Zionist ideology simultaneously idealized and subordinated Yemenite Jews as authentic yet primitive.

Evidence

The orientalist-Hebraist disposition of Zionist discourse was manifest in the attitude toward Yemenite Jews who were described as the “authentic Jews”—the successors of the ancient Hebrews—but also as uncivilized primitives. Yemenite Jews were brought to Palestine by the Zionist movement in the first decade of the twentieth century. While their own motivation for migrating was evidently religious, they were recruited not as partners in the colonization project, but as “Hebrew labor,” to supplant Arab workers, placing them on the front lines of the conflict between Jews and Arabs. Yemenites seemed to be a solution to the “problem,” as they could “work like Arabs.” Nevertheless, they were considered to be “outside of history.” A case in point is the Kinneret incident wherein Yemenite settlers were violently expelled to make room for Zionist “pioneers” who wanted to expand their land holdings. The Yemenites, who lived and died on that piece of land over the course of twenty critical years, were not even allocated a place in the narrative of Kinneret, one of the founding myths of the Zionist endeavor. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 652

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the orientalist/Hebraist framing themes from the book’s earlier chapters on the double ambivalence of Orientalism toward the Jews; also chimes with the reader’s interest in how ideological narratives erase inconvenient populations from founding myths.
• SEED: An essay on how settler-colonial movements everywhere recruit ‘authentic natives’ as labor on the frontier while denying them narrative inclusion in the founding myth.