It sounds like the plot of a particularly absurd black comedy: an American Jew goes out to hunt Palestinians on the streets of Miami, mistakenly identifies a father and son — both Israeli Jews — as Palestinian, and immediately unloads a magazine on them; the two miraculously survive and escape. At the hospital, the son publishes a post saying that he and his father “survived an attempted murder motivated by antisemitism,” signing off the post with the popular Israeli slogan, “Death to Arabs.” Only after learning that the attacker was a Jew seeking to kill Arabs does he delete his remarks and appear on Israeli television to say, “it doesn’t matter what we are, Jews, Russians, Arab … no human being has the right to take the life of another.”

Miami Beach Police along Ocean Drive, in South Beach, Miami, Jan. 16, 2016. (Adam Fagen/CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

This is not the first time that Israeli Jews were attacked after being mistaken for Arabs. During the tense days of October 2015, several such incidents occurred in Israel: soldiers shot and killed 28-year-old Simcha Hodadov, an immigrant from Dagestan who had moved to Israel for Zionist reasons, studied in a yeshiva, served in the Netzah Yehuda unit of the Israeli army, and later worked as a security guard. But the soldiers suspected he was Arab, so they opened fire.

That same month, Uri Rezkan was stabbed at his workplace in a supermarket in the city of Kiryat Ata by another Israeli Jew, and in Jerusalem, a Haredi man attacked a Jewish pedestrian with an iron rod, leaving him seriously injured. In both incidents, the perpetrator deliberately targeted the victims because they took them for Arabs.

This is a well-known Israeli rule of thumb: the more tense and violent the situation, the more dangerous it is to “look Arab.” But truthfully, within Israeli-controlled territories, there is never really a good time to do so.

This insight was distilled by the Palestinian writer Sayed Kashua, in one of the funniest yet saddest episodes of his acclaimed sitcom “Arab Labor.” The protagonist, Amjad Alian, decides to participate in the reality show “Big Brother” to prove to Israeli Jews that Arabs aren’t scary. The other contestants, knowing there is an Arab among them but unaware of his identity, mistakenly suspect the Mizrahi of being Arab — and their treatment of him changes accordingly.

Non-Jews have also been attacked after being mistaken for Arabs, such as Eritrean migrant Habtom Zerhom, who was lynched by a mob of civilians and police at the Be’er Sheva central bus station after being mistaken for a “terrorist.” But among Israeli Jews, in a reality in which having an “Arab appearance” serves as the primary trigger for violence, Mizrahim are almost categorically at the highest risk.

Israeli policemen detain an activist during the eviction of mostly Mizrahi families from the Tel Aviv neighborhood of Givat Amal neighborhood, December 29, 2014. (Oren Ziv)

A Mizrahi Jew can change his or her last name, distance themselves from any Arab element in their identity and heritage, and fully embrace Western culture, but they cannot shed their skin. In public spaces — whether in Israel or beyond, as the Miami incident demonstrates — they can still easily be identified, and consequently treated, as “an Arab.”

The ‘wrong’ kind of Jew and Arab

But outward appearance is only part of the Mizrahi-Arab story, and it’s not even the main one. In Israel’s early years, the Ashkenazi establishment harbored a burning resentment and contempt against the Mizrahim for their Arab identity, long before they encountered them in person and saw the color of their skin or eyes. “This is a race unlike any we have seen before,” Israeli journalist Aryeh Gelblum wrote in Haaretz in April 1949. “The primitiveness of these people is unsurpassable … above all there is one equally grave fact, and that is their total inability to adjust to the life in this country, and primarily their chronic laziness and hatred for any kind of work.”

By 1951, the Jewish Agency and the Israeli government had adopted a selective immigration policy for Jews from Morocco and Tunisia, in contrast to the unrestricted immigration granted to Jews from Western countries. “One of the greatest concerns weighing on us as we assess our cultural state is that the influx of immigrants from Eastern countries will lower Israel’s cultural level to that of its neighboring countries,” wrote Abba Eban in 1952, then Israel’s ambassador to the United States and the UN.

A few years later, the Mizrahi uprising in Haifa’s Wadi Salib neighborhood would unleash all these suppressed fears. “I don’t know whom they’re bringing from Persia now, but we are doomed to accept them. We’ll see what kind of jungle we’re creating for ourselves,” grumbled Prime Minister Levi Eshkol.

A demonstration by Mizarhi residents of Wadi Salib in front of the police station in Haifa, July 9, 1959. (Israeli Police/Wikimedia Commons)

Then-Education Minister Zalman Aran went so far as to accuse “the Jews of the Eastern communities” of “passive sympathy for violence.” Decades later, Benjamin Netanyahu’s close advisor Nathan Eshel would echo these sentiments, claiming that Mizrahim “respond well to violence.”

This brief overview — just the tip of the iceberg in an ocean of racism — is meant to remind us of what so many Mizrahim in Israel insist on denying: the Arab core embedded in their Mizrahi identity, and the price it exacts.

Over the past year and a half, amid the war’s toxic climate of hatred and revenge, statements about “Arab barbarism” have become widespread in Israel — regrettably, even from Mizrahi men and women who were once allies in the struggle for equality. Those who for years critically analyzed the roots of Mizrahi oppression in Israel have suddenly adopted the most racist, anti-Arab terminology when speaking about Palestinians.

The shooting incident in Miami could serve as an important reminder for them: when the shooter left his house with the intent to kill Palestinians, he wasn’t thinking about Palestinians in a political sense. Even if his victims had been Palestinians, he had no way of knowing whether they were Zionist Palestinians, like Yoseph Haddad. His target was Arabness itself.

In fact, one could say he didn’t make any mistake: he did end up shooting Arabs, just the “wrong” kind. In that sense, he was no different from his victim, who rushed to write “Death to Arabs,” right before realizing that his attacker was a racist Jew.

Mizrahim may continue to deny their Arab identity, to scorn it, to distance themselves from it — but in the end, a bullet will remind them: after all, you are Arab too.

Orly Noy