The author became famous on social media as a sharpened right-wing man, cut to the left when he asked questions about distributive justice and received no answers, and today defines himself as a-Zionist.
"In my utopian world people understand that reality is concrete and not symbolic."
Mizrahi Oak
Photography:
Yossi Zeliger
We became friends when he was a right-wing man who publishes difficult texts.
Not as hard as ice, like hot basalt rock.
We went a long way together, as colleagues, as neighbors to the opinion pages, to the same residential building on Facebook.
When he turned left strongly, I was personally disappointed: we lost to the left one of the creative, persuasive and uninhibited writers.
But Alon Mizrahi, 47, a content writer from Tel Aviv, did not stop after the U-turn from the ideological right to the ideological left;
He continued to travel, leaving behind the Zionist left, and becoming a "Zionist."
His new book "Freedom. Manifesto" (published by Locus) is a personal, very deep speech, which unfolds a worldview that spreads some affiliation, on the verge of anarchism.
You often refer to your ethnic affiliation, as the son of a Moroccan mother and a father who is half Iraqi and half Sgt. I dare say to you, politically incorrectly, that perhaps your walk to the left is part of a desire to be accepted by an imaginary elite.
"It is not urgent for me to belong to the left. I could stay right until today. Socially I do not find myself on the left. If I wanted to be accepted I would go to the Zionist left. In March I would be happily hugged. But I am too radical for Meretz. What could not stay on the right is "The fact that the right denies that the occupation is problematic. There is a problem. We have done injustice. I do not see a line on the right that seeks to engage in this."
The injustice begins in the War of Independence, not in the Six Days. If Hebron and Sheila are a problem, Zionism is a problem. In the end you will have to admit that '48 is an occupation.
"This is true".
So you have a problem not with the right but with the Israelis.
"A debate about our conduct in history is one thing, and actions we do today are something else. 48 'It is not at the same level of urgency, not at the same level of denial as what is happening in the territories right now. You can move the border and stop oppressing the people sitting there, "Or grant them full citizenship and full rights. People live there, under the same rule, in a different status."
Even if you only sit in Tel Aviv, it will still hurt those who say "this is my land". Maybe your magic button should cancel the State of Israel.
"I'm not a utopian. I just can not accept a reality where someone travels with his children and soldiers shoot at him or someone at his grandson's age tells him at the checkpoint 'shut up', and tells me 'it's not terrible'. It's horrible, poisons us. I would like us to be educated not to be indifferent to this. "
But you are not told that it is not terrible. You are told that when the Arab lays down his weapon there will be peace. That the checkpoint is because of them. That once they stop producing terrorism there will be no barrier.
"You settlers are in love with this land as a historical order? Sabba. Want to live here more than anywhere in the world? Sabba. You are crazy and it does not bother me. But if you live in a settlement and a hundred meters away you have a person with slave rights, why would you agree? "A person who is willing to pay the personal price and live in Psagot or Talmon and at the same time demands equal rights for his neighbor, I kiss his hand."
Wait, differentiate. It is not that the right to education, health, food, water, not even self-government has been taken away from him. Oslo gave the Palestinians the opportunity to lead their lives. The only thing they are denied is the right to national definition, the establishment of a pentagonal state.
"Oslo was signed in 1995. The settlements started half a century earlier. The settlement mechanism left the other as a citizen. It is a huge human failure. Many things can be said about Mapai, but even when they fought the Arabs and deported them, they gave citizenship to those who stayed here. .
In 1950 Arabs went to the polls with identity cards.
I want to ask the settler, how do you preserve such a discriminatory mechanism when you see it in front of your eyes on the way to work?
Enough with the story of the flowering of the wilderness on a bald rocky mountain.
It would not have been a wasteland if there were others there. "
"Out of the settlements will come an account with the leaders of their movement." Right-wing demonstration // Photo: Oren Ben Hakon
The State of Israel was built on the ruins of quite a few Arab localities. The settlements do not.
"I will not enter a mall that is beaten every day, even if they tell me that this mall was given to me by God. I know many of the settlers identify with the truth of what I am saying now. There will come a day when people from the settlements and religious Zionism will come to terms with this movement. You brought us, what you did to us. "
I think it's happening. There is such an internal conversation, you may not be aware of it. In the end people are intelligent and decide for themselves about their lives. They are not pawns on a chessboard that a zombie moves. A resident of Elon Moreh feels in his daily life that he is doing something for an ideal that is greater than him. That even if he sits at home and watches a movie on Netflix, he is active in the Zionist vision that he is sitting on a mountain above Nablus.
"The questions will also come from a social background, of living in isolated localities, in suffocating communities. The 33-year-old single woman from the settlement. The gay. The educated who wants to read Kafka and Spinoza in the interest of the government that everyone should be an association and not be able to read."
so what are you? Where do you belong?
"At this stage of our lives on this planet, a collective tribal identity requires study. Where does this lead us?"
Tribal identity is very necessary for our psyche. A person needs to know what family he is from and what community that these circles feed the human need for belonging. You say - I do not belong to anyone, I am a kite.
