Haim Yacobi, Israel and Africa: A Genealogy of Moral Geography, Routledge, Abingdon and New York, 2015, 146 pages, $145 hardback 978-1-13-890237-4 (http://www.tandf.net/books/details/9781138902374/)
In January, 2014, tens of thousands of Eritrean and Sudanese asylum seekers marched through central Tel Aviv, blocking traffic and orchestrating a full-day sit-in at Rabin Square.[1] These public demonstrations were organised to spotlight both the increasingly inhumane conditions of African refugees and a new law that would criminalise the act of seeking asylum in Israel.[2] Just over a year later, in May 2015, a series of protests was organised by Jewish citizens of Ethiopian descent. These protests (which began in Jerusalem, but then exploded on the streets of Tel Aviv) were orchestrated to unveil the depth of brutality and the underlying systemic and direct racism exerted against this community in Israel. The initial demonstration was organised in response to the beating of a black Israeli soldier by two police officers. The video that captured the event (which occurred the day before) appeared online and opened a window into a common, albeit often hidden experience of Ethiopian Jewish men in Israel.
The media blitzes that surrounded the events of May 2015 made no connection between them and those of January 2014. This was despite the fact that their participants and organisers come from neighbouring countries in Africa, with similar stories of brutal journeys through the desert and into “the promised land”. Moreover, both protests were spatialised in similar ways, each moving through central Tel Aviv, blocking traffic, and ending at Rabin Square. They both physically brought the margins of the city and the politics of the periphery into the centre, intentionally disrupting the “whiteness” of public space in this elite section of Tel Aviv. That said, links were quickly, even easily, made between the Ethiopian-Israeli demonstrations and the “Black Lives Matter” demonstrations occurring at the same time in the United States.[3] The linking of the two (in exclusion of other oppressed groups) presented the racialisation of black bodies in Israel as exclusively the experience of Jewish citizens. This clearly leaves out those “Black Lives” who protested the year before against their detention and for their right to “matter” in Israel; and moreover, completely dislocates the story of Ethiopian Jews from the situation of Palestinians (citizens and non-citizens), who are racialized, excluded, and occupied through parallel, intersecting mechanisms.
In Yacobi’s Israel and Africa, we are given the tools to articulate the convoluted lines and limits of Israel’s moral geography, as they are woven into and exposed in these protest events. In his text, we find an Israel that has worked incessantly to erase and dislocate its physical, cultural, and social links to Africa/the Middle East. This imaginary Israel epitomises an impossible attempt to square a circle, because Africa and the Middle East are part of this place, and vice versa. The result is a set of paradoxes. On one hand, this produces clear demarcations, as reflected in the protest events’ segregation of different African lives and trajectories, with each, in turn, distinguished from the mobilisations of other marginalised Jewish and non-Jewish communities, whether the Mizrahim – who were the Black Jews of previous decades[4] – or the Palestinian communities inside and outside the Green Line. On the other hand, as the protesters marched from black Tel Aviv into white Tel Aviv, they exposed the fragility (and flexibility) of those lines; although, ultimately, they were forced back onto “their side” by the end of the day. The ambiguities inherent in delineating Africa from Israel become further conspicuous in the Ethiopian protests. These spotlighted the bounded social, cultural, and political space that shapes the borders between “White Jews” and “Black Jews”, while still locating Ethiopian Jews among the privileged ethno-nationalist classes vis-à-vis these other Africans. Yet, Ethiopian Jews clearly sit uneasily within the production and socialisation of a (self-imagined) “European”, “white” Israel. They are thus relegated to peripheral zones, the subjects of systemic violence and the targets of direct violence, particularly when they step into white spaces.
Yacobi’s intervention on the genealogy of Israel’s moral geography in/with Africa is located in the same set of incommensurate logics as those unveiled in the African-Israeli protests of 2014 and 2015. He follows Israel’s routes to, from, and back to Africa, along the (neo)colonial networks of development practice, architectural knowledge, economic success, and intellectual expertise. He exposes a process of internal colonisation, a whitening of Eretz Yisrael in relation to its surroundings and internal constructions. The state emphasises its relationship with Africa primarily through “difference”, as it attempts to construct its image for itself and for the rest of the world as a democracy and as a developed, modern country. This is further embedded in the moral links the state professes between the two—with their common struggles for liberation, de-colonisation and development—offering itself as an example for Africa, as to how a “start-up nation” can succeed (expressed, according to Yacobi, in the 1950s by then-Foreign Minister Golda Meir; and reiterated in the present day by Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs). However, Yacobi’s contribution is not limited to outlining the way Israel constructs borders and denies cartography. Rather, Yacobi’s compelling work unveils the ambiguities of the settler-colonial project, which problematically and uncomfortably isolates and segregates, but also covets, assimilates and absorbs local geography and knowledge (while it attempts to enclave and exclude its peoples).
