Social Identities, Volume 10, No 1, 2004

Post-Zionist Orientalism? Orientalist Discourse and Islamophobia among the Russian-Speaking Intelligentsia in Israel
DimitryShumskyDivisionsGot Levin t. 14/24Haifa32922Israeldshumsky@study.Haifa.ac.il

DIMITRY SHUMSKY Haifa University

ABSTRACT: This article attempts to shed light on a special kind of Orientalist discourse that circulates in Russian-Israeli literature and press. This discourse feeds on the cultural sources buried in the Russian-Soviet imperialist discourse about Russias Orient, which has been articulated by modern Russian literature, including prominent Russian-Jewish authors, and corresponds to the racially grounded discursive practices currently widespread in post-Soviet Russia with regard to natives of the Caucasus and Central Asia. The article investigates the ways of transferring Orientalist concepts from the (post-)Soviet cultural experience to the Israeli one, identifying the Orientalist discourses dual role in shaping the immigrants self-awareness on two levels, the local and the global. On the local level, the Russian-Israeli intelligentsia deploys Sovietmade Orientalist interpretative tools to read and decipher the reality of a new country, by presenting it as a familiar reality. Identifying and labeling the local Orientals the Palestinians on the one hand and the Mizrahi Jews on the other by means of negative concepts borrowed from the Russian-Soviet Orientalist repertoire, a RussianIsraeli intellectual locates her/himself within the Eurocentric Ashkenazi component of Israeli society. On the global level, the extreme Islamophobic rhetoric of the Russian-Israeli Orientalist discourse, according to which today Israel and Russia, as well as the West, all share a common Islamic enemy, enables a Russian-Israeli intellectual on the one hand to reassert her/his cultural ties with her/his country of origin, and on the other to heighten the validity of her/his self-image as part of Western culture.

Introduction A major issue of interest to researchers in the framework of the discussion about the impact of the large-scale wave of immigration to Israel from the former Soviet Union is the immigrants relationship with the Ashkenazi elites and where they stand relative to the dwindling of the Israeli-Ashkenazi cultural hegemony. Two opposing arguments have therefore been advanced to elucidate this issue. On the one hand, the immigrants are generally presented as contributing to undermining Ashkenazi cultural dominance. According to another view, however, most of the immigrants are becoming socioeconomically and culturally integrated into the ranks of the Ashkenazi middle class, of which they will therefore become an integral part within the next generation.1
1350-4630 Print/1363-0296 On-line/04/010083-17 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI: 10.1080/1350463042000191001

84 Dimitry Shumsky The rst argument has recently been expressed by Baruch Kimmerling, in a programmatic essay intended to delve into multicultural discourse in Israel (Kimmerling, 2001a). He argues that, despite their closeness to members of the Ashkenazi elites in terms of origins, the Russian-speaking immigrants should not be considered the allies of the Ashkenazi Jews in the struggle that the latter are waging in order to maintain their cultural hegemony in Israel. Regarding the material and occupational sphere, the immigrants wish unequivocally to become part of the Ashkenazi middle class. In the cultural sphere, however, the tendencies are utterly different. While the immigrants attach unique weight to Russian culture, they seek to institutionalise their separate Russian-Jewish identity within Israels evolving multi-cultural society. As part of this process, alongside groups of marginalised citizens, such as Israels Arab citizens, they play the role of the new Israeli, built on a perception of ethnic-cultural pluralism, constantly challenging the very logic of mono-cultural hegemony (Kimmerling, 2001a, pp. 6465). In addition to this indirect challenge to IsraeliAshkenazi hegemony, with which in Kimmerlings view the immigrants can be credited due to their contribution to cultural diversication in Israel, he also identies a direct cultural confrontation between them and the Ashkenazi elites. For Kimmerling, while one of the most striking characteristics of IsraeliAshkenazi culture is expressed in its Western self-image, the immigrants attitude toward Western culture is characterised by a feeling ranging between suspicion and contempt (Kimmerling, 2001a, p 66). The opposing interpretation to Kimmerlings, concerning the position of Russian-speaking immigrants in respect of the cultural rifts in Israel, is primarily advanced by Sammy Smooha. He argues that, in view of their ethnic afliation and cultural identication with the dominant Ashkenazi group, these immigrants are joining the latter in ever large numbers,2 thereby boosting the groups strength vis-a ` -vis the challenge from the weaker strata such as the Mizrahim (literally Eastern Jewish communities of North Africa, the Middle East, and Asia). Among the set of factors which Smooha views as contributing to this trend, he identies a strong Western orientation on the immigrants part (Smooha, 1998, p. 41). This distinction would appear not only to indicate the immigrants present-day cultural pattern in their destination country, but also to hint at a certain amount of cognitive baggage that predates their immigration and underlies this pattern. Smooha does not, however, address the question of the immigrants cultural background something which might perhaps be a crucial factor in shaping their Western orientation on moving to Israel. The present article, which supports Smoohas position on this issue, is therefore designed to ll this lacuna in his interpretation, as well as to complete it in several other respects. By examining literary and journalistic texts written by Russian-Jewish intellectuals in Israel, I will seek to shed light on this underlying face of the Russian-Jewish intelligentsias3 Western orientation, at whose centre lies the discourse containing ultimate denigration of the Oriental Other. As will be seen below, this is a special version of the Russian and Soviet Orientalist discourse that characterised Russo-Soviet colonial perception of the natives of the Caucasus and Central Asia. The theoretical framework for

