Incredibly Stupid Scholarship on Israel

I will trace some moments in the hegemonic production of an isolationist approach to the study of “Jewish History” as crucial to a quite anomalous project in which the state created the nation—not simply in the metaphorical sense of fabrication, but also in the literal sense of engineering the transplant of populations from all over the world. From: “Rupture and Return: Zionist Discourse and the Study of Arab-Jews,” Social Text 75, Spring 2003, pp. 49-74

I keep reading academic papers on the phenomenon of Israel and keep being amazed and awed  (from awful) by their stupidity. First of all, they all describe the Mizrahi (Arabic speaking) Jews in the Muslim world as living in a paradise, and wonder at the historical fact that one day the all left their thousand years old existence and moved in mass to Israel. This voluntary population transfer is inexplicable and anomalous for Western academics, and they attribute it to Western colonial practice of recruiting manpower in the Third World, almost like the cotton planters in American South importing African slaves. Developing this imaginary parallel, they search for the smallest grievances of the Mizrahi in Israel, something that could be compared to the Civil Rights and so protest movements in America. As they say in German, if you only have a hammer (the AfroAmerican protest movement), then everything looks like a nail. Incredibly for this old Israeli, even the "boureka" (popular) movie of the fifties, Sallah Shabati, is being dismembered and misunderstood to prove their thesis and accidentally (or not) to provoke social divisions in Israel. The element Western academics lack and they don't even know it, is belief in God and the Torah, which explains all the Jewish experience. Without God, the Yemeni Jewish community starting to walk through enemy Saudi desert towards the embattled Promised Land, an event that did really happen, is amazing and inexplicable.

Apparently the Academia cannot digest that Zionism is proved right and Israel is a prosperous and powerful state in this Middle East swamp of failed states and savagery. I am working now in several projects in all cases hired by the Mizrahi businessmen, who have built fantastic enterprises in Israel. In my daily life, I wonder what these academics, many of them Jews themselves, are seeing and writing about.  My opinion is that they are trying desperately to force Israeli reality into the imaginary pattern of Western colonial academic discourse. It is like a woman trying on fashionable shoes three or four measures smaller than her foot and taking a few steps in front of the shop's mirror. It happens all the time and believe me, it is painful for her and for the observer too.