Shifting Ethnic Boundaries and Inequality in Israel

Or, How the Polish Peddler Became a German Intellectual

Aziza Khazzoom

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780804779579
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du Moyen-Orient

Why do racial and ethnic groups discriminate against each other? The most common sociological answer is that they want to monopolize scarce resources—good jobs or top educations—for themselves. This book offers a different answer, showing that racial and ethnic discrimination can also occur to preserve particular group identities.

Shifting Ethnic Boundaries and Inequality in Israel focuses on the early period of Israeli statehood to examine how the European Jewish founders treated Middle Eastern Jewish immigrants. The author argues that, shaped by their own unique encounter with European colonialism, the European Jews were intent on producing Israel as part of the West. To this end, they excluded and discriminated against those Middle Eastern Jews who threatened the goal of Westernization.

Blending quantitative and qualitative evidence, Aziza Khazzoom provides a compelling rationale for the emergence of ethnic identity and group discrimination, while also suggesting new ways to understand Israeli-Palestinian relations.

PART I

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

The 1950s were a time of social fluidity in Israel. Before the state was established in 1948, the Jewish population in the area numbered about 600,000, and the non-Jewish close to 900,000. During the war that surrounded statehood, the indigenous Muslim population was reduced to about a fifth of its original size.¹ Then, over the next ten years, nearly a million Jewish immigrants arrived from more than twenty different countries, nearly tripling the Jewish population. This all occurred as the protostate institutions that Jews and others established before independence were transformed into full-fledged institutions capable of self-government and as the economy grew rapidly. In other words, for better or for worse (depending on one’s politics), what emerged was as close to a new society as sociologists can hope to find.

This book focuses on the labor market experiences of the new Jewish arrivals. Initially, they were a diverse group. From each country of origin, peddlers immigrated with professors, the unschooled with the well-educated; quite literally, a number of separate, independent stratification systems were mixed together in Israel’s dynamic environment. However, despite this heterogeneity, the Jewish sector that emerged was divided into two groups: “easterners” from Muslim countries,² known collectively as Mizrahim, and “westerners” from Christian countries, known collectively as Ashkenazim.³ By the time the first Israeli-born generation reached maturity, Mizrahim had significantly lower educational and occupational attainments than Ashkenazim. Moreover, the initially large internal differences—between Polish and Russian Ashkenazim, for example, or between Iraqi and Yemenite Mizrahim—had been significantly reduced (Nahon 1987; Amit 2001). This process of “dichotomization,” or the distillation of two ethnic groups out of an initial state of heterogeneity and the production of ethnic inequality between them, represents a particularly dramatic instance of what Omi and Winant (1986) called “racial formation” and what in the Israeli context, I am calling “ethnic formation.” ⁴

As in most modern industrialized societies,⁵ these economic disparities have proven to be stable over time (Shavit et al 1998; Cohen et al 1998). But unlike most, it is possible in Israel to locate a historical period in which ethnic diversity in class position was transformed into an entrenched ethnic hierarchy. This is important because pinpointing the sources of ethnic inequality is difficult in stable, established societies. Forms of power and advantage—economic, political, and cultural—converge over time, as particular groups establish dominance over resources. When class and ethnicity are enmeshed, the observed impact of ethnicity on success is not necessarily an indication of its real importance. Thus, even when it can be shown that ethnic inequality is reproduced largely through class factors (e.g., Hout 1984, Farkas et al., 1997), sociologists are in dispute over the meaning of these findings. Some, such as Wilson (1980, 1987) on the U.S. case, argue that the prominence of class demonstrates that racial/ethnic discrimination in the labor market is no longer an important determinant of life chances. Others, such as Parkin (1979), posit dynamics that allow ethnic elites to capitalize on the prior association between class and ethnicity to disguise ethnic discrimination as a class-based outcome. Concern over this issue extends far beyond academic circles. From the publication of The Bell Curve (1994) to the debate over affirmative action, the question of whether ethnic discrimination has simply gone underground continues to shape social policy and spark debate. By studying an ethnically stratified modern industrialized society at its formation, before class and ethnicity were fully enmeshed, we can consider ethnicity as an axis for social closure, less encumbered by preexisting race/class correlations or institutionalization of advantage.

