Fighting Racist Ashkenazi HASBARAH (5): Sallah Shabbati and the Yemenite Babies Affair
David Shasha
Who is Sallah Shabbati?
By: Rabbi Haim Ovadia
Rage?
Laughter?
Frustration?
How should I respond to the ideas and images conveyed in the almost cult Israeli movie Sallh Shabati? I would like to believe that Ephraim Kishon uses his brilliant satirical talent to criticize the nascent of Israel for its mistreating of the new immigrants, corruption of public elect officials and the ossification of the Kibbutz ideology, but I cannot escape the thought that there was a better way to do it. Kishon criticizes the discrimination in Israeli society, but not because he believes that the Mizrahi immigrants are of equal talent and abilities but rather because Israel is supposed to be a state for all of its citizens and they should all have an equal opportunity. He is patronizing, like a father telling his son that he loves him despite of his shortcomings, just for being his son.
At certain points throughout the movie Sallah emerges as the Noble Savage who because of his simplicity and lack of acquaintance with democracy and modern society is able to point out the ailments of this society. In two cases the sharp, cynical voice of Kishon speaks through Sallah in his condemnation of the discrimination and European arrogance. The first is when he “finds” a lost dog but is rejected because the lost dog was a small white poodle while he brought in a gigantic black watchdog. When he realizes that he will not get the prize for the found dog, he tells the grieving owner: “It’s all because of the color, right? Black is not good but if it was white it would be OK.” The second comes when he is scolded by the Kibbutz secretary for selling his daughter. She urges him to “quickly forget your barbaric customs”. Sallah slowly turns to her and asks: why do you always want us to forget that which is not good for you, if it were the opposite, if my custom would be to give you money when my daughter gets married, what then? Would you ask me to forget my customs?”
But these two instances are outweighed by the overall negative picture of the Mizrahi immigrants, and that Kishon might have had a Eurocentric perspective is sustained by analyzing the gallery of characters in his numerous books. It is not surprising to see that the literary critics, lawyers, clerks and elected officials as well as the pioneers and wealthy tourists, are all Ashkenazi while the Mizrahi Jews are Janitors, maids, carpenters and drunkards. As a matter of fact the general character of the rude Israeli working class member is called Mr. Kadmon, wordplay on primitive and oriental. Not to mention that later in life he felt foreign in Israel and moved to Switzerland and that the greatest number of books he sold was in Germany.
The movie itself revolves around the difficulties Sallah and his family, as a typical immigrant family, are facing when they arrive to Israel. The plot is somewhat weak due to the fact that the material was first presented as short skits and later developed into a script and a musical. The main story line is that of Sallah trying to make ends meet in the new country without having to work. He does so by getting paid to vote for several different parties, by stealing, cheating and eventually by trying to sell his daughter to the neighboring Kibbutz. All of his attempts fail but he manages to get the long awaited for apartment by protesting that he doesn’t want it and that he’d rather stay at the Transition Camp. The side stories are of the Kibbutz members, Zigi and Bat Sheva falling in love, respectively, with the exotic daughter and son of Mr. Shabati, Habuba and Shimon. The message of the movie is that the government, kibbutz and Sochnut (Jewish Agency) are corrupt and that only a twisted logic can outwit the system.
With all the good intentions of Kishon, though, he caused an almost incorrigible damage to Mizrahi identity, and especially in America, where this movie was viewed almost as a documentary. For starters, Sallah’s body language is exaggerated and grotesque, he can barely walk, his legs are crooked, he lacks balance and grace, and you can always hear his shoes clicking as he drags his feet. When he talks his whole face contorts in strange expressions and he sometimes uses sign language, he raises his voice and screams with no reason and he will not miss an opportunity to curse in Arabic an unsuspecting Ashkenazi.
The Mizrahi Jew, through Sallah, is described as an irresponsible family man. He doesn’t know how many children he has, drags his youngest son dangling from his hands like a monkey, and has no idea why the old lady Jula is with them but finally concludes that she must be a relative. He yells at his pregnant wife that she must deliver a boy and his children tell the social worker that every time she is about to give birth they are all hiding for fear of his rage. The following dialog is typical:
Bat Sheva (Social worker): Did you have brothers and sisters?
Sallah Shabati: Yes, of course.
Bat Sheva: How many?
Sallah: It’s hard to tell, there were many and some died.
Bat Sheva: But any way, how many?
Sallah: Anyway, a lot.
