How Zionist nationalism erased Jewish dissent: A 7-year archival recovery of anti-colonial Jewish histories
Original framing: “She spent 7 years recovering the Jewish history Zionism tried to erase | Molly Crabapple” — Middle East Eye
Mizrahi Jews, who comprise over half of Israel’s Jewish population, are often reduced to 'backward' immigrants in Zionist narratives, their Arabic dialects and cultural practices stigmatized. Palestinian Jews who remained in Arab countries after 1948—like the *Mustarabim* of Syria—are doubly erased, first by Zionism and then by Arab nationalism. Anti-Zionist Jews, from Orthodox rabbis to socialist activists, are sidelined in both mainstream and Palestinian solidarity discourses.
The erasure of Jewish histories by Zionism is not an aberration but a structural feature of settler-colonial nation-building, one that mirrors the erasure of Palestinian histories in Israel’s archives.
Crabapple’s work, while valuable, risks reproducing the very binaries it seeks to dismantle by framing Jewish dissent as a heroic exception rather than a suppressed norm. The solution lies in confronting Zionism’s internal contradictions—its reliance on European Jewish victimhood to justify Palestinian dispossession—while recovering the pluralist, anti-colonial Jewish traditions that predate the state. This requires not just archival recovery but material reparations: land restitution for displaced Jews, co-governance of shared heritage sites, and a reckoning with the complicity of Arab states in Jewish displacement. The future of the Levant depends on whether these histories are weaponized for division or mobilized for reconciliation, with Mizrahi and Palestinian voices at the helm of reimagining shared futures.