Orientalist Discourse and Islamophobia among the Russian-Speaking in Israel 85 the analysis will be provided by Edward Saids post-colonialist insights, as recently applied in Slavic studies. In my discussion, investigation into the ways of transferring the Orientalist concepts from the Soviet cultural experience to the Israeli one will be related to the Orientalist discourses dual role in shaping the immigrants self-awareness on two levels, the local and the global: (1) its mediating role with the new reality in the destination country, helping to decode and make sense of it, to nd a place within it and situate the self on Israels cultural map; and (2) its role in reinforcing the link with the country of origins imperial culture, by situating the self on the universal cultural map. 1. Russian-Soviet Orientalist Discourse and the Russian-Jewish Intelligentsia The concept of Orientalist discourse, taken from Edward Saids Orientalism, designates the various ways in which the Orient is represented in Western culture as the opposite of the Western experience. This discourse is based on a structural dichotomy between the rational, enlightened and progressive West and the Orient, particularly the Muslim-Arab, which is irrational, uneducated and backward or alternatively spontaneous, enchanting exotic and so forth. This conscious construction, characteristic of the body of academic, literary and artistic knowledge that evolved in Western European culture over the generations, was closely bound up with the European colonial enterprise in the Orient and provided the ultimate justication for colonial control over it, particularly that of England and France (Said, 1978). As one of the seminal essays to have contributed to the shaping of the post-colonial discussion, the impact of Orientalism considerably exceeded the boundaries of Middle Eastern studies. However, when it comes to Slavic studies and Sovietology, until recently their attempts to examine the extent to which Saids insights are applicable to the Russian and Soviet imperialist enterprise in the Caucasus and Central Asia encountered two basic obstacles that originated in two limitations characterising research into Russian colonialism in earlier generations. Interestingly enough, these limitations appear to be clearly demonstrated by, of all things, Russias Orient (1997), a scholarly collection of essays, which in its introduction emphasises the need to examine the representations in imperial Russian culture of the natives of Russias southeastern borderlands in view of Saids approach (Brower and Lazzerini, 1997). Firstly, the research considers only the imperialist enterprise of the Czarist Empire, ignoring the colonial endeavours of its Soviet heir. Secondly, and more importantly, the use of the concept Russias Orient to designate those areas of the Caucasus and Central Asia that came to be included within the Empires borders as it expanded, contains a questionable assimilation of the colonial Russian paradigm, which tended to present this geographical space as an inseparable part of Greater Russia. The reproduction of this paradigm at times makes it possible to blur the imperial discourse about the natives of these areas, eventually denying the relevance to it of the Saidian analysis, arguing that the geo-cultural tie between Russia and the Asian borderlands is, as it were, too immanent and profound to be summed up in such dichotomous terms as we Russians versus the Oriental Others (Layton, 1997, p 82).