In this book, I examine the process of occupational attainment of Jewish immigrants during their first encounter with Israel’s labor market, that is, the encounter that would set the stage for later generations’ attainment possibilities. I show that even if the perpetuation of ethnic inequality in Israel is correctly conceptualized as a class-based dynamic (Kraus and Hodge 1990), its genesis is not. In 1961, ethnicity conditioned an individual’s ability to translate prior achievements, such as education and occupation abroad, into Israeli occupations. Thus, in a case in which class and ethnicity were not initially fully correlated, this modern industrialized society distributed occupations along ethnic lines directly.

But far more interesting than the fact of an ethnic impact is the nature of the pecking order that developed, and it is here that the complexity and importance of the Israeli situation emerges. As noted, the Jews who immigrated to Israel came in country-of-origin groups. Each country was unique in its history, communal organization, overall attainment levels, and often even language and religious and cultural customs. But in Israel, Jews were portrayed as already divided into Mizrahim and Ashkenazim (Shenhav 2006) These binary categories were drawn from the global east/ west or Muslim/Christian divides (Shohat 1988) and were employed by gatekeepers from the first days of the immigration (Tsur 1997), and it was they, not the country-of-origin grouping, that eventually meshed with class (Nahon 1987; Amit 2001). This process of dichotomization, in which ethnic boundaries shifted in part through the distribution of resources, is one of the more interesting features of Israeli society. But although we know that dichotomization eventually occurred, we know little about how or when.⁶ Thus the question of this book is not just whether ethnicity affected attainment in the first encounter with labor market but how that effect interfaced with the known outcome of dichotomization.

The answer is not simple. Prior work implied that employers and state agents imposed the new binary categories on the arriving immigrants by immediately distributing resources according to the Mizrahi/Ashkenazi distinction (Bernstein and Swirski 1982). Thus, one expected outcome is that in the first encounter with the labor market, gatekeepers would distribute occupational prestige according to the binary, and not country-of-origin, categories. And indeed, among the six largest countries of origin Romanians, Poles, and Soviets, who were Ashkenazi, received similar and relatively high returns to education, while Yemenite and Moroccan immigrants, who were Mizrahi, received similar and relatively low returns. (“Returns to education” refers to the extent to which higher educational attainment results in higher prestige occupations, income, and the like.) What makes the outcome complex is that Iraqi immigrants, who were also Mizrahi, received Ashkenazi-level returns to education. Thus, by 1961 the distribution of occupational attainment only partly followed the expected dichotomization pattern, and more to the point, the experience of Iraqi immigrants was antithetical to what has been a prominent framework for the analysis of Israeli ethnic inequality.

I dub the Iraqi returns to education the “Iraqi paradox” because without Iraqis in the picture, dichotomization would appear to be the straightforward result of labor market discrimination along binary lines. I then explore what the paradox tells us about Israeli ethnic formation and about the use of the dichotomization framework to conceptualize it. Following Emigh’s (1997) “negative case methodology” I do not recommend rejecting the dichotomization framework but rather expanding it so that it can account for the Iraqi pattern as well as that of the other five countries.⁷ This is appropriate because we know that resources were eventually distributed by the Mizrahi/Ashkenazi distinction (Nahon 1987; Amit 2001) and that the Iraqi paradox therefore indicates not that dichotomization didn’t occur, but that it was not immediate or straightforward. The exploration of the Iraqi paradox is therefore guided by three questions: (1) Why did Iraqis do so well in the first encounter with the labor market? (2) Can the explanations for their success be related to their later downward mobility? And (3) how much alteration of dichotomization theory is needed to account for the Iraqi experience?

