We do not want Israelis to become Arabs. We are duty bound to fight against the spirit of the Levant, which corrupts individuals and societies, and preserve authentic Jewish values…
David Ben-Gurion, 1st Prime Minister of Israel
If you read coverage of Israel-Palestine in the West, right or left, you’re familiar with the idea that being a Jew means one cannot be an Arab. Many people follow in the footsteps of Ben-Gurion, where Jewishness itself is defined as ‘Western’, alien from the immigrant Jews of the Middle East and North Africa who threatened to ‘degrade’ Euro-Israeli culture.
Throughout my life, Jews and non-Jews have typically reacted to my background—the child of a Russian-descended Jewish father and an American-born, Syrian-Jewish mother—with surprise: “I always heard people like you existed!” Despite the awkward phrasing, I welcome their delight; it contradicts a world that makes people like me invisible.
I soured on Zionism in my early teens due to the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Some people assume this is natural for an Arab Jew, but I’m an exception. Many Arab Jews are enthusiastic Zionists, and my Syrian family is mostly apolitical. My discomfort with Zionism was echoed by my father, who was jolted by the crimes during the Lebanese Civil War. In both my struggle to reclaim my Arabness and to find solidarity with Muslims, my white father has often been my strongest support.
Seventy-plus years of forced assimilation and discrimination have left Arab Jewish identity in a state of contradiction. In Israel-Palestine, Arab Jews are pressured to assume a Western identity, to see themselves as peripheral to the history of European Jewry (‘Ashkenazi’ in Hebrew).
In a sense, all Arab Jews are mixed. Much of my life has been spent trying to define my Jewishness and Arabness in my own terms, beyond Western categorisations.
My mother’s family don’t dwell on ethnic identity. While they retain some traditions, they saw no reason to pass them to me, associating them with the pain of poverty and displacement from post-Ottoman Syria. Most of my Arabness had to be learned second-hand. I got no help from Zionist Arab Jews, who spat “Arab” like it was a curse word. For them, Arabness was a reminder of strife in the homelands and their own “backwardness” in Israel.
In college, I joined other Arab students in sharing culture horizontally—discovering commonalities between our parents, our politics, our jokes, and affirming each other as a diaspora rethinking itself in the aftermath of revolutions at home. For the first time I felt the kind of identification my father recalled of his childhood: belonging. We recognized how we could help each other repair the damage a white society had done. My Jewishness wasn’t an obstacle; just one part of a mosaic.
Still, out in the wider world, the contradictions returned. Ashkenazim would dismiss (sorry, “comfort”) me not to worry and just be a Jew. The child of two Jews identifying as mixed was a threat to “unity”. In reality, it was a threat to European hegemony. If people like my family felt they had more in common with other Arabs than European Jews, the ideology that fuels the Israeli state would crumble. Again, I thought of how my father had raised me. He grew up in Brooklyn, where Ashkenazim and Arab Jews lived together, even while keeping to largely themselves. From a young age, he sought to give me a sense of pride in my identity without the rigidity of tradition. Even when the collateral damage of Zionism weighed on me, he would remind me that being Jewish was how it was lived, not what nationalists and conservatives told me.
To be an Arab Jew is a constant assertion of its multitudes, in the name of self-preservation and smashing the Eurocentric depiction of Ashkenazim as the dictionary ‘Jew’. My spirit has long been unsatisfied with the idea that I am only connected to other Jews. I have double the perspective—familiarity with my father’s Mel Brooks-style humour, and my mother’s nuanced understanding of the Middle East in a politically-charged time. I watch the destruction of Aleppo and remember that those fleeing were once my ancestors’ next-door neighbours, not the “enemies of the Jewish state”.
From a young age, I—olive-skinned with thick eyebrows, in contrast to my lighter relatives—was labelled the Syrian in the family. There was something deeper than skin tone: I needed to think of myself as Syrian-Jewish instinctively, beyond what white men had defined in books. My Arab half was present in eating rice on Passover, making traditional date haroset, and listening to the smatterings of Arabic my grandfather let slip when his guard was down.
But how had I come to see those things? Thinking back, I’m left with one last irony. My father, who shaped my views about identity and how it needed to be asserted, encouraged me from the youngest age to see myself as Jewish on my own terms. It just happened that as I grew older, more aware of my place in the world, we started talking about two different things. Jewishness, at least in my mother’s family, was just the other side of the coin of Arabness. It was my white father who taught me how to be an Arab Jew, how to take pride in it, how to see the cracks in Zionist concepts of one identity. I spend so much time trying to work beyond the identities white men gave my people. But I owe the drive to do that to a white man.
Many years after I was declared the Syrian of the family, I asked my aunt which of my parents I looked like. She told me, “You wear your mother’s face with your father’s expressions.”
The Mixed Stories series is created and curated by Umar Butler. It explores the complexities around being a mixed-race person and the mixed-race experience.
About the author
Raymonde Chira is a child of Brooklyn of both sides, from the Jewish cluster of Midwood to the Syrian quarter of Bensonhurst. She is a graduate of Oberlin College, where she studied Creative Writing and Social Anthropology. Since graduating, she has been writing short stories, essays, and comic books that explore colonialism in Japan and Palestine, inter-religious Arab identity, and the condition of so-called “model minorities.” She is a member of the Mizrahi Caucus at the NYC chapter of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, where she works on advocating for police reform and promoting platforms for MENA-descended New Yorkers. She lives in Queens.