Bat Sheva: When did you get married?
Sallah: A long time ago.
Bat Sheva: How old were you?
Sallah: Very Little.
Sallah: But any way, how old?
Sallah: Any way, little, that’s how we do it!
Sallah is not a great bread winner either, he is lazy, has no profession, and even when assigned to forestry, which was a way to keep the immigrants busy, he manages to do nothing and eventually get fired. Not only him, but other Mizrahi immigrants are not skilled or educated laborers either, the director assigns to a Moshe Haboosha (Iraqi) the profession of a shoemaker while Kalman Binstock is a high ranking official. As if not working was not enough, he takes his children’s salaries in order to get drunk at the Maabara coffee shop, the Café where the Maabara residents spend most of their time. When the politicians look for the Maabara’s strongman they ask someone in the street where is everybody? And he answers, where else, in the café. In one iof the scenes, upon entering the Café with the camera zooms on Sallah in his pajamas, another stereotype- Iraqi pajamas. As a matter of fact the Iraqis never wore pajamas outside but their striped clothes were mistaken for such.
Sallah is drinking and playing the game he loves - Backgammon or Shesh-Besh. This game has such a central place in his life that the first thing he does at the Maabara is play the game, and when his daughter tries to tell him that she wants to marry Ziggy he claims that one cannot stop the game in the middle, and he even takes the board with him to the synagogue. He plays for money and usually cheats his innocent Ashkenazi neighbor Goldstein. To sum it up, for Sallah Shesh-Besh is more important than family, work, religion and ethics.
Sallah, when it pleases Kishon is a total ignoramus. He can barely write and cannot read at all. He doesn’t know anything about cuckoo clocks, elections, faucets, machinery or modern furniture. His speech is primitive and slurred and most of his sentences follow the formula: This is… this is! For example: This is a big dog, this is; This is a good sausage, this is, etc. but his speech cannot be identified as is the case with his general character. Where is he from? Kishon created an amalgam of an all-mizrahi character, maybe to fend off critics. And indeed the Moroccans saw him as Iraqi and vice versa. Topol’s rendition of his accent, praised by the media, is distorted because he mixes the letters het and hei, ayin and aleph. The dress code of the family is a mixture of Iraqi Moroccan, Kurdish and Tunisian elements, topped off by a vest a-la Tuvie the milkman, making Sallah no more than a miserable caricature of a man.
The greatest distortion of the movie, though, is the idea of the main plot that Sallah’s daughter will be offered to whoever pays more. When Ziggy, the Kibbutz member she falls in love with, tries to protest, Sallah’s daughter Habuba answers: this is our custom. It is sad and ridiculous to hear that, especially since the one community among which girls are still sold to the highest bidder is the ultra orthodox Ashkenazi society. It is hard to believe that this is how the Mizrahi Jews were viewed by the Ashkenazi establishment, and for many years I thought it was the product of ignorance. Only lately, especially after teaching a course on Jews of the Mediterranean at the American Jewish University did I realize that it was part of a PR campaign meant to keep the Mizrahi Jews at bay and raise sympathy and funds abroad for the brave young state that has to absorb that lower quality human material.
I would love to have your comments and thought as well to see you at our next film event: My Fantasia, by Duki Dror, a movie that examines questions of identity in face of the enforced melting pot policy and alienation of Jews from Arab countries from their legacy.
A Few Excerpts from Anti-Sephardi Articles
What follows are excerpts from articles that I showed the audience at our screening of the film at critical moments of the movie. It helped convinced those skeptical of the scope of the discrimination.
I believe that we need to create an on-line Sephardic reader, containing original texts that highlight our unique legacy. They should be divided into thematic and chronological categories and remain as faithful as possible to the original texts.
Prof. Yohanan Peres, Sociologist, Tel Aviv University, 1994
Today Mizrahi music is played on the radio because of a vocal group that this is what they want to hear, it is only because of political pressure. But if you listen to “by request” shows, you will find out that there are no mizrahi songs there, and these are the most popular shows. In the future, when the radio will be fully commercial (and not government sponsored) the mizrahi music will disappear form the radio, because the audience’s taste will determine what we will hear…
Can you imagine where we would have been today had we allowed the existence of a wholesome, proud Mizrahi culture? I am not talking about folklore… but rather of culture as a way of life. If, God forbid, we would have encouraged a mizrahi lifestyle alongside an Ashkenazi lifestyle, where would we be today?