I consider two plausible stories. The first is that Iraqis did experience discrimination in the first encounter with the labor market but successfully fought back and that the discrimination continued until Iraqi attainments were finally curtailed. This story is in line with dichotomization theory as it exists now, because it implies that Israeli society was for some reason characterized by a consistent and multifaceted push to reduce the attainments of all Middle Eastern Jews to the same level. This contention is supported by evidence that in placing immigrants in residential locations, state agents discriminated against Iraqis to the same degree as Yemenites and Moroccans. In addition, there is evidence that in the next generation the school system discriminated against the children of Iraqi immigrants. These findings imply that the discriminatory apparatus was pervasive and was characterized by a level of cooperation among different groups of gatekeepers that is more in line with Marx’s conceptualization of a united ruling class than with the more multifaceted conceptualizations that predominate today. With regard to modern industrialized societies as a whole, it implies not only that they can discriminate along ethnic lines directly, but also that they can do so in a concerted and forceful way.

But other findings suggest a second story. Some of the cultural differences between Iraqis and the two other Mizrahi country groups corresponded to important features of Israeli identity and social goals. The Jews who established and immigrated to Israel were deeply committed to developing a modern, western society, and more Iraqi individuals fit this ideal than Yemenite and Moroccan individuals.⁸ It may be that because of this greater conformity, there was simply no desire to discriminate against Iraqis. This argument is further supported by findings that when Moroccans conformed to the Israeli conception of modern, western behavior, their returns to education approached those of Ashkenazim, and when Iraqis did not conform to this conception, their returns dropped to the level of other Mizrahim (Chapter 7).

In short, these and other findings in this book suggest that Israel’s gatekeepers were primarily interested not in creating ethnic inequality—although that is certainly what they did—but in marginalizing and managing what they variously referred to as the eastern, Arab, Levantine, or Oriental. They believed that origins in a Muslim country made one eastern, and the dichotomy between Muslim and Christian countries strongly shaped their expectations regarding individual immigrants who sought jobs in the new economy. At the same time, the consistent finding of this book—of an ethnic hierarchy in returns to education that was flexible, and whose flexibility was systematically related to demonstrable westernness—suggests that it was the project of westernization, not of producing an ethnic dichotomy, that remained the guiding logic behind the distribution of resources in the first encounter with the labor market. As a whole, these findings suggest that Mizrahim were evaluated at a group level and an individual level simultaneously; at the communal level all Mizrahim were taken as eastern and signaled a negative contribution to the collective, but at the individual level, they were considered separately, and westernness could become more salient. ⁹ This second explanation requires an expansion of dichotomization theory. Prior work has focused largely on the material reasons for ethnic exclusion and has paid less attention to motivations rooted in culture and identity. The incorporation of these additional dynamics provides for a fuller understanding not just of the Iraqi paradox but also of Israeli ethnic and national formation generally.¹⁰

IMPLICATIONS

Charting this process of dichotomization is important for understanding how Israeli society developed. But it is also a fascinating window into why ethnic discrimination occurred in Israel, and by extension, one mechanism through which racial/ethnic discrimination can occur in other societies as well. And that, in turn, is its main contribution for students of race/ ethnicity worldwide. The book demonstrates that “ideological” factors such as identity and global hegemonic discourses are capable of shaping internal social cleavages. These ideological factors can affect such things as where boundaries are placed around groups, whether ethnic difference becomes an axis of social inequality, and which individuals within ethnic groups are excluded and which are included.¹¹ As such, this book joins a couple of seminal works that have similarly explored moments in which identity appears at least as important as material interest in explaining racial/ethnic dynamics: Roediger’s The Wages of Whiteness (1991) and Almaguer’s Racial Fault Lines (1994). That this is the only book of its kind to use a large-scale, representative data base (the 1961 Israeli census) to make such an argument makes it particularly important.

