Enemies, A Love Story: Mizrahi-Arab-Ashkenazi Relations Since the Dawn of Zionism by Hillel Cohen

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Enemies, A Love Story: Mizrahi-Arab-Ashkenazi Relations Since the Dawn of Zionism by Hillel Cohen

Could the conflict between Jews and Arabs in Israel-Palestine been averted or at least ameliorated? It’s an underlying theme in Hillel Cohen’s Enemies, a Love Story. As an associate professor of Middle Eastern studies at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, Cohen has written about the conflict before. Here, he focuses on relations between Palestine’s Arabs and Mizrahi Jews, who lived among the Arab majority for centuries, and how those relations altered with the influx of the Ashkenazim, European Jews intent on forming a new sort of Jewish community in the Holy Land.

Cohen complicates the picture many of us have, shading black and white into many shades of gray. Jews and Arabs were never homogenous in attitude or belief, and Zionism was not a monolith in its formative decades. Mizrahim and Arabs often got along well under Ottoman Turkish rule, albeit Jewish life in the empire was not without difficulties. Some Mizrahim resented the arrival of the Ashkenazim and others worked with them. For their part, many European Jews looked down on the Mizrahim as socially and culturally inferior.

As much as anything, Enemies is a reminder that history is seldom simple. The State of Israel was established in 1948 largely by Ashkenazim Zionists, who turned themselves into the new nation’s elite. The Mizrahim often felt negatively stereotyped, trapped in low-wage jobs. Feeling excluded, many gravitated toward right-wing populism and extreme forms of Israeli nationalism.

Enemies, A Love Story is stocked with citations from the early 20th century by Jews and Arabs seeking accommodation. Alas, competing ideas of nationalism, a Western import in a region where religious rather than ethnic identity had been prevalent, shipwrecked chances for conciliation. Cohen writes with the wisdom of a historian who understands the challenge of accounting for inconvenient facts.

Enemies, A Love Story on Amazon here.

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