86 Dimitry Shumsky These two distortions are rectied in Ewa M. Thompsons research (2000) on Russian literature and colonialism. Firstly, the author highlights the continuity of the Russian colonial enterprise from the days of the Romanov dynasty right up to the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. Secondly, she circumvents the obstacle of viewing the non-Russian territories under Russian and Soviet rule as a kind of Russian Asia. By placing Russian literature, which in Russian colonial culture undoubtedly played a similar role to that of Western discourse about the Orient, in the centre of the discussion (Thompson, 2000, p. 34), the researcher describes how various Others from the Poles in the West, to the peoples of Siberia and the Far East such as Buriats, Evenks and Tungus who, as Russia constantly expanded, found themselves coming under its authority, were imagined in this literature. In the context of this study, a particularly striking resemblance can be identied between representations of the Russian Orient in Russian literature and Muslim images in Western European Orientalist discourse. Thus Asiatics are brutish, primitive, miserable and scoundrels, albeit not lacking in a certain heroic, romantic aura. In addition, the colonial author tends to condemn the natives to demonisation, on the whole combined with complete anonymity, leaving them bereft of any human identity. As Thompson convincingly shows, the gure of the despised Asian remains a constant in Russian culture over a number of centuries, from Pushkins and Lermonotovs works in the rst half of the nineteenth century to our own days, a time when it is being widely disseminated in the Russian public awareness in connection with the discourse about the Chechnyan and Caucasian Maa (Thompson, 2002, pp. 5774). One of the main axes of discussion in Thompsons research, which is also of great importance for our present purposes, involves the analysis of the background to the complete absence of post-colonial debate in Russia itself. The reason for this lies, in Thompsons view, in the rhetorical success of Russian discourse on culture and identity, which has managed to shape the self-image of Russia as a passive, feminine entity devoid of the slightest hint of aggression. This myth about Russias complete innocence has led to a rather paradoxical result, whereby a power with an unbridled imperialist appetite is presented as a country devoid of natural borders, reluctantly ghting for its existence. Thus Russian colonialism acquires a kind of moral stamp of approval and hence it remains outside the domestic critical debates about the Russian past and present (Thompson, 2000, pp. 4143). Indeed, the Russian intellectual tradition has never scrutinised the Russian colonial endeavour through critical eyeglasses. Those Russian writers who at various times took great personal risks by denouncing the Czarist or Soviet regime, were used to emphasise a universal dimension of the suffering of the Russian people and the spiritual misgivings of the Russian intellectual, without bothering to consider the individual voices of the conquered non-Russian peoples (Thompson, 2000, pp. 2930, 33). Hence Russias right to annex foreign territories, to act as the ultimate representative of their populations, and to refer to them in derogatory terms, as was done in her Orient, was viewed in the Russian national awareness as a perfectly natural state of affairs. Thompsons insights into the selective nature of Russian intellectuals

Orientalist Discourse and Islamophobia among the Russian-Speaking in Israel 87 criticism of the State and the regime are crucial to an understanding of the Russian-Jewish intelligentsias attitude towards Russian cultures discourse about the Orient. It should rst be noted that a number of Israeli sociologists, who tend to see Russian-speaking immigrants in Israel as a group with a ercely critical approach to the Israeli establishment, frequently attribute to Jews from the former Soviet Union a culture of criticising the State as such, ostensibly derived from the quasi-subversive approach to the Soviet regime which characterised many of them in their country of origin.4 The myth about the rebellious spirit of the Russian intelligentsia as a whole and specically and especially its Russian-Jewish form, is also endorsed wholeheartedly by the intellectuals among the immigrants themselves.5 Such a sweeping claim is oversimplied, insofar as it ignores the essential question relating to the distinction between those strata of Russian and Soviet culture and politics that fell within the purview of Jewish criticism and those that remained outside it. Addressing this question is likely to have illuminating implications for another question, which is not unrelated to the previous one: what do people from the former Soviet Union reject in Israel out of the whole cultural and political panoply of the new country and what parts do they tend to accept? In any event, when it came to the Orientalist discourse, which is part and parcel of the Russian and Soviet imperialist culture, in fact the attitude to this matter of the Russian intellectuals of Jewish origin was no different from the attitude prevalent among the Russian intelligentsia per se. In the spirit of the tradition of the Russian hegemonic culture, of which members of the Russian-Jewish intelligentsia considered themselves part as long as they were in the Soviet Empire, and still continued to feel themselves part in Israel also (Golden, 2001a, p. 17), the outstanding gures of the Russian-Jewish intellectuals over the previous hundred years contributed to an imperial creative endeavour to shape the image of the Russian Orient. For the purpose of illustration I will give just two examples of important twentieth century Russian-Jewish writers: Osip E. Mandelstam (18911938) and Isaac E. Babel (18941940). These two literary gures are reasonably wellknown, both for their great contribution to modern Russian literature and for their critical attitude to the communist regime, for which they paid with their lives during the Stalinist purges of the late 1930s. As such, these two occupy a fairly distinguished position in the cultural pantheon of Russian-Jewish intelligentsia, in the former Soviet Union and Israel alike. Mandelstam is considered one of the greatest gures of Russian poetrys Silver Age, spanning the twilight years of Czarist autocracy and the initial stages of the Soviet regime. In the early 1930s, Mandelstam was one of the few intellectuals to openly challenge the regime, when in one of his famous poems he attacked Stalin and the members of his entourage in the most vitriolic fashion. Furthermore, Mandelstam was known for his special affection for Georgian culture and literature, being particularly enchanted by Georgian poetry. In connection with the present subject matter, special attention should be given to one of his essays from the early 1920s, in which he expounds his thoughts about the position of Georgian art under the youthful Soviet regime (Mandelstam, 1990, pp. 30710). As the representative of civilised Russia,