Three other, related contributions from my work are worth underscoring. First, the book highlights ways that the emergence of social groups can be related to the emergence of social exclusion, or, put differently, it addresses classic sociological questions about why ethnic difference sometimes leads to exclusion and sometimes doesn’t. Some researchers conceptualize the impulse to exclude as following directly from the identification of group difference (van den Berghe 1987), while others suggest the opposite pattern, in which the identification (or strengthening) of group difference occurs when there are scarce resources over which groups might compete (i.e., the impulse to exclude leads to a search for groups to exclude) (Barth 1998). In Israel, however, neither link is appropriate. Rather, both the redrawing of group boundaries and the emergence of exclusion along the new lines were shaped by a third factor: concerns over producing, or portraying, the self as western. Moreover, when one widens the historical window it becomes clear that these concerns shaped Jewish ethnic relations for more than a century prior to immigration but did not always lead to social closure. Instead, groups perceiving themselves as more western sometimes expended significant resources to westernize, and therefore include, groups they saw as eastern.

In fact, as I will discuss, a review of the literature suggests a fourpart classification of reasons that ethnic group boundaries might shift or strengthen, and each reason suggests a different relationship between difference and exclusion. The Israeli case belongs in the “relational” category, in which one group defines itself through defining another. Alternatively, new ethnic boundaries might be created because of lack of information—as when whites classify Japanese and Koreans as Asians—or because of a change in scale—as when immigrants from different parts of Italy, upon arrival in the United States, begin to see a shared Italian identity as more salient than it was previously. This study of Israel suggests that a relational dynamic can create intense commitments to particular ethnic contrasts, but the drive to exclude can wax and wane. In contrast, when one group excludes another to monopolize resources, there may be an intense commitment to exclusion, but little commitment to any specific set of group boundaries, or to excluding one group rather than another (Parkin 1979). In cases of lack of information or change in scale, no systematic relationship between exclusion and group formation may be in place. Within this classification scheme, Israel is not so much unique—Almaguer (1994) and Roediger (1991) make parallel arguments about the United States—as it is an example of a type of ethnic dynamic that is less often researched.

In a second general contribution, I follow Almaguer (1994) in arguing that identity concerns can affect how ostensibly neutral resources such as occupations are distributed in ostensibly neutral arenas such as labor markets. This conflates race and class in interesting ways. In an argument that is parallel to my argument that most Jewish elites wanted to produce Israel as western, Almaguer argued that just after the occupation of California, Anglo immigrants wanted to produce a “free labor” state. Since specific groups of nonwhites were associated with unfree labor to differing degrees, racial categories were infused with class symbolism, and vice versa. This intertwining partly explains why race affected the distribution of occupations, as well as why some racial groups experienced more discrimination in labor markets than others.¹² Similarly, I argue that in Israel, higher status occupations were often seen as representing the modernity and westernness of Israeli society. As such, they seemed appropriate for people who were not only technically qualified but also culturally western, or at least European. My argument and Almaguer’s argument share the basic premise that occupations can be infused with racial/ethnic/national meaning and can thus become building blocks for collective identity. In this way, identity concerns can affect the distribution of material resources without material interest, in the classic sense of increasing personal wealth and power, necessarily playing a role. Thus, this book offers one explanation for how racial/ethnic exclusion can be ingrained into the fabric of modern industrialized societies, even as their economic structures and democratic ideologies mandate that human capital be the main determinant of attainment.¹³

A third contribution is methodological. To chart ethnic formation, this book blends the insights of stratification research, which asks how resources are distributed among groups, with the insights of racialization theory, which asks how those groups are created. In most work, these questions are addressed with different methodologies. Quantitative status attainment models, similar to those used in this book, ask how ethnicity and class background account for outcomes such as occupational prestige or educational attainment. In these models, the individual is usually the unit of analysis, and ethnicity is usually conceptualized as a characteristic of individuals. Racialization work, in contrast, often uses historical-archival materials to track changes...