Haaretz, Jul. 10, 2021 9:03 AM
'We Saw Jews With Hearts Like Germans': Moroccan Immigrants in Israel
Warned Families Not to Follow
Thousands of letters written in the early years of the state by
immigrant soldiers to their families in Morocco reveal a gloomy picture.
Most wanted to go home
by Ofer Aderet
In 1949, in the midst of the War of Independence, an Israel Defense
Forces soldier wrote a letter to his family who remained in Morocco. “We
came to Israel and thought we’d find a paradise here, but regrettably it
was the opposite: We saw Jews with hearts like Germans.” He also had a
word of caution for his relatives: “If you want my advice, stay in North
Africa; it’s better than the Land of Israel.”
The soldier’s identity remains unknown, but thousands of similar letters
that were deposited in the IDF and Defense Establishment Archive show
that he was not the only Moroccan immigrant who harbored such feelings.
Excerpts from the letters, which had remained below the radar of
historians and researchers, are now being published for the first time.
Another soldier from North Africa was more direct and blunt, accusing
the Ashkenazi Jews of racism. “The European Jews, who suffered
tremendously from Nazism, see themselves as a superior race and the
Sephardi [Mizrahi] Jews as belonging to an inferior one,” he wrote to
his parents. He complained that the North African new immigrant “who
came here from afar and was not required to leave his home because of
racial discrimination – is now humiliated at every turn.”
A feeling of injustice also arises from the lines that follow: “Instead
of [showing] gratitude, they treat us like savages or something that is
unwelcome. When I see [North] African friends wandering the streets, one
without an arm, the other without a leg, people who spilled their blood
in war, I ask myself, ‘Is it worth it?’”
Historian Shay Hazkani – whose research focuses generally on the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict and on how Jewish immigrants from North
Africa and the Middle East were absorbed and treated during the early
years of the state – discovered these letters in classified reports
written by the postal censorship bureau that operated in the army from
its inception. The unit’s members read the letters sent by soldiers and
deleted classified information. Moreover, they also copied – without the
soldiers’ knowledge or consent – passages that would interest the army
and the civilian authorities. By this means it was possible to monitor
the mood among the soldiers and to track other developments.
Dr. Hazkani was especially interested in what these historical sources
could reveal – despite the problematic nature of reading personal
correspondence – about the feelings of immigrants who had come from
Morocco to fight in the war in 1947-48, who were opening their hearts to
their families who remained behind.
“The Poles control everything,” one soldier wrote his family in Morocco
at the time, noting that “95 percent of the guys here are dissatisfied,
and would like only to go back to where they came from.” In the view of
another soldier, “Palestine might be good for people who suffered in the
camps in Germany, but not for us, the French, who are lovers of
freedom.” (He was referring to France’s protectorate regime, which ruled
in Morocco until the country became independent, in 1956.)
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Mizrahim
Allegations of discrimination at the hands of Ashkenazi immigrants are
rife in many of the letters Hazkani studied. One soldier, originally
from Casablanca, wrote his family back home that the Polish Jews “think
Moroccans are savages and thieves. When we pass by, they look at us like
[we are] brutes.” His dream was to return to Casablanca, he told his
family, and he would go on crying until he was able to buy a plane ticket.
“I can’t stand this country, which is worse than jail. The Ashkenazim
exploit us in everything and give the best and easiest jobs to the
Poles,” a soldier wrote to relatives in Morocco. “The wages are worth
nothing. For his easy labor, the Pole gets 2.5 liras, but the maximum we
Moroccans can earn for our arduous and strenuous work is only 1.5 liras.”
The perusal of thousands of letters by new-immigrant soldiers from
Morocco suggests that the majority of them wanted to return home and
that they recommended that their families not immigrate to the Jewish
state, or at least put off any such move. The percentages shift between
periods and between the groups of letters sampled, but a summary drawn
by the IDF turns up high numbers: About 70 percent who wanted to go back
to Morocco and 76 percent who recommended to their families to stay put.
The army’s top brass itself generally displayed a patronizing, hostile
and distant attitude toward soldiers of North African origin, according
to the IDF’s own files, from which the letters quoted by Hazkani were
taken. “Even though the soldiers are of inferior education and culture,
they manifest potent criticism,” one army report states. “North African
immigrants suffer from an inferiority complex that might be caused by
the way their Ashkenazi colleagues treat them,” a censorship official
wrote after analyzing the soldiers’ letters.