Regarding the Aliyah from North Africa, Zalman Shazar, President of Israel (1951)
We are going to pay dearly, this is inconceivable… we are facing an immigration who never knew what is education…. They are not used to so much education so much learning… even if we assume that they will be able to graduate elementary schools, but what will be our level then, how will Israel look, will we still be a light to the nations? How can the State of Israel survive without an European and Anglo-Saxon reinforcement, our Jews! … the actual role of Zionism is to bring the Jewry and not necessarily Mizrahi Jews into the cycle of Aliyah
Aryeh Gelblum, Haaretz, 1949
This is an immigration of a race until now unknown in Israel… we face people whose primitivism is at a record, their level of knowledge borders with absolute ignorance, and more alarming is their incapability of absorbing any spiritual idea, generally they are only a little better than the level of the Arab, black and Berber natives of their countries of origin and definitely at a lower level than Palestinian Arabs, unlike the Yemenites they lack Jewish background, and they are totally controlled by the wild game of primitive instincts….
In the living quarters of the Africans you will find filth, gambling, drinking and prostitution, many of them are plagued with severe eye, skin and sexual diseases, without even mentioning stealing and mugging. There is nothing secure against this a-social element…
Above all these, there is another basic fact no less alarming and that is the lack of ability to adapt to life in Israel and primarily chronic laziness and rejection of work…
The particular tragedy of this immigration is that unlike lower human material from Europe, their children have no hope either to raise their cultural level in the depth of their ethnic identity will take forever…
Did we consider how our state is going to look if this will be its population?
Giora Yoseftal, Minister of Immigration and Absorption (the man in charge of absorbing the Jews from Arab lands, after whom there is a street or a neighborhood named in every developing city):
This is an immigration wave with deteriorated moral values, with lower cultural level and poor ideological baggage that might degrade our young country into the abyss of a Levantine culture at the same low level of the neighboring nation”.
Abba Eban
One of our greatest fears is that the increase in immigration will force Israel to compare its cultural level to that of the neighboring world.
(This is in the same spirit of Hertzl’s vision: “To build in the Middle east a European defense wall against Asia”.)
In 1964, the Ministry of Education distributed the following pamphlet to teachers in rural areas (i.e. development towns:
To the first grade teacher,
Some of the first graders you have just welcomed attended kindergarten and some arrived directly from their parents’ house without any preparation. You know that the majority of these kids are immigrants who come from a primitive cultural environment…
Let us consider the obstacles:
Learning difficulties:
- Immaturity for reading.
- Lack of sufficient motivation towards reading.
- Lack of ability to face failures.
- Lack of basic education habits.
- Lack of basic language terms, which serve as a foundation to acquire and expand knowledge and which are found in our text books.
Immaturity:
- Incomplete physiological development in the areas of movement control, sight and hearing.
- Inability to perceive a vertical image and transfer it to horizontal (copying from the board to the notebook).
- Lack of coordination between eye and page…
- Inability to visually distinguish between different shapes and sizes.
- Inability to move from 3-D conception (a whole object) to 2-D.
- Inability to acoustically distinguish between different or similar words.
- Mental age lower than biological age.
- Inability to understand or follow simple orders.
- Inability to express thoughts in a clear, simple way.
- Lack of experience with objects (pets, toys, utensils) that he will learn about, hear and read in school…
From Dr. Shlomo Horowitz History of the Jewish People (out of 638 pages, only 6 deal with Sepharadim and here is an excerpt):
While European Jewry underwent a process of raging revolutions and a new center began forming across the ocean, in the decaying Islamic countries of Asia and Africa – previously fortresses of Jewish culture – there lived Jewish congregations of approximately 800,000 people under the double yoke of Oriental tyranny and Islamic fanaticism, enclosed in their special ghettos and limited to few professions (usually vendors), frozen in their lifestyle and their spiritual slumber”
…The multitudes lived in degenerate poverty and ignorance, and those who lived far from the thoroughfare of modern history were at an even lower level and resembled their semi-barbaric Muslim neighbors in their lifestyles and cultural level…
…the overwhelming majority of the Jews was ignorant and swept – like its neighbors - by superstitions. The public life was totally frozen and there was no spark of any social movement.