88 Dimitry Shumsky which had, as he put it, sympathetically followed Georgias cultural development for a hundred years, he praised Georgian cultures special ability not to blend with the Orient (Mandelstam, 1999, p. 308). True, the author argues, Georgia had frequently looked in the direction of Orient, but it had always managed to overcome it through the excellent artistic means. As the faithful heir of Pushkin and Lermonotov, who had long since established the image of brutish Asia, Mandelstam has no need of redundant explanations as to the nature of this Orient. It is obvious that this is a quintessentially negative entity, the complete antithesis of genuine spiritual creativity. Nevertheless, the author advises Georgian culture not to entirely discard its quasi-Oriental exterior so as to maintain its intoxicating Eroticism, which had in the past proven so enticing to Russian poets (Mandelstam, 1999, p. 307). Babel, Mandelstams contemporary and one of the most innovative gures in modern Russian literature, was also not exactly an admirer of the communist regime. As early as the 1920s he provoked the wrath of the Soviet military elite when his famous Red Cavalry stories exposed the Red Armys cruelty in the Civil War. Nevertheless, when it came to descriptions of the Soviet Orient, Babels voice, like that of Mandelstam, harmonises with the chorus of RussianSoviet Orientalist discourse. This is manifest in his story My First Fee (Babel, 1999, pp. 41929), the outcome of the authors time in Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, at the beginning of the 1920s, as a journalist for the local Russian-Soviet newspaper. The story is about a young man working as the linguistic editor at the Caucasian commands military publishing house. He suffers from loneliness and depression in the suffocating atmosphere of Tbilisi, which is both foreign and strange to him. The hero nds the way out of his profound mental distress by falling in love with a tall, white-faced Russian prostitute who stands out in the midst of the simian hordes of the natives (Babel, 1999, p. 421). As he spends time with her, the hero makes up a story about his miserable existence as a homeless youth from the Russian countryside, who wandered throughout the Caucasus, forced to live cheek by jowl with the local savages and in this way for the rst time discovers his talent as a storyteller. Profoundly moved by his tale, the prostitute refuses to take any payment from him for her services hence the heros rst fee. A reading of the story clearly reveals the role that the author assigns to the natives of Tbilisi, including the local landscape. The local simian hordes that crush spirits and women (Babel, 1999, p. 427) personify the complete opposite of the experience to which the hero aspires one based on love and creativity. To Babel, therefore, Tbilisis Oriental bazaar illustrates precisely what the Orient illustrates for Mandelstam mans brutish and sterile side, a side that must be overcome. In view of research into the representations of the Orient by these two idols of the Russian-Jewish intelligentsia, it must be noted that this stratums disagreements with the regime and the Soviet state in no way indicate anything about its attitude to one of the persistent and seminal axes of Russian, Soviet and post-Soviet culture alike the Orientalist discourse. The imperial knowledge of the swarthy Asiatics that members of this intelligentsia have acquired through the mediation of Russian literature, therefore constitutes an important part of their cultural baggage when they move to the Middle East.

