A similar thing happened during the elections in 2015 when artist Yair Gerboz attacked “those who think democracy is tyranny of the majority…amulet kissers, idol-worshippers and bowers at the graves of saints.” That was followed by an inflammatory statement by academic Amir Hetsroni on Channel 2 last year in which he told a Jewish woman “nothing bad would have happened if your parents had stayed in Morocco and rotted there.”

Hetsroni said: “If we didn’t open our legs without selection to all kinds of Jews, questionable Jews and half-Jews from third-rate countries, whose uniting characteristics are to kiss amulets, eat hummus, drink borscht, take government handouts and get an orgasm from arguing with the world — Boujie [Zionist Union leader Isaac Herzog] would have taken it in a cake walk…The Israeli left is paying the Zionist price, and no one other than the professor [Hetsroni himself]…is willing to say it.”

The stunning regularity of these kinds of comments in media points to a disturbing wide-spread presence of them just under the surface. In 2010 Israeli poet Natan Zach was on channel 10 when he claimed that Israel had taken in the wrong sort of immigrants. “The idea of taking people who have nothing in common arose. He one lot comes from the highest culture there is – western European culture- and the other lot comes from the caves.” He was referencing the immigration of Jews from Arab countries in the 1950s. Hetsroni had also referenced it, as had Gerboz.

Here are a few reactions to this:

Why are such statements made by people who are educated and claim to be speaking in the name of “culture” and the “left”?  Hatred of the “east” and stereotypes against people from the Middle East are not supposed to be propagated by the open minded “left”, but rather by the racist right. The fact is that part of Israeli society has cultivated a kind of European western supremacism in its attempt to keep transmitting European culture over the years.  It has embraced a 1950s Western cultural value of “the west is superior”, and kept it in a kind of time warp, trapped in ice.  It doesn’t want to move forward and accept that other cultures should have equal space in society.

The idea that only western civilization brought “progress” and that only in the West is there a “modern conception of life”, is an idea taken from the 1950s and the colonial and imperialist cultures. There are multiple modernities and there is no such thing as only western “progress” and eastern “superstition.”

Is Israeli academic culture so backward and ignorant and uneducated and trapped in the past that it has not left the 1950s behind?  Apparently it is.  When academics, poets, artists, film critics and the “educated” society expresses views that would have been normal in the 1930s about “the east”, it is because the academic circles have not educated people.

The view that the west is “superior” and that the east is an “inferior” culture is one of the many reasons anti-Israel activists view Israel as a European outpost in the Middle East, a false and colonial entity.  It is ironic that those who pretend to be on the “left” in Israel and claim to be “cultured” actually embrace this view without shame, as if be shameless colonizers.  But when they go to Europe and tell Europeans “we westerners are superior in Israel,” one wonders how they are received.  Perhaps the truth is that these kinds of Israelis cannot go abroad and express themselves this way and so they are trapped in an Israeli bubble, trying desperately to transmit to the next generation views that have disappeared in the West.  The only groups who embrace an unreserved hatred of non-European culture in Europe today are the radical right.  So does that mean that Israel’s “cultured left” is actually a radical European right?  Perhaps.

There is a tendency to not only disregard Jewish history that is rooted in the Middle East, but to be dismissive of it and hateful towards its adherents.  But one wonders why the same Israelis who have such a visceral dislike for Jews who make up a large portion of Israeli society, keep asking those Jews to go to the army and defend their state.  If you disregard them so much, then stop asking them to defend you?  How would Israel do if it was just made up of a small “villa in the jungle” as Ehud Barak called it, a few westerners and no one else, a “European-Jewish only” state?  It would have suffered the fate of South Africa pre-1994 or Algeria.  So what is strange is that the same anti-Mizrahi and anti-eastern racists who think their country country should be so pure, also have lived on the backs of those they dislike.  Their state would be viewed as entirely a European colonial construct, were it not for its diversity.  What’s interesting is they claim that the “easterners” are living off their Iron Dome and “start ups”.

Iron Dome and the start ups are partly Israeli, but they are funded by Western, and particularly American money.  This Israelocentric arrogance that “we built it”, ignores the fact that it is a collaborative effort of foreigners as well.  There is a ridiculous view in Israel that “we western Israelis did everything, you did nothing,” but they themselves would not have Iron Dome without America’s ample funding.  Who pays for all these goodies in Israel?

A new anti-semitism that repeats stereotypes directed at Jews in Europe exists in Israel among those who continually bash Jews from the Middle East.  The same stereotypes used against Jews in Europe in the 1930s have returned in Israel to be used against Jews who are seen as an “other.”  For instance the idea that Jews do “strange” ceremonies with foreskin, is borrowed from the similar anti-circumcision views in Europe. It’s interesting that the same European immigrant Jews in Israel repeat these views of other Jews, but it is because they have internalized anti-semitism in order to ape Europe. Such is their adoration for a 1950s mentality, they embraced not only anti-Arab racism but some stereotypes related to anti-semitism.

There is something interesting in the fact that the insults hurled at Jews from Muslim countries are the same stereotypes that people have against Arabs and Muslims.  Thus the racism and contempt for Mizrahi Jewish culture is related to a larger racism against Arabs.  When people say “we invented thing and you didn’t”, it is directed also at Arab culture.  When people are mocked for praying, it mocks Muslims also. So why is this called “left” and not seen as anti-Arab?

There is no shortage of support for anti-Mizrahi views based on absolute ignorance.  On Oshrer’s Facebook the following names “liked” the post: Bar-Tal, Tzohar, Lapidot, Nir, Ginsberg, Varoner, Litwitz, Shuval, Shustov, Feigin, Orr, Parnes, Kessary, Ashkenazi, Herman, Ron, Kauf, Shachar, Gazit, Waxman, Shamir, Linik-Levi, Regev, Mashiah, Harris, Pragler, Oren, Singer, Shem-Tov, Bar,, Kaplan, Goldman, Joseph Aldor, Giladi, Achai, Weksler, Rorman, Gimpel, Zlayit, Rosenberg, Gal-Rveie, Shamgar, Modai, Matia, Steinberg, Winkler, Schatz, Orsher,, Tzach, Itzcar, Bashan, Beloosesky, Ringer, Fainstein, Tzechrov, Etinger, Katzir

This is a kind of whose-who of European last names in Israel, many connected to well-known families. These are educated people judging by their own Facebooks.  And they expressed support for a 1950s style rant?  That points to a tragedy in Israel, a kind of cult of western Eurocentric superiority, that celebrates brutish and bullying posts against the ‘other’.

There is something wrong in Israel.  Leading newspapers publish opeds claiming Russians have “crime in the blood” and that black people are “stained with evil.”  Leading commentators, artists, poets and academics have a vile unreconstructed 1950s view of Africa, the Middle East and non-whites.  They think that only progress can come from Europe.