“This phenomenon is serious and raises concern,” he continues, not just
because of the damage to morale among the soldiers, “but also because of
the information sent by the ‘offended’” to their families and friends in
their countries of origin.
"The European Jews, who suffered tremendously from Nazism, see
themselves as a superior race and the Sephardi Jews as belonging to an
inferior one."
Data from the Central Bureau of Statistics shows that 6 percent of those
who immigrated from Morocco in the years 1949 to 1953 actually returned
to their native land: 2,466 out of approximately 40,000. Proportionally,
Hazkani found, this was almost twice the number of those who returned
among the immigrants from Europe and America (Ashkenazim).
‘Human sheep’
Complaints about Israel did not only make people decide to leave the
country. There was an Israeli government policy that was intended to
hinder or delay immigration. In 1951, the government adopted a policy of
“selective aliyah.” In a 1999 article, “The Origin of Selective Aliyah,”
Dr. Avi Picard, from Bar-Ilan University’s Land of Israel Studies
department, notes that the restrictions referred to the "quality" of the
immigrants – who by and large came from North Africa at the time – and
not their numbers, and were imposed via classification on the basis of
one's physical fitness, age and profession.
“Don’t believe the Zionist Office in Morocco. It is spreading
propaganda, lies and distortions,” an immigrant soldier from North
Africa wrote his family in an effort to dissuade them from making the
move to the Holy Land. “Here you’ll be called ‘dirty Moroccans,’ and the
papers will write that the Moroccans don’t know how to dress or how to
eat with a fork. Only with their hands. They think that the only human
beings here are the Poles.”
The unnamed soldier was referring to a series of articles published in
Haaretz in 1949, which continue to resonate to this day. A reporter on
the paper, Aryeh Gelblum, assumed a fictitious identity in order to
document life in the immigrants’ transit camps. He published his grim
conclusions under the headline, “I was a new immigrant for a month.”
“This is an immigration of race such as we have never before known in
Israel,” he wrote, in reference to the North African immigrants. “We
have here a people at a peak of primitiveness. The level of their
education borders on absolute ignorance, and even graver is [their]
incompetence at absorbing anything intellectual.”
Gelblum added, “Only slightly do they surpass the general level of the
Arab, Negro and Berber inhabitants from their places [of origin]… They
are completely subject to primitive and savage instincts. In any event,
this is an even lower level than what we knew among the Arabs of the
Land of Israel of the past.” He continued: “What can we do with them?
How can we absorb them? Have we considered what will happen to this
country if they became its citizens? One day the rest of the Jews from
the Arab world will immigrate! What will the State of Israel look like
and what sort of level will it have if it has citizens like these?”
In the summer of 1950, Davar, the organ of the Histadrut labor
federation, ran an article about a transit camp in Marseille where new
immigrants, most of them Jews from North Africa, were waiting on their
way to Israel. Terms such as “bad material” and “human sheep” were used
to describe the prospective immigrants, who would have to be “kneaded”
in order “to shape them.” The article went on: “Will it be possible to
form new traits among these abject human beings? In Israel, will they
not again descend into the atmosphere from which they were removed –
among their brethren in the community?”
"Instead of showing gratitude, they treat us like savages."
An article in Davar that September warned about the “oriental” character
of the people who would flood Israel. “Our fate depends on quality. In
other words, the degree to which the non-oriental elements, which are
the only ones that can sustain this country, will triumph. How to
elevate them to the Western level of the existing community and how to
protect ourselves with all our might against the possibility that the
quality of the populations of Israel will fall to the oriental level.”
Similarly harsh comments were made by the country’s leaders, as has
already been revealed. Levi Eshkol, the finance minister and later prime
minister, was quoted in 1953 as saying, “We are shackled with human
refuse, because in those countries they are sweeping the streets and
sending us in the first row these backward people.” Other leaders
expressed themselves in similar terms.
Some of the immigrants from Morocco heard these voices and read the
articles and were enraged. Their feelings were given expression in an
article titled, “Moroccan Jewry Gazing toward Israel,” published in 1949
in a Jerusalem-based periodical, Hed Hamizrah (Echo from the East). It
opens by noting that at first “the enthusiasm of the masses of Jews [in
Morocco] for making aliyah to the Holy Land was unbounded.”