From SHU 299, February 6, 2007
Whitewashing History: Israeli Media and the Yemenite Babies Affair
By: Shoshana Madmoni-Gerber
“We used to leave in the hospital healthy babies; the next day I would ask them ‘where
are the babies?’ and they said they are gone. They died. What do you mean died? They
were healthy. Nothing was wrong with them. Today when they say that they died, it’s not
true. They were sent for adoption, mostly to the U.S.”1 (Nurse Ruja Kuchinski, 1996)
The day my aunt Hammama emigrated fromYemen to Israel in 1949, she gave birth to a healthy baby boy. When she returned from the hospital to the immigrant camp in Rosh Ha’ayin, the nurse who accompanied her in the ambulance held the baby in her arms and told my aunt to step down. When my aunt turned her back, the ambulance and drove off. She never saw her baby again.
My father, himself a Jewish immigrant from Yemen, said he and the rest of the family rushed to the scene minutes after they heard my aunt’s cry. He told me the story when I was a little girl, but only years later did I understand the magnitude and ramifications of this traumatic event. When I became a reporter, I heard similar stories from many families of Yemenite and other non-European ethnic groups. I learned that hundreds of Jewish families in the state of Israel were carrying this tragic narrative in their memory.
Through extensive research, and interviews with dozens of families, activists and journalists, I discovered that while the Israeli government and the public have tried to forget and silence this Affair, Yemenite families continue to suffer from their terrible loss. In this essay, I argue that public efforts to silence and deny this affair contribute to the ongoing intra-Jewish rift and racism in Israeli society today. Moreover, the question of if and how this story will be remembered in the public sphere will strongly influence the identity formation of Yemenite and Mizrahi children of future generations.
What is the Yemenite Babies Affair?
During the mass immigration to Israel from 1948 to the early 1950s, hundreds if not thousands2 of babies disappeared from immigrant absorption and transit camps throughout Israel and from the transit camp Hashed in Yemen. According to testimonies given to the Kedmi Commission (1995–2001), the absorption policy governing Yemenite Jews required separating children from their parents because the stone structures housing the babies, called baby houses,4 were in better condition than the tents and tin structures that sheltered the parents.
Babies were usually taken from the baby houses without parental knowledge or consent. Parents who were present and refused consent reported that camp authorities forcefully took their children from them, even acting violently.4
Later testimonies revealed that a typical scenario was as follows: a baby was declared ill and taken to the hospital despite parental assertion that the child was healthy. The ostensibly ill baby was then taken to one of several institutions around the country, such as Wizo, an international women’s organization with recovery centers in Safad, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. The parents were then told their babies had died, even as state institutional workers later testified that these “parents were not interested in their children.”
As more complaints were filed during the mid-1960s, the Affair gained more momentum each time, causing a public outcry that was quickly suppressed and forgotten. Despite numerous, suspiciously consistent allegations that babies were kidnapped and adopted by European Jews, or sold to Jewish families abroad, the state of Israel has refused to properly investigate the matter. The establishment’s efforts to silence the story was unwavering—an effort that would not have been possible without the media’s active cooperation.
The government appointed two inquiry commissions, in 1967 and 1988. Both operated behind closed doors, had limited authority and budget, no power of subpoena, and were not challenged by the press. In 1995, a public investigative commission, called in Hebrew Va’adat Hakira Mamlachtit, was finally appointed after a public protest turned violent, by Rabbi Meshulam and his organization.
This commission, however, was not what the Yemenite community had hoped for. In his legal analysis of the Kedmi Commission’s conclusion (2002, 48), Law Professor Boaz Sanjero wrote: “My main conclusion, based on acceptable legal text analysis, is that the Commission’s work is lacking the most fundamental basis for investigative work: epistemology of suspicion.”
According to Sanjero, suspicion of criminal acts was not considered at any stage of the Commission’s work. Rather, he said, the Commission was engaged in “a discussion” about this Affair, which can be read as a verification of the establishment’s discourse.
Zionist Narrative and Media Discourse
The historical review of the Babies Affair raises questions about Western domination, national identity, “otherness,” memory, and how dissenting voices were silenced. With the exception of a few critical narratives in Haolam Haze in 1967 and Ha’ir, Haaretz and Channel Two in the mid-1990s, denial ruled the media coverage.
Articles were mostly aligned with the government’s versions of events instead of challenging it. As a result, the media produced a narrative that obfuscate, rather than investigated the Affair. Haolam Haze was not only the first media outlet to bring the story to the attention of the public as a phenomenon, but also the only one to frame the story as a narrative of kidnapping. The magazine reported that the kidnapped babies were sent abroad for adoption at a cost of $5,000 US per child.
