On the strength of these narratives, they can cultivate support at home for laws of return or flexible citizenship regimes, or seek support abroad from diaspora nationalist communities. It is not a given that these stories will be accepted or acted upon, but it is clear that sometimes they are, to dramatic effect. When differentiating between transnational practices undertaken for purely practical economic interests and those undertaken for religious, ethnic, or identity-based reasons becomes difficult, it becomes yet more important to recognize how the reality of diaspora and the myth of diaspora can be used to move people, money, and ideas in ways that simple labor forces never could. Following S, person after person told me similar things about their fear and dislike of their future Arab neighbors, and a few also told me that they would prefer to live outside of the increasingly Latino neighborhoods springing up in Beersheba, Ramla, and Tel Aviv. How did my subjects learn about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and how did they learn to place themselves so firmly against the Arab side of it? Why are they all ending up in Ramla anyway? Why in the world should their fellow Latin American Jews be lumped in with Palestinians as people to avoid once they make aliyah? And what does their curious, tenuous position tell us about the way race and immigration operate in Israel? Obviously, people exist outside and beyond this divide; the binary is only a politically expedient assumption. Even within the Jewish “side,” perceived race is predicated on a complicated and nuanced set of associations between different Jewish groups, affected by skin color, religious practice, language, and former national origin, among other aspects. Iquiteño Jews fall firmly on the Jewish side of that foundational split,stackable planters but they fit uncomfortably within that side. In this strange position, they highlight a fundamental Israeli paradox.
Secular nationalists in Israel need Jews to outnumber Palestinians within its territory, and so Israel constantly desires new Jewish bodies. To get them, it broadcasts a welcoming face to the diaspora, encouraging immigration under the Law of Return. This desire, however, must contend with powerful ultra-Orthodox gatekeepers that disapprove of conversion into any kind of non-Orthodox Judaism, and with the racism of other secular-nationalist Israeli Jews.However, they are not Jewish in the right or the most desirable ways. As they make their way to Israel, they must jump through administrative and religious hoops to please both sides, and along they way, they form their own opinions about their identities, Israeli racial hierarchies, and Jewishness itself. The case of Iquiteño Jewish migration is proportionally tiny, but it handily reveals Israel’s tenuous balancing act between secular-nationalist and ultra-Orthodox politics, and highlights the fragility and arbitrariness of the definition of Jewishness that Israel relies upon. Howard Winant and Michael Omi’s definition of a racial project is useful in discussing the creation of Israel’s racial system. A racial project is “is simultaneously an interpretation, representation, or explanation of racial identities and meanings, and an effort to organize and distribute resources along particular racial lines”. Omi and Winant often fail to see the ways in which religion becomes racialized, or the overlap between religion and ethnicity , unfortunately. Such an intersection is easy enough to fill in after the fact, particularly with the help of the clear example laid out before Iquitos. The state of Israel knowingly and actively pursues a racial project that privileges Ashkenazi religious and cultural behavior alongside phenotypical representations of race. In order to bridge this gap, I use Orna Sasson Levy’s work to describe how sub-ethnic differences within the Jewish population rub up against racial differences, as well as Yehouda Shenhav’s discussion of “Arab Jews” , which complicates the assumed simplicity of the Israeli/Palestinian divide. The end result is a racial project that hides the real complications of identity in Israel from vital prospective citizens.
Israel’s multi-part racial hierarchy privileges an ideal Jew who is pale-skinned, descended from European Jewish immigrants, observant and Orthodox enough for civil benefits but not too Orthodox18, and Ashkenazi in practice and culture. For those of Israel’s Jewish population who do not fit this mold, a complex hierarchy exists between different Jewish groups, forming a two part intra-Jewish racial structure where both perceived race and Jewish sub-ethnicity can be vectors of privilege and oppression. These groups may combine ethnoreligious subcategories and racial identities in a number of ways; however, almost all of them strive to be read as not Arab. Non-Arab, non-Muslim, non-Jewish peoples with a long history in Israel, such as Armenian Christians, are marginalized civically and politically , and do not figure largely in the racial imaginations of most Israelis. Newer non-Jewish, non-Arab immigrants have also been drawn to modern Israel, including a population of Catholic Latin Americans. They too are a very small minority and are generally excluded from discussions of racial formation and hierarchy within the country. Considering these elisions, the most basic division of Israeli society is thus between Jews of any race or ethnicity and Palestinians. Israel’s situation is quite different from American racial projects, which are perhaps its closest cousins, and I do not wish to ignore these differences or apply American racial optics carelessly. Israel’s history, its theological governance, and its demographics are very different, as are its modes of thinking about race, citizenship, and belonging. That being said, some models of race developed in the United States, when adapted, can shed light on other cases. In Israel specifically,stackable flower pots bringing in such theories is useful because countries wrestle with a popularly assumed racial binary that hides much diversity. When used alongside scholarship like that of Sasson-Levy and Shenhav, the existence of the imagined but strict Israeli/Palestinian binary leads to fruitful theoretical comparisons. In particular, I find that this system in some ways resembles Claire Jean Kim’s U.S.-based theory of racial triangulation.