Subsequently, however, when the newcomers encountered Israeli reality,
“that enthusiasm began to be mixed with bitter disappointment.”
It is clear from this that the letters from the disappointed soldiers
reached their destination in Morocco and resonated there. “The reports
reaching here from Israel are ominous. We are told that the immigrants
are being received in Israel with gross discrimination and scathing
insults,” the Hed Hamizrah writer noted. “The sorrow is heightened when
you hear that these insults are not coming from gentiles but from their
brothers who are in Zion, on whom they pinned all their hopes and from
whom they thought to find succor and aid until they adjusted to life in
Israel.”
The author wonders “what did we do to deserve having this trouble fall
upon us, and this shameful attitude?” He goes on to review the
contribution of Moroccan immigrants to Israel’s rebirth: “Is this the
reward that the official institutions pay us for having fulfilled our
national duty in all senses? After all, you all know what we have
wrought in the past and in the present. We were among the first illegal
immigrants [ma’apilim] to Israel. Young sailors among us left their
families and suffered together with their brethren in the concentration
camps of Cyprus. Young lads from Morocco were also not lacking on [the
ship] Exodus Europe 1947. Our boys fought like lions on all the fronts,
in the north and the south, the Galilee and the Negev, in the Old City
of Jerusalem and in the land’s other cities, and blood was shed everywhere.”
The article concludes: “Morocco’s Jews fought for the deliverance of
their land, and why should they be discriminated against? Why is their
blood different from the blood of their Western brothers? The bitterness
caused by this insulting attitude is growing apace here. Everyone is
demanding that the government of Israel right this wrong.” Addressing
members of Knesset, the writer calls for “the abolition of this racial
discrimination, for we are the children of one father.”
Yaron Tsur, an expert in the history of Jews from the Arab and Islamic
countries, addresses this issue in his 2001 book “A Torn Community: The
Jews of Morocco and Nationalism 1943-1954” (Hebrew).
“The first testimonies about the cooling of the enthusiasm for the idea
of aliyah to Israel are connected to the reports about the shock
experienced by the immigrants from Morocco at what they viewed as
discrimination against Sephardim overall and against Moroccans in
particular in Israel,” Prof. Tsur writes. “That was one aspect of their
encounter with the ethnic problem. The potency of the negative impact
these reports created may be gleaned from numerous testimonies. This
discrimination was apparently the phenomenon that was most damaging to
Israel’s image in the eyes of the [Moroccan] diaspora.”
"It is better to be a 'filthy Moroccan' than a 'filthy Jew.'"
According to Tsur, heightened efforts to portray the positive aspects of
immigration to Israel were of no avail. “No propaganda could offset the
impressions of the immigrants in letters from Israel and the testimony
of those who returned,” he notes. Complaints about discrimination were
heard from every quarter in Morocco, he writes, and they also had an
impact on the efforts to raise funds from Moroccan Jewry for the Zionist
cause.
Thus, the professor describes a meeting in a private home in Rabat, at
the end of which one of the participants said to the guest speaker, “You
spoke well, but I will not donate anything and I will try to see to it
that others follow my example, because you are treating Morocco’s Jews
like savages.” In another meeting, held by an MK from the Sephardi List,
Avraham Elmalich, with Moroccan rabbis in the city of Port Lyautey
(today, Kenitra), a religious court judge requested of him “that every
son of Israel who will go up to Israel, whoever he may be, it will not
be said of him, ‘This is an African, a Sephardi or an Ashkenazi,’ but
just a plain Israeli.”
The soldiers’ letters also reflected this sentiment. One soldier wrote
his family that the antisemitism in Israel was worse than in Poland.
Indeed, he added, the discrimination was so widespread that it could be
compared to the extreme nature of relations between whites and Blacks in
America. Striking a similar note, another wrote, “Orientals are treated
here like Negroes in the South of the U.S. There is great hatred between
the Orientals and the Westerners, who make up the Government.”
One soldier wrote, dishearteningly, that despite everything, he
preferred to remain in Israel and not return to Morocco. It is better to
be a “filthy Moroccan” than a “filthy Jew,” he explained to his family.
