Abstract
This thesis examines the role of race in the State of Israel by exploring how Blackness manifested through the State’s Mizrahi population. Blackness was both ascribed by the State unto Mizrahim, as well as adopted by some Mizrahim, namely the Israeli Black Panthers. Established in 1971, the Israeli Black Panthers utilized race in their fight against state and societal discrimination, leaving one to question the depth and weight of the term “Black” in Israeli society. Locating itself in the mid-to-late twentieth century, this paper begins by laying the foundation of the arrival of Mizrahim to the State of Israel and their subsequent discrimination that persisted in the decades that followed. Israel racialized Mizrahim as Black, but only after Europe racialized Ashkenazim – once Ashkenazim began forming their own society in the likes of the West, they othered Mizrahim in order to align themselves with whiteness. The racialization of Mizrahim, in conjunction with specific acts of racial discrimination, then provides the much-needed background in understanding how and why Mizrahim would align themselves with a Black Power movement from the United States. The Mizrahim involved in the Israeli Black Panthers identified with and adopted Blackness for a cause that they saw existed both within and far beyond their national boundaries, carving out a place for themselves within this historical narrative of global Blackness. Reclamatory in nature, their identity can sometimes be seen vacillating between Black and white, as typically occurs in oppressed-oppressor relationships. The transnational nature of this topic leads one to question how the Israeli Black Panthers were perceived by those outside of Israel, specifically in terms of Blackness. American and Jewish-American newspapers provide insight to the citizenry’s wide-ranging viewpoints, such as ambiguous, receptive, and rejective, with most more likely to reject the Israeli Black Panthers’ Black identity. This thesis strives to display the lived realities of Mizrahim through underlining their agency via acts of resistance. Through the inclusion of Mizrahim in conversations around race, and the portrayal of the similarities of the Black-white divide in the United States and the Mizrahi-Ashkenazi divide in Israel, a clearer picture of the commonalities between oppressive systems and the ways in which race consciousness forms may emerge.