This alternative coverage, however, paled in relation to the overwhelming narrative that supported the government’s denial.
The media was also instrumental in framing the Affair as a “Yemenite problem.” The title: “The Yemenite Babies Affair” ultimately turned this affair into a Yemenite problem, thus never transforming the discourse to questions of State and society’s responsibility.
As Cornel West argued in Race Matters (1993), part of the barrier in the public discourse about race is the view of black people as “problem people.” This framework, West says, is paralyzing. It prevents society from dealing will the more crucial question of “what this way of viewing black people reveals about us as a nation.”
The media discourse about this Affair demonstrates the power of Zionist meta- narrative (Shohat 1988) to drive what Stuart Hall terms “strategies of representation.”
The narrative of the Babies Affair is rejected because it contradicts the notion of Jews as victims.
It forces us to acknowledge that Jews have victimized other Jews, on a racial basis and within a decade of the Holocaust. The mostly Ashkenazi controlled media was not going to allow this voice to be heard. As activist Rafi Shubeli explains, some vital questions were absent from the media discourse:
How is it possible that in a democratic state, so many people are living with an unresolved pain for so long? Why is Yemenite pain not legitimate?
One of the main strategies used by media organizations was denying access to Yemenites families and activists seeking further investigation and demanding answers from authorities all the while magnifying testimonies of state representatives, thus weakening the Yemenite community.
Ilana Dayan, prominent journalist and host of the show Uvda on Channel Two, was one of few journalists to break this silence. She said:
There is a gap between the depth of the pain, the magnitude of the Affair, and the media treatment…The ability to prevent the Yemenites from effective form of expression for so long is unbelievable. Especially because we think of ourselves as an open society, but the truth is that different groups in society have no access to power focal points and effective forms of expression.
Yemenites as “Others”
To uncover the powerful ideology behind the narrative of this Affair, one must examine the Orientalist assumptions that marked Yemenites as “Others” and served as the basis for constructing this discourse. Some media narratives even blamed parents for not wanting their children, or worse, justified the kidnapping as an act of charity, to better the future of theses babies.
In the 1960’s, articles on the Affair portrayed Yemenite Jews as at once exotic and inferior; primitive people in need of rescue and enlightenment. In a Davar article in 1966, for instance, Yemenite parents were described as seeing “for the first time in their lives how to bathe a baby and how to change a baby’s diaper.” (Davar, February 24, 1966)
Absorption camp staff told the press and the Kedmi Commission that Yemenite Jews were not terribly upset when told their children died, interpreting the Yemenites’ religious belief and their tendency to internalize pain as a lack of care. “If a child died in the tent, they would say, ‘God gives and God takes’” (Davar, February 26, 1966).
Moreover, the ideological assumption that Zionism “rescued” Mizrahim, justified abduction and adoption.
Ahuva Goldfarb, head nurse of the Absorption Camp Baby Houses, went so far as to say, “Maybe we did them a favor” (Madmoni, 1996). The Yemenites were dehumanized beyond the categories of us/them, and became inhuman “things”. Head nurse Sonia Milshtein shocked the Commission when she referred to Yemenite babies as “packages” and “carcasses.” (Ha’ir, October 27, 1995).
When asked if, as a mother, she could understand the families’ pain, she replied: “Oh, I’ve heard this too much lately. After forty years I would have been happy that my child got a good education and a good family. Yes, that is how I would feel” (Yoman, July 21, 1995).
When Sara Perl, chair of Wizo-Israel, testified to the Kedmi commission, she also claimed her supervisor said parent didn’t claim their children because “they just don’t want their children, they have too much going on” (Ha’ir, November 3, 1995).
In its final report, the investigative commission concluded that thousands of Yemenite parents deserted their own children. Sanjero’s criticism of the commission’s report notes that only Yemenite parents were blamed.
No other parties were held accountable for separating thousands of babies from their families, or the burial of babies without the knowledge or presence of their parents (if they had indeed died).
The blame for not searching hard enough or neglecting their children forced parents to defend themselves from false accusations as they relived their tragic losses. In Tzipi Talmor’s documentary Down—A One Way Road (1997), the following heartbreaking testimony was given by Shlomo Bahagali, a Yemenite parent who searched for his son Hayim for 50 years:
I am talking to you, Hayim; this was not my fault. This is the fault of the people in charge. It isn’t at all like they said that we were not interested in the babies. It is a cruel lie. That is why I am talking to you, Hayim; please in God’s name, if you hear me, your ID number is 64703, please come back to me, let me rest in peace. I need to know that you are alive wherever you are.