"I belong to myself."
I have a list of identities that says where I belong. I know where I can undress from the costumes. If you tell your daughter 'you do not belong anywhere', then she does not belong to her father and mother either. it's cruel.
"I will tell my girl do not listen to anyone, I will teach her that there is no such thing as society telling her what is right and what is wrong."
"I understand they see me inferior"
His daughter is Michaela, a six-month-old from his heart, whom he brought with his partner Shulamit Avitsur, the mother of a 10-year-old girl from a previous relationship.
They live in central Tel Aviv, with regular weekly outings to a demonstration in Balfour.
Mizrahi makes a living from writing content and writing articles in the press (he previously wrote for "Mida", "The Hottest Place in Hell", "Haaretz") and has thousands of followers on his Facebook account.
Growing up in Yokneam in a right-wing home, "against the background of a political reality that destined me to be a violent right-wing bully."
He was educated in the institutions of religious Zionism, which prepares in Givat Shmuel and Yavneh High School in Haifa, institutions that he calls a "racist environment."
His political upheaval took place in 2014, when he entered the annual event of the "Mida" website, a conservative-liberal magazine founded by Ran Baretz, in which Mizrahi published regular articles.
"I grew up in a house that spoke Israeli. I did not know that something had to be hidden." Mizrahi // Photo: Yossi Zeliger
"I was invited to their offices. I entered the room and everyone around me was Ashkenazi settlers in ironed white shirts and beards, from the mountains and hills around Jerusalem, and I was almost the only Mizrahi. I looked around and realized I did not feel at home as I was supposed to feel. I must note I was a star there. "My editors were fairer and cuter than other news sites I wrote about later. But yes, Orientalism was the key to change."
A fabricated history
Mizrahi describes the house where he grew up as "a house that spoke Israeli, I did not know that something had to be hidden."
According to him, at a young age he did not understand that the Israeli story being told was a lie.
"As I grew older, I realized that I was being seen as inferior. My grandparents were raised from Morocco like goats. My mother was born in Casablanca, grew up in Wadi Salib. My father has been in Palestine for many generations, you could say that on my father's side I am Palestinian. If my grandmother was born in Marrakech then I should admire Bibi? Is it a cause and effect relationship?
"When I grew up in Yokneam, in the Hadassim school with principal Meir Lalom, and when I went to the synagogue of Rabbi Meir Baal Hanes in Yokneam, I saw no contempt for leftists, this language did not exist. Local Labor functionaries prayed with us and had a place of honor in the synagogue.
"Not really ready to go all the way." Left-wing demonstration
"My father worked for 35 years as an aluminum worker and received no property. The kibbutzniks received land. I wrote a column whose title was 'In the Name of Victor'; Victor is someone who worked with me in trucking. And I discovered that Oriental speech has a very strong opposition within the intellectual right. "That should be groundbreaking in thought, avant-garde, unwilling to speak in terms of distributive justice. From there I felt I was disconnecting from the right. I felt I could not develop a conversation that had doubt."
And one day you say 'freedom. I want freedom! ' I am neither left nor right. I'm a balloon floating in the air, a balloon named Alon.
"I am in favor of more bridges, emphasizing the common ground between people. Me and you, who sit here in Dizengoff Center in Tel Aviv, and a person who lives in Cairo, or Pakistan, or Helsinki - our struggles are similar. We want our children to have a normal education, to have clean drinking water. Do I have to look for identities to organize a quarrel for myself? "
You deny that there is an element in the person's personality that is a particular identity. To me, if everything is universal, then everything is flat.
"We speak Hebrew, it's our language. We have memory. And we are our parents' children. I do not deny it. I ask where it leads, to a world of constant war and constant conflict? I can be part of a collective charge but be free and cast doubt." .
Miscellaneous does not necessarily mean hierarchy. There is a different and equal. Different people have different languages and different beliefs, they belong to a certain people and a certain country. I give my children a path to follow. You tell your daughter - there are no trails. Do you know what fear it is? It's like standing on a roof that has no fence.
"But it's the truth. It's all imagination. The stories of heaven, the fathers, the mothers - are the disconnection. It's a fabricated history. The truth is me and you. Everything that is supposed to force me to think is wrong. Babylon and a town in Germany - should I hate Arabs? "
You were not on the right if you think the right is equal to hating Arabs.
"Israeliness says to hate Arabs. I do not blame the right for this. In our education system there is no chapter in which a Jewish child learns about his Arab neighbors as legitimate human beings. I am a radical but my questions are very simple."
What does the end of your Torah say? Will there be anarchy here, and there will be no traffic lights, and no cash register, and no law, or framework? Take your ideas to the end, how does the world exist? The world stands on its own from having a place you were born to, a language you speak, a border between countries, property that belongs to you and is not someone else's.
"In my utopian world people understand that reality is concrete, not symbolic. An example of concrete challenges? Environment, education, medicine. An education that includes plays, literature, philosophical and humanistic thinking."
And culture of your people? Ethos like the story of the flood and the parting of the Red Sea?
