Who decides who is Jewish has created a powerful tool for social and political control

The people I spoke with were not ignorant or easily molded, and were justifiably proud of all the learning and hard intellectual work they had put in to becoming eligible olim. As I discussed in the first chapter, however, the materials used in Iquitos’ conversion and migration-preparation courses come from a very limited number of sources, including the Jewish Agency for Israel and a number of self-avowedly Zionist rabbis from Argentina and New York. It does not seem outside the realm of possibility that information about daily life for Jews in Israel, about Palestinians generally, and about Jewish-Palestinian relations specifically, is heavily biased against Palestinians. Much as I found that the educational materials available in Iquitos strongly encouraged adopting love for, belief in, and loyalty to the modern state of Israel as an integral part of being a Jew, these same resources, which contain implicit information about racial hierarchies in Israel, emphasize Jewish-Palestinian strife and the importance of believing in Jewish difference as a core part of Jewish identity. Iquiteño Jews are necessarily being purposefully manipulated by the Israeli government to form Jewish-supremacist ideas before entering Israel. However, many parts of the conversion and migration process encourage a kind of racialized nationalism. In particular, the community focus on the modern state of Israel as central to a contemporary Jewish identity and the need to perform dedication to Israel and a particular form of Jewishness in order to be permitted conversion encourage this. These small nationalisms compile, and the result is that people learn to discriminate without it being a necessity planned by any individual or agency.

Given my observations,flower pots for sale the entire process of Jewish education, conversion, and migration, with all its particularities, contingencies, and administrative requirements, seems to encourage anti-Arabracism as a side-effect. And, as that side-effect is beneficial to the state, it seems evident that it is at the least allowed to continue, even if it was not a premeditated plan. It is important to note that a perspective that puts the burden of creating this internalized hierarchy ignores Peruvian influences. I also suggest that, as most Iquiteño Jews belong to a relatively privileged ethnic group within Peru, most are not accustomed to thinking of themselves as racially marginalized. Rather, the Peruvian field of racial positions in which Iquiteño Jews locate themselves position Afro-Peruvians and indigenous Peruvians as the other points of the triangle, against whom the mestizo Iquiteños define themselves as relatively valorized. Although nobody I interviewed specifically compared Palestinians to any other groups, I noted similarities in the ways in which some Iquiteños referred to their indigenous neighbors. They used racist epithets like “indio” in the way that my young interviewee referred to Palestinians as rats. One might assume, therefore, that Iquiteño Jews find it easy to imagine themselves fitting into a similarly elevated place in Israel, and difficult to imagine changes to their current position of privilege. Historically, futhermore, due to Peru’s large indigenous population, racial censuses and other state documents struggled to clearly demarcate “indigenous” and “not-indigenous” categories based on descent alone; rather, the assumption of European cultural markers became key to classification 24.

Thus Iquiteño Jews might also draw on Peruvian historical dynamics around cultural assimilation as a means of racial advancement as a way of reading their options in an Israeli context. In combining both perspectives, then, a proposed method of transmission for knowledge of the Jewish-Israeli/Palestinian divide begins to appear. The other half of the equation is still missing, however. It is intriguing to consider that, at least in a relatively isolated place such as Iquitos, Israeli racial hierarchies reveal their fundamental dichotomy but not the complexity of intra-Jewish triangulation. Latin American Jews who migrate to Israel might expect to enter the country in a position of privilege, only to find that the truth is more complicated. Thus, it seems apparent that processes that train diasporic Jews to become potential Israeli citizens end up educating these future olim on their likely place within an Israeli field of racial positions — to an extent. Regardless of whether most Iquiteño Jews who wish to migrate to Israel expect to fit into a given field of racial positions in which they gain one enormous privilege, of Jewishness, but might yet face a very difficult battle against many forms of racialized prejudice, and whether their education on these matters is intentional or not, they are involved in an explicit attempt by the Israeli state to maintain and deepen that fundamental Jewish/Palestinian divide. To describe this instrumentalization of Latin American, specifically Peruvian, Jewish migrants, I will use Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s concept of demographic warfare. Shalhoub-Kevorkian names the strategies the Israeli government uses to surveil and control Palestinian lives via restrictions on settlement, movement, and living spaces “demographic warfare.”