Lack of Closure Future Cost
The unresolved tragedy of the Yemenite Babies Affair will not fade with time, as some state leaders hope.
The wounds of long-suffering mothers and fathers only deepen as the younger generations see the injustice wrought upon their families and community. The kidnapping of my aunt’s baby remains a vivid memory.
Many people of my generation have made an unbreakable connection with the past and vowed to fight for the recognition of their parents’ narratives.
To avoid consequences stemming from civil discontent, more dialogue is needed. The state and the public must fully listen and truly regard parents’ narratives; they have a right to be heard. As noted historian Howard Zinn wrote in A Power Governments Cannot Suppress: “If history is to be creative, to anticipate a possible future without denying the past, it should, I believe, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past…”
Moreover, in the absence of dialogue about the transgressions of the past, acts of oppression reoccur. As Esther Hertzog (2005) noted, there is a direct connection between the kidnapping of Yemenite babies in the 1950s and what she calls the systematic removal of children from their families in Israel today. “…Children are still a resource for the government to maintain its power... all the while using rhetoric and ideology that justifies any means including violence by the controlling institutions, all the while denying any responsibility for these actions” (12).
Hertzog’s analysis demonstrated how state welfare and absorption organizations infantilized Ethiopian immigrants for their own benefit, for instance, despite good intentions. Major decisions, such as the children’s education, were once again made without consulting parents. Hertzog claimed the integration of Ethiopian families into Israeli society was influenced by the same Eurocentric biases that dominated the absorption of Mizrahi and Yemenite Jews in the 1950s. Both were seen as “traditional” societies in need of rescue and enlightenment.5 Hertzog noted that “behind this image of patronage and responsibility lies also the suspicion and anxiety about criticism” (38).
To date, more than 1,000 complaints have been filed with one or more of the three commissions investigating the Yemenite Babies Affair. Despite the many legal problems with the final commission’s report, the numbers are still horrifying, making the often-cavalier attitude of decision makers and the media even more shocking.6
The state and the media have told Yemenite parents and other Mizrahim that their experiences, memories and pain are not relevant. No society can build a healthy future with such a stained past. Yael Tzadok, a journalist who investigated the affair for the Voice of Israel explained:
Organized crimes performed by people against other people of their own nation have occurred all over the world, including similar affairs where babies were used as an “asset” that is negated from “unworthy” families and granted to “more worthy” ones (in Canada, Argentina, Australia). We didn’t invent it. Yet, while other countries have started a process of revealing the truth, listening to the victims, healing the wounds and heading towards forgiveness and reconciliation, here in Israel we won’t even admit that it happened. We believe that we, Jews, are more moral than other nations… And yet here we are, with our own homemade racism… What does it say about the Jewish state? This is why you find massive silencing from the government and the press. We are a society that lives with a very big gap between what we pretend to be and what we really are.
Notes
1. The nurse was audio taped by Avner Farhi, whose sister was kidnapped from Ein-Shemer Camp in 1950.
2. Over 1,000 complaints were submitted to all three commissions combined. Rabbi Meshulam’s organization claimed to have information about 1,700 babies kidnapped prior to 1952 (450 of them from other Mizrahi ethnic groups) and about 4,500 babies kidnapped prior to 1956. These figures were neither discredited nor validated by the last commission. Shoshi Zaid, The Child is Gone [Jerusalem: Geffen Books, 2001, 19–22).
3. During the immigrants’ stay in transit and absorption camps, the babies were taken to stone structures called baby houses. Mothers were allowed entry only a few times each day to nurse their babies.
4. See, for instance, the testimony of Naomi Gavra in Tzipi Talmor’s film One Way Road (1993) and the testimony of Shoshana Farhi on the show Uvda (1996).
5. For Shohat, the kidnapping formed part of the broader Eurocentrism of the Zionist Enlightenment discourse of progress and modernization, viewing itself as rescuing Middle Eastern Jews (Shohat 1988). See also her analysis in “The Narrative of the Nation and the Discourse of Modernization: the Case of the Mizrahim” Critique 10 (Spring 1997).
6. These findings were often presented to the public as low numbers, as if “only 69” missing babies could be accepted and forgotten
From Left Curve, Number 35, 2011, re-posted to SHU 525, April 18, 2012