Israeli state policy situated Mizrahi Jews physically and ideologically between Jew and Arab.

Evidence

On these grounds, one could claim that in Israel the Mizrahim found themselves caught in the traditional position of the Jews in modern European discourse: between West and East, between the European and the Arab. They were pushed to the margins, and subjected to blatant colonial attitudes and practices. Nor did they fit the secular-religious dichotomy, also orientalist by in nature. Particularly marginalized were North African Jews, already residents of the Middle East, who thus came to the same location from which they had emigrated, while all aspects of their culture were denied in the name of the new cultural ideal. The physical location of the Mizrahim was determined through governmental practices of settlement in so-called development towns and agricultural cooperatives along the borders, between the Jews and the Arabs, and often in Arab homes that were confiscated following the expulsion of 1948. They were placed on the front line, the boundary between Israel and its refugees, and required to develop an anti-Arab attitude in order to become “real” Jews—in other words: Israelis. Unlike in their Diaspora, they had no autonomous space to practice a Jewish culture separate from the state. As already mentioned, even their “Judaism” was rejected as “oriental” and thus alien to the authentic Jewish spirit. Instead, they were obliged to identify with the national ideology and its cultural symbols. The dichotomy of Jew and Arab was the essence of the definition of the state as well as of citizenship. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 664

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the standing claim ‘the veil shifted from passive tradition into an active revolutionary instrument’ and the general pattern of colonized populations absorbing the colonizer’s self-image; also connects to the reader’s interest in how states position marginal groups between binaries.
• SEED: Angle: how a settler-state reproduces the colonizer’s East/West dichotomy on its own non-European immigrants — the diaspora-inside-the-state. The detail about settling Mizrahim in confiscated Arab homes as a boundary practice is a vivid, article-ready configuration.