She highlights the ways in which population control is central to Zionist Israeli political projects. Preventing family reunification, return to homes and land owned before the Nakba,tower garden and zoning laws are only some of the ways in which Palestinians are demographically controlled. The goal of this control is to eliminate Palestinians, or at the very least make sure they are outnumbered by an order of magnitude by Jews. I argue that the aggressive advertising and subsidizing of aliyah on part of the Israeli state also represents an act of demographic warfare. Shalhoub-Kevorkian only passingly refers to the Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law , which governs immigration, but controls on immigration directly shape the makeup of a country’s population. Although Iquiteño Jews are construed as racially undesirable, unideal Jews, they are nonetheless Jews. As such, they receive support and encouragement from the Israeli state as they journey towards becoming acceptable Israeli citizens. Thanks to the global reach of Jewish educators and educational material that position Israel as central to Jewish identity, far-flung diaspora communities can both be shaped and shape themselves into better-conforming citizens. After all, an ideal Jew is not needed to be superior to a Palestinian. It is no coincidence that so many Iquiteños have ended up in Ramla: in a city with a large Muslim minority, even undesirable Jews can serve the state’s demographic purpose. How does the Israeli citizenship and immigration regime navigate this complex set of desires? The key is in its power to enforce a specific set of standards for deciding who is a Jew, and therefore who is eligible to come to Israel as a potential Jewish citizen. The split between levels of citizenship and the impossibility of creating a neat and widely acceptable definition of Jewishness reveals how weak and divided the Israeli political consensus is on issues of immigration, race, and Jewish identity. The basis for this incorporation regime is the Law of Return of 1950. Together with the Citizenship Law of 1942, these two pieces of legislation form the basis of Israel as a state; they are arguably more important than any other law in Israel, including the constitutional Basic Laws. Put together, they define Israeli citizenship, and thus who is granted free movement into Israel, in a seemingly very simple way: if a person is a Jew, then they are a citizen. If they are a citizen, wherever they may be in the world, wherever they were born, they may enter Israel to live legally and with full government support. It is, of course, not so simple. Citizenship is always subject to citizenship discourses, or the different “schools of thought” that govern what access to rights citizenship grants to its holders, how people think about citizenship, and who gets to be a citizen. In Israel, these citizenship discourses present a tug-of-war between ethno-nationalist and ultra-religious priorities.

While some scholars add the demands of a liberal democratic regime , this seems like an increasingly over-optimistic characterization as Israel entrenches itself increasingly firmly in the category of illiberal democracy in which the appearance of being reasonably democratic excuses highly undemocratic social and civil rights violations. Iquiteño Jews face two particular and linked difficulties in integrating into this discourse: navigating Israel’s tiered citizenship regime and being recognized as appropriately and fully Jewish.Since the time of the second incorporation regime at the state’s founding, Israel has effectively created tiers of dejure citizenship. On the highest tier are those recognized to be Jews by the state, as well as some minority groups such as Armenian Christians, with a fairly full complement of social, civil and political rights. On the next tier down are those reliant on the increasingly frail liberal framework of Israel’s non-ethnic citizenship. The largest proportion of this group is “1948” Palestinians, those who remained within Israel’s armistice boundaries, who are technically citizens but enjoy many fewer rights, which have historically been suspended at the state’s whim. However, Jewish Israelis also fall into this category if their Judaism is somehow in question. For example, Israeli-born Jewish people who are not strictly halakhically Jewish are denied the civil right of marriage despite being citizens , and the very large demographic of ex-Soviet Jews whose halakhic bona fides are insufficient to merit full inclusion is a perennial source of anxiety to the state. Shifting between these tiers is the non-citizen legal resident, who enjoys a scattershot basket of rights and yet has more security and standing than undocumented or non-citizen Israelis. The situation an Iquiteño Jew wishes to avoid is that of becoming an ambiguous Jew, prevented from accessing full rights despite their citizenship. The fact of this strange bifurcation highlights a cleft between secular nationalists and ethnocentric religious communities apparent in the Law of Return itself: that of the perennially impossible problem of deciding who is a Jew. This is a loaded question regardless of who is asking it. Identity and belonging are fraught with emotional, historical, and familial weight that becomes all the heavier and more complex when an identity is, like Jewishness, a shifting blend of culture, religion, and ethnicity. It becomes truly urgent when the allocation of basic rights depends on fitting this deeply personal and subjective identification into a bureaucratic box and proving it to the satisfaction of an immigration judge. When this is the case, deciding who is Jewish “is not an autonomous problem waiting to be politically and legally resolved but rather a social language that serves the political purposes of social engineering”. According to Jewish religious law, halakha, a Jewish person is someone with a Jewish mother or someone who has converted through an extended community process under the guidance of a rabbi. These rulings postdate the Biblical period and so derive entirely from rabbinical debate. As may be predictable by this point, this seemingly simple pair of criteria are in fact very complex. What if the Jewish mother is herself a convert? What if a child is adopted? What about those whose fathers are Jewish, or those born of Jewish parents who do not practice, or those born to a Jewish mother who have converted to a different religion? What if the conversion is not Orthodox? And whatever the case is, how do you prove it? The Law of Return attempts to avoid these complications for immigration purposes by making the requirements for entry relatively loose. Today, those with Jewish parents or at least one Jewish grandparent and their spouses and children may enter Israel and achieve some level of citizenship. This more permissive approach fits badly with other stricter state applications of halakha, however. They are Jewish enough to enter Israel, Jewish enough to be subjected to the draft, and Jewish enough, in many cases, to consider their Jewishness an indelible part of their identity. However, they are not Jewish enough to fully access the benefits of Israeli citizenship. This divide is exemplary of the clumsy compromises Israel has had to make between secular nationalists and the ultra-religious, compromises visible in the history of the Law of Return. Before 1970, the Law of Return granted entry to those with Jewish ancestry up to three generations back; the major amendment of the Law of Return in that year to its present, more restricted form was the culmination of two decades of court and legislative fights that progressively tightened the criteria for entry across many potential defining aspects of Jewishness.