The logics of settler-colonial geographies weave in and out of the aesthetics of Israeli space, producing the imagined lines through which we identity “us” and “them”. Or, as Yacobi, quoting Edward Said, puts it, we designate what is us and what is “ours” within the space of the familiar; and situate what is not familiar, what is theirs, what is other, as barbarian, to be contained, controlled, redeemed and finally, replaced. These logics are not only present in the visceral image of a Separation Wall that divides legitimate from illegitimate colonisation, but in the ordinary infrastructure of roads and railways that construct and segregate the movements of citizens and non-citizens, rich and poor, Jewish and Palestinian, and the invisible communities who live in between. Yacobi ties these processes to the agents who built them: Israeli businessmen, architects and planners who learned and practiced their craft in Africa, and returned to implement them in Israel. Their aesthetic lines proliferate the planning of Jewish settlements (in the West Bank and in Palestinian areas inside Israel proper), mirroring, normalising, and materialising the practices of colonisation, in the delineations of what constitutes Israeli space vis-à-vis Palestinian space and vis-à-vis Middle Eastern and African space.
Yacobi’s book adds a new, much needed layer of analysis to the growing canon of work engaging with the settler-colonial ethos in Israel, the majority of which is focused on (and even narrowly limited to) the hidden and blatant lines of privilege and exclusion endemic to the relationship between settlers and indigenous peoples.[5] Conversely, Yacobi intersects Israel’s denial of geography with cultural productions of separation and co-optation, not to unveil a bordered, exclusive space, which has become banal in the field of critical geography. Instead, his work exposes the ambiguities in Israeli border-making, through its multiple engagements with Africa, on both African and Israeli soil. His resonant depictions of the erasure of Arabs from Israel’s landscapes and Arab-ness from its cultures and peoples are paralleled with stories of dissonant African spaces. These include the production and anchoring of a “North African Diaspora” in the Mizrahi township of Netivot and of African refugees collectively mobilising in Southern Tel Aviv, producing public declarations and events that connect them to the experience of Holocaust survivors and refugees. He reminds us that there is no fortress wall tall enough to protect the “white villa in the jungle” from the truth of its geopolitical and moral locations. As Yacobi effectively argues, there is no hiding from the fact that this is Africa, that this is the Middle East, that this is Palestine, no matter how hard Israel and Israelis try to escape it.[6]
Sharri Plonski, Department of Development Studies, SOAS University of London
Notes
[1] The protests were held across the city over a period of three days, weaving together the southern Levinsky neighbourhood—where the refugees live, congregate and access illegal work opportunities—with the northern (elite) corners of the city (see Schaeffer Omer-Man, 2014 for details).
[2] This is a reference to the 2014 Amendment to Israel’s Anti-Infiltration Law, which allows for a one-year pre-trial detention period for asylum seekers who enter Israel illegally, after which they are transferred to the Holot Detention Centre, an “open” facility run by the Israeli Prison Service (see http://hotline.org.il/en/main/ for details).
[3] See Norton (2015) and Freedman (2015) for reports, images, and tweets, in which links are made explicitly by protesters, their audiences, and the Israeli media.
[4] Yacobi’s work spotlights Israel’s ethnicised and racialized hierarchies through the experience of Mizrahi Jews (Jews who trace their ancestry to the Middle East and North Africa), who were the first “Black Jews” of Israel. The Ethiopian Jews and African asylum seekers can be seen as merely the latest inheritors of this social construction. See the work of Shalom Chetrit (2009) and Yehouda Shenhav (2006) for further elaboration of intra-Jewish conflict and the production of “Black Jews” in Israel.
[5] See for example Shafir (1989), Piterberg (2015), Dagani (2014), Rouhana & Sabbagh-Khoury (2015), Sultany (2016), Naamnih (2013), Molavi (2013).
[6] This is a play on Yacobi’s discussion in his concluding chapter of the Israeli denial of geography in the phrase “this is not Africa”; a common trope of speakers at anti-asylum seeker rallies in Israel (see for example Lior & Yagna [2012] for details). Yacobi argues that this statement epitomises the moral geographies of Israel in Africa, with Israel here and Africa there, and Israel imagined and positioned on the “Western, progressive, and white section of the world’s geopolitical and cognitive map” (p.127).
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