Fighting to Heal the Rift

Yifat BittonPic: Israeli lawyer and social activist Yifat Bitton

The rift is an old one, but it is still there if you look under the surface. Today, it is subtle, less in your face than before, but it gets to the heart of the complex nature of an Israel that members of the Diaspora rarely get to witness.

You can see it in areas such as education. Within Israel’s integrated school system, there is still friction, segregation within integration – the most prestigious classes are still populated mainly by one group who has held power since the State of Israel was born.

In higher education, the rift is more staggering. Statistics put the split at about a nine to one ratio in terms of senior staff and professors.

Today, Israelis like to think they are living in a multi-ethnic, post Ashkenazi-Mizrahi society – once unheard of intermarriages are now commonplace – but the first glance never reveals the whole story.

Yifat Bitton, lawyer, law professor, leading social activist and the founder of Tmura Centre (The Israeli Antidiscrimination Centre) is at the forefront of a controversial battle to bring the marginalization of Israel’s Sephardic community into the public sphere.

Her mission: to heal the decades long rift in Israeli society between Ashkenazis, who she says have ownership over social power, and Sephardis, who may not suffer the overt discrimination of old but still find themselves locked at the bottom of the social strata.

“In Israeli society, there is a need and a wish for us all to be equal. Part of the reason Israelis won’t acknowledge the discrimination against Mizrahis is that it says that we have failed in some way within the Jewish faith,” she said.

Because old-style direct discrimination is almost unheard of in modern Israel with a few exceptions – Bitton said the Knesset enacted human rights legislation after recognizing that Sephardis still have problems gaining admission to clubs – recognition as a marginalized group is a thorny issue for Israel’s Mizrahi Jews.

With no official status as a discriminated faction, Mizrahis continue to lack access to the vast array of anti-discrimination tools that exist in progressive Israeli society, which Bitton terms very anti-discrimination oriented.

The understated nature of the prejudice Mizrahis face allows for a current of denial to prosper inside Jewish Israel at large. Bitton calls it a pathological denial, a “collective state of mind”, as opposed to a psychological denial.

The Tmura Centre uses Israel’s civil law system to represent marginalized Mizrahis in court. It is almost a David versus Goliath battle. Tmura was the first organization to petition the court system as a representative of the Mizrahi community as a whole. Before, denial of their recognition as a legitimate entity meant venues for articulating collective grievances through legal claims were unavailable.

Tmura is one of the only NGOs that specializes in a systematic anti-discrimination work on behalf on the Sephardic community.

Petitioning the Israeli High Court of Justice might be faster, but Tmura utilizes the civil system – cases can take between three and five years.

“We are really pioneers in this field. It is really, really hard to convince the court to rethink the structure of Israeli society as far as the court sees it and relate to this group and these individuals as part of a group that is discriminated against.”

That their claims are even brought before the court is in itself a huge achievement as far as Bitton is concerned.

“Israel was supposed to be the Jewish state and it was promised to all Jews alike,” said Bitton. “When you come to the point when you see that there is discrimination within Judaism, something in the narrative breaks. It’s very hard for the Israeli Jewish community to cope with it in that sense.”

When Bitton comes to Toronto next month to deliver a New Israel Fund of Canada lecture entitled “The Challenges Facing the Sephardic Community in Israel Today,” she will speak about the underlying discrimination that Sephardis still face on a daily basis and the denial mechanism that fuels it, she will talk about her work in antidiscrimination law and her passion for teaching Israel’s next generation of legal activists, she will stress that her goal is to draw attention to the issue and the consequences of discrimination against Isreal’s Mizrahis.

One thing she will not be able to do is to end on an entirely positive note, to say that the situation is steadily improving.

“It’s going to take time and patience and we need to be optimistic,” she said. “If I wasn’t optimistic about all this I wouldn’t have done it to begin with. But I’m not cheerfully optimistic that this is clearly going to change Israeli society through the legal system.”

The legal battle, she said, has to expand into other avenues in order to facilitate real, lateral change.

“It has to be combined with a rethinking of social structure in Isreal, through politics or through some kind of social moment. This is something that will not happen in the short term,” she said. “Something needs to be worked on for a substantial amount of time in order to allow people to understand that talking about their Mizrahiness isn’t something that is forbidden, it’s not something that is destructive to the Israeli Jewish community."

The struggle for equality rests not so much with what Bitton terms Stage Two – the actual struggle itself – which she said will eventually triumph, one way or another. The real crux of the issue rests with Stage One – the long-term quest for recognition.

“It is pretty intimidating today to talk about this,” she said. “It feels like it’s tearing us apart from one another. The truth is that in a way there is a rift between Mizrahis and Ashkenazis and this is the only way to bring us back together as far as I’m concerned. But to bring us back together equally.”

Yifat Bitton speaks on Thursday, Feb. 4 at 7:30 p.m. at Adath Israel Congregation (37 Southbourne Avenue). For more information, call 416-781-4322.