"I see no obligation to believe it. I was born into this world and I will go from it, and there was only one Mizrahi oak. There are no duplicate versions of me. Why do I have to live someone else's fantasies and hallucinations, even if he lived a thousand and two thousand years ago? How does that affect me? What about me and Maimonides or King David?
They did not meet me and I did not meet them.
I do not say this defiantly, but to provoke thought.
If you go through the doubt and decide to go back to your faith, your faith will be more sophisticated. "
Okay, so questioning is something that's missing on the right. What are you missing? What needs to change in the community you hang out in today? Points for improvement.
"All the things the left blames the right are its own blind spots. One by one. The right is racist? The left is no less racist. The right has oligarchs? The leftists are the most privileged, rich, heirs of apartments in Tel Aviv. The right has no doubt and the left no sincerity. The left casts "Like a doubt, but just for fun. They don't really go all the way with it and come back with brave conclusions."
And the room you enter in a "measure" meeting is the same room you will enter in the equivalent on the left. The same shades.
"Obviously. Take the left-wing associations in Israel - 99 percent Ashkenazi. There are no Mizrahis. Sometimes Arabs are brought to the shop window. There is no substantial internalization of openness. In this matter, the right recognizes correctly. Joined the Compass gang because of their treatment of women.They had the most correct opinions in the world and they exploited women who passed right by like property.
"The business of the peace and leftist industry is a privilege preservation mechanism, which is nothing more than a brochure. Look how beautiful we are, traveling to this and that village, writing an academic paper, but it's modeling values. It's not really a commitment to values. Some hired leftists were arrested in an anti-occupation demonstration "Even the right would appreciate them more if they were willing to pay prices. Are you so against the occupation? You will demonstrate with Palestinians and be arrested. You will do something real."
Rebellion on the way to sobriety
At the end of your story it is more an oriental consciousness than a question of voting for a party at the ballot box.
"It's not that I define myself as positive as such. The next step after understanding my place as an Mizrahi is to ask who else is doing it. If I am pushed against the wall as an Mizrahi, how does the Arab feel? Feminism is also a key to change, when a woman is pushed into a box and told. “Be excited, not analytical.” I see the Assyrian struggle and understand that kibbutzim and settlements are brotherly currents to everything.
"The religious political currents in Israel - how can it be that they were all created by Ashkenazi men, from end to end? Shas' religious Mizrahis are dressed in Ashkenazi clothes, in parties sewn for them by Ashkenazis.
The Likud, Labor, Meretz and Religious Zionism are led by Ashkenazis.
What do you have left, to take off the shelf which Ashkenazi are you willing to treat as your boss and that he will tell you what to think?
There is a point where you realize that when we were told 'Jewish state' it was with a wink.
'A Jewish state'?
Who are you talking about when you say Jews?
When you ask if I'm trying to 'be accepted', it's clear to you that I'm not a partner. "
You are willing to acknowledge commitment: You have a commitment to your partner's payer. Do you have a commitment to anything else?
"Commitment to my moral perception and outlook, to who I want to be. It's before everything. Before the state, my father, my mother, Shulamit, before my child. Maybe life will put me to the test that I will have to change it.
"In India and Pakistan they speak the same language in close dialects, Indian and Urdu, but kill each other because one converted to Islam in the seventh century and the other did not. Take a point point in the world. His grandfather fought and died, his father fought and died, how long will it continue? There are tribes in the Pacific with The mythological angles. Maybe our mythologies are not such a hit either? For the sake of being able to live calmly with others, with all the sorrow, I will give up the story of my tribe. If the Pakistani and Maori and whites in America give up some of their belonging, you sanctify so much, less blood will be shed And there will be less hatred in the world. "
Is there something worth dying for that is bigger than you?
"How will he be killed and not pass in the Torah? Yes. If you are told to harm an innocent person or die, then yes, to die. And if you have to deny yourself deeply, it is better to die, like the Jewish directive that it is better to be killed and not work foreign work. I studied in yeshivot. I die. On the dialectic of the Gemara, on the preaching of every comma and tag.Sometimes the answer is dismissed in mysticism or arbitrary explanations, but the attention to why there is a certain letter here and not another letter, gave me a lot.Everyone who grew up in religious education has the ability to critique texts from home. I received my critical reading in Gemara lessons. "
What do you leave with you from the religious home where you grew up?
"The Ten Commandments, and especially the second commandment, 'You shall not make for yourself a statue and any image.' I have a hatred for a statue and a mask. I remained a fundamentalist in this. A statue and a mask is a symbol. Look at that, it is now your God. The state, the flag. This will get you to do terrible things, and I accept this commandment wholeheartedly, more than many religious people.
"Also the concept of the Hebrew Abraham, so named because he was on one side of the river, and the world from the other side. Rebellion is the way to awaken. A thinking person must be a rebellious person. With generations Judaism becomes institutionalized but Abraham shattered the whole familiar world, the world "The only idol he knew, and said - there is no such thing as a representation of God, everything is abstract. There is no place where God is more than any other place."
