “They will tell me: is this what you want to do - defend the villa? … The answer is yes, unequivocally. In the environment in which we live, we need to defend ourselves from the wild beasts.”
Despite the differences between Netanyahu and Barak, they share something far deeper: a profound contempt both for the Arab space within which Israel exists, and for many of the people who live there.
For Barak and those who share his politics, their revulsion towards Mizrahim, whom they view as inferior, has led to their exclusion from centres of power and wealth. By contrast, Netanyahu and his allies have eagerly cultivated that same inferior, violent, barbaric image in order to exploit it for their own purposes.
In the final analysis, Mizrahim have remained “jungle people” in the eyes of both camps. If the Mizrahi public in Israel values life - life in the sense of a meaningful human existence - then it must finally internalise this reality.
This is especially urgent as the messianic, racist, Kahanist right is dragging Israel into fascist depths, while aiming to ensure that the Mizrahim become the violent face of that fascism.
Netanyahu and his allies frame this regime change in the laundered, antiseptic language of law and jurisprudence, knowing full well that political activists such as Yoav Eliasi (better known as “The Shadow”) and Mordechai David will place their “Mizrahi resources” at their disposal, lending these moves the populist veneer they require.
A pivotal moment
The fact that such large segments of the Mizrahi public in Israel have so eagerly enlisted in a project designed to fortify the walls of that same “villa in the jungle” - within which they themselves will be permanently confined to a place of inferiority - is a tragedy so grievous that it provokes both sorrow and rage.
Those who taught young Mizrahim to chant “death to Arabs”, not to mention to kill Arabs in practice as a patriotic act, hold their own forebears in profound contempt - forebears who lived in the Arab space as natives, and who would have recoiled in horror at such cries of hatred.
And who will serve as National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir’s executioners once he passes his death penalty law targeting Palestinian “terrorists”, if not those very Mizrahi youths?
This is the moment to pay attention again to Barak's recordings, to Netanyahu's boasts, to the noose pinned to Ben Gvir's lapel - and decide
Fortifying the walls of an imagined villa is not - and never could have been - in the interests of the Mizrahim.
There is not a single point along the Zionist spectrum that does not demean our identity as descendants of this region. The pioneers of the Mizrahi struggle, such as the Israeli Black Panthers and the rebels of Wadi Salib, grasped this almost intuitively.
Our interest was, and remains, an alliance with our Palestinian brothers and sisters in a struggle to break down the walls of the colonial structure, in favour of a civic space where our identity is not trampled, humiliated and exploited for the benefit of those who despise our very existence.
Since the genocide in Gaza began, Zionism has moved from its grotesque phase into a cannibalistic one. The role it assigns to Mizrahim at this stage is more dreadful than anything we have ever known.
This is the moment to pay attention again to Barak’s recordings, to Netanyahu’s boasts, to the noose pinned to Ben Gvir’s lapel - and decide. There may not be another such moment.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
posted by Satish Sharma at
03:58
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