Kim theorizes the racialization of Asian-Americans within the American “field of racial positions” as a process that does not happen in a vacuum in which each ethnoracial group receives particular treatment independent of the treatment of other groups, nor in a strict hierarchy bounded by Black and White, but “relative to and through interaction with” all groups. These fields of racial positions acknowledge the power of public discourse, personal interactions, and structural forces in shaping the relative privilege of racial groups in a shifting arena specific to time and place. This form of racialization allows for multiple axes of racial formation and foregrounds the manner in which different groups are racialized through comparisons with others. When she argues that Asian-Americans are “racially triangulated” within these fields, she illuminates the ways in which Asian-Americans define themselves and are defined by others in contrast to White and Black Americans through processes of relative valorization and social ostracism. By borrowing Kim’s vocabulary to refer to Israel, I locate Iquiteño-Jewish migrants within a field of racial positions that includes Palestinians, non-Jewish and non-Arab migrants, and multiple subgroups of Jews with varying levels of ethnic and religious privilege. Their identity is triangulated in relation to, especially, light-skinned Ashkenazi Jewish Israelis and Palestinians. Iquiteño Jews, mostly, are converts in the Conservative/Masorti movement, people with dark skin, people with Sephardi rather than Ashkenazi heritage, second- or third-language speakers of Hebrew, and recent migrants. As such, they are racially constructed through social ostracism when compared to light-skinned Jewish Israelis, European-descended Ashkenazim, first-language speakers of Hebrew, those born in Israel, and Orthodox Jews, among other axes of identity. Legally, as non-Orthodox Jews, they have fewer dejure rights in Israel, such as to marriage. Socially, they face colorism, language discrimination, anti-immigrant bias, and anti convert bias. At the same time, they enjoy innumerably more rights, both de facto and de jure, than Israel’s Palestinian citizens. How aware of this situation are the Jews of Iquitos? It is not clear to me or to my subjects how legible Iquiteños moving through Israel are as non-Arab, or even perhaps non-Christian. However, it is clear that in Iquitos, potential olim know enough about Israeli racial hierarchies to name themselves as emphatically not Palestinian, and to preemptively take action to distance themselves from Palestinians. Interview subjects did so by expressing their desire to move quickly away from Ramla, which they saw as a demeaning or undesirable place to live because it had a high proportion of Arab residents. A younger female friend of S, the interviewee who opened this chapter, told me in hushed tones that she had heard Ramla was violent and unhealthy —because of its Arab population. My youngest respondent, a young man of , planned to immediately join the IDF for a variety of reasons, including the opportunity to undergo an expedited Orthodox conversion in the military, but also to “defend [Israel] from rats,” meaning displaced Palestinian families who might wish to return to their ancestral homes. My hosts appeared generally moderate in their Peruvian political opinions, and were by and large vehemently anti-Trump, but when I asked them who they would vote for in the then-upcoming Israeli prime ministerial election, they responded that they liked and approved of the Likud party’s policies around checkpoints and the building of new settlements.
Clearly, many Iquiteño Jews felt a deep anxiety about Palestinians in Israel. Those who did not involve themselves politically were nonetheless entering a situation in which their presence would inherently help the Israeli state disenfranchise Palestinians with equanimity. At the same time, my respondents divulged much less anxiety to me about their position within the intra-Jewish Israeli hierarchy. Although in 2019, three individuals informed me that Ramla was undesirable not only because of the large Arab population but also because they felt other Latin American Jews were broadly undesirable to be identified with, few others expressed such sentiments. While many told me they felt anxious about learning and using Hebrew on a daily basis, introducing their children to such a new place, or finding good work, it seemed to me that most felt excited about merging into a Jewish-Israeli whole, deeming such assimilation entirely possible. It was not clear to me in any instance in my 2019 interviews that individuals felt they “should” be more identified with either Ashkenazi or Sephardi Jews in Israel, or that there was much trouble with racism within the Jewish population in Israel. Some older respondents, particularly when I spoke to community elders whose families had maintained Judaism through the Iquitos community’s lean years in the late 20th century, mentioned that they strongly identified as Loretano Jews, who had a practice and history all their own, but that identification waned quickly as respondents grew younger. Those who felt those ties to a Peruvian, non Ashkenazi form of Jewishness were also much less likely to report a desire to migrate or a sense of already being Israeli, rather than or in addition to being Peruvian. This provides a picture of Jews who feel themselves already comfortably ensconced within a privileged majority. That said, I do find it interesting and important that even three of my respondents would feel the need to preemptively distance themselves from other Jewish Latin Americans living in Israel. It is even more interesting that not a single person I spoke to was interested in reclaiming the traditions of their Moroccan-Jewish ancestors, or connecting with Moroccan-Jewish communities within Israel. The current community leaders had not considered reaching out to the Sephardi Chief Rabbinate for assistance or educational materials, content with the Ashkenazi-normative materials and training sent by such organizations as the Jewish Agency for Israel. However roundabout the way, and however quiet the transmission, clearly some Iquiteños are receiving some information that allows them to preemptively triangulate themselves before making aliya. Information that comes to Iquitos about racialization in Israel comes from Iquiteño Jewish family members and friends living in Israel, the Spanish-language Jewish news media, rare features in the general Peruvian press dealing with Israeli issues, Jewish organizations interacting directly with Iquiteños, and visitors. Notably, most of the Iquiteño Jews could not name a favored Israeli party or politician when I asked them to.