Waxing poetic, another expressed the hope “to finish my service in the
IDF and return to you, to my homeland Morocco, which I loved. This makes
me very happy.” One of his comrades-in-arms, who was from France, was
frustrated at being identified, mistakenly, as a Moroccan. “I only know
French but my skin is tan and I resemble a North African. What should I
do? No one believes I am not North African. I don’t have a job, and even
‘white’ girls don’t want to dance with me,” he complains. Another
soldier cautioned his family that this was not the right time to
immigrate to Israel. He explained, “You must know that the Arabs are our
brothers, unlike the Ashkenazi Jews, who make our lives miserable. For
all the money in the world I will not stay here.”
‘Big Brother apparatus’
An analysis of the letters reveals that the writers effectively refuted
the central tenets of Zionist propaganda: The “homeland” is not Israel
but Morocco, and it is only to there that can one “return.” As for the
Jewish state, the only recourse is to flee it. Moreover, the brethren of
Morocco’s Jews are not the Jews of Poland or Germany, as those who
espoused the “ingathering of the exiles” had hoped, but rather the
Arabs. Thus, instead of a new – Israeli – identity, the hard landing
experienced by some of Morocco’s Jews contributed to the shaping of a
Moroccan identity.
The soldiers’ letters are quoted in Hazkani’s new book, “Dear Palestine:
A Social History of the 1948 War” (in English, from Stanford University
Press). The historian has drawn in the past on the same collection of
letters from the army’s postal censorship unit. One such study, which
gave rise to an article in Haaretz in 2013, dealt with letters sent by
soldiers from the front in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. The letters
themselves, in the army archive, are not accessible to scholars or
others. Selected passages from them were quoted in internal military
reports under the heading, “The Soldier’s Opinion,” earmarked for senior
ranks – and it is these reports that Hazkani was able to locate.
How did he get to this archival collection in the first place? At the
beginning of the 2000s, Hazkani was the military correspondent for
Channel 10 News. One day, while preparing an item about Israel’s arms
deal with Germany in 1958, he came across an odd document. “It
summarized the views of ‘ordinary’ soldiers about the deal… Their views
were extracted from their personal letters, secretly copied by a massive
Big Brother apparatus,” Hazkani explains in his book.
Although the historian's current focus is on soldiers of Moroccan
origin, other archival documents show that they were not the only
foreign-born soldiers during the state's first decade who had scathing
criticism about the Israeli society in which they found themselves.
Soldiers from the United States, Great Britain and elsewhere who arrived
as part of the Mahal project – involving army volunteers from overseas
who were not immigrants – also weren’t wild about the so-called sabras.
A survey conducted among the volunteers in 1949 by the Israel Institute
of Applied Social Research (later renamed the Guttman Institute, and
today called the Viterbi Family Center for Public Opinion and Policy
Research) found that most of the newcomers expressed negative opinions
about the Jewish state and its inhabitants (55 percent), with the bulk
of the complaints referring to the phenomenon of proteksya (cronyism or
favoritism). “Other reasons for resentment,” Hazkani notes, “were
chutzpah, egoism, hypocrisy and lack of respect.”
In this country, “it’s not what you know but who you know” that’s
important, one of the volunteers noted in his answers to the
questionnaire. “Proteksya… proteksya… what chance does a guy like me
have without that vitamin?” added another. Some complained that the
locals made no effort to be friendly, and were impolite, impudent and
loud. A common theme was that Israelis think they’re always right and
can’t abide the idea that sometimes the other side is right. The
volunteers also felt that the locals attached too much importance to
their country of origin, which affected their attitude. And, of course,
that Israelis love aliyah but not olim.
The army’s postal censors diligently copied passages in which the
volunteers expressed highly negative views about their experience in
Israel. “It is enough if I say that when the Anglo-Saxons [first] came
here, 95 percent were interested in settling. Today, you can’t even find
5 percent,” a soldier wrote to his family in England. “In this country,
soldiers try not to die for their country, but try, and with success, to
have others (foreigners) die for their country,” another observed. A
volunteer soldier from the United States castigated the sabras’
“reprehensible behavior” and termed them “irresponsible” and “cheaters.”
“When I come back home,” he added, “I’ll tell you how the people here
falsify all the ideals that you work so hard for and that for the sake
of their realization I came here.”
A South African soldier expressed antiwar sentiments, writing to his
family that he didn’t want to fight for imperialism and the Zionists’
“territorial ambitions.”
Another maintained that “a golem is being created here, and no one knows
how it [will] turn out when it grows up.” The golem in question was the
State of Israel itself, which arose, he wrote, thanks to lofty ideals
but was losing control over its character and its future.
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