Orientalist Discourse and Islamophobia among the Russian-Speaking in Israel 89 2. A Little Sunny Republic: The local Dimension of Russian-Israeli Orientalist Discourse In his novel Inostranka (A Female Foreigner), Sergey Dovlatov (19411990), one of the great writers of the Russian diaspora in the last generation, describes, in the ironic and incisive language so typical of him, the all-encompassing confusion that overwhelmed the inhabitants of a Russian-Jewish immigrant neighbourhood in New York on hearing the following shocking piece of news: a beautiful young woman from the neighbourhood was having a romantic liaison with a Hispanic man. This was the pained reaction to this piece of news on the part of one of the neighbourhood intellectuals: Beautiful women always fall for these cheeky Georgians What? Hes Hispanic? If the truth be told, its the same thing (Dovlatov, 1993, pp. 6566). By putting these words into his heros mouth, the author is undoubtedly trying to indicate a particular method by means of which the Russian-speaking immigrants in the USA are likely to identify and mark local swarthy Others. The rich repertoire of images of the Asiatics drawn from Russian-Soviet discourse in the immigrants eyes tantamount to watertight facts helps them to interpret the colourful human scenery in their new surroundings, utterly condent that they are facing a familiar reality. The fact that instead of Georgians as a readily identied category there might be Armenians, Uzbeks, Chechnyans and so on simply makes the system more effective, since this blurring of individual ethnic groups makes it possible to simplify an actual cultural reality by squeezing it into a single all-embracing category. Does this system operate and if so how among the Russian-speaking intellectuals in Israel? In order to consider this question, I will rst of all examine the work of Dina Rubina, undoubtedly the most successful novelist of all writers of Russian literature in Israel. A native of Tashkent, Uzbekistan, Rubina immigrated to Israel at the end of the 1980s, after publishing a number of stories in the Soviet Union. However, she established her reputation in the Russian literary world only after coming to Israel, primarily as a result of her books reecting her Israel experience. These were issued in the 1990s by prestigious Moscow and St Petersburg publishing houses. As an introduction to our discussion of representations of the new land and its inhabitants in Rubinas books, we will rst focus on the least Israeli of them, Kamera nayeszhayet! ... (Camera Approaching! ... 1993/94). In this clearly autobiographical tale, the female protagonist looks back at her life in Uzbekistan, while also weaving in her thoughts about her present-day experiences in Israel. It can clearly be seen that out of the sum of the heroines experiences of life in Tashkent, it was her encounters with the Uzbek natives which left the most negative impression in her memory. For example, the Uzbek students whom the heroine encountered when she was teaching a musical discipline at the Culture Institute aroused feelings in her that ranged between contempt and resentment. It becomes clear that the basis for this feeling is to be found in the bedrock of knowledge about Uzbek culture at the disposal of the author-heroine knowledge about whose certain nature there is not the slightest doubt in her mind. In this connection, what she considers to be the

90 Dimitry Shumsky most signicant item of knowledge concerns how Uzbek men relate to women and to love between a man and a woman. According to her, the way every Uzbek man sees it, the female world can be divided into two. On the one hand there are Uzbek women who serve their husbands in humility and obedience and are therefore, deserving of their mens protection; and on the other, all the rest, who are irredeemable whores and hence legitimate targets for sexual assaults (Rubina, 2002, p. 252). The representations of the Uzbek man range here between an enslaver of women in the domestic setting and a cruel rapist outside it. Irrespective of the scenario, the sentiment of exalted love remains patently beyond his reach. This, in the opinion of the author-heroine, is the nature of the Uzbek students whom she faces in her lectures, making a supreme effort to open up to them the world of Schumann and Schubert. In this setting she does not conceal her self-pride, seeing herself as a kind of ambassador of European culture among these boorish and obtuse shepherds. And yet this civilising mission is doomed to failure, since anyone who is incapable of knowing the emotion of love cannot possibly grasp the greatness of classical music. Could you perhaps play this with a little more feeling, the heroine begs one of her students who is practising Schuberts Serenade. After all, it is a love song Im sure you yourself love someone? No! a young Uzbek student replies to Rubinas heroine, overcome by fear and terror at her question, We We dont love! We want to get married! (Rubina, 2002, pp. 25455, emphases added). In the spirit of the Russo-Soviet literary discourse about the Russian Orient and out of a very explicit link with the Russian-Jewish voice within it, the gure of an anonymous Uzbek student comes to personify the essence of the character of an entire Asian people, as it is undoubtedly known to the author-heroine. And indeed, we will have no difculty in identifying parallels between Babels Georgians crushing spirits and women and Rubinas womenenslaving and rapist Uzbeks. In order to dispel any doubts about the veracity of the writer-heroines knowledge of the Uzbek people, she allows her Uzbek hero to express himself on behalf of the entire Uzbek people. And so speaking in the rst person plural the student admits to his peoples basic inability to fall in love and to love. It must be stressed that this kind of image is not limited to an individual description of the Uzbeks alone: rather, in the writers eyes it represents the essence of the Orient generally and of the Muslim world specically. As such, Rubinas Uzbek goes beyond the boundaries of the orientalist discourse in her country of origin and starts to become an interpretative tool when confronting the Muslim Other in Israel. Even in Camera Approaching! ..., whose plot is largely set in the former Soviet Union, this tendency is quite conspicuous, for example when a rude Arab labourer whom the author-heroine has come across in Jerusalem immediately reminds her of her encounter with a drunken Uzbek in Tashkent (Rubina, 2002, pp. 31213). But we nd more explicit and instructive continuity between the images of the Russian Orient and the Israeli Orient in Rubinas more Israeli works. Consider, for example, Here Comes The Messiah! (1995/96), her most famous book, which has been translated into

Orientalist Discourse and Islamophobia among the Russian-Speaking in Israel 91 a number of languages, including Hebrew and English. The novels female protagonist, Ziama, falls victim to Palestinian terror, when she is stabbed in the throat before the eyes of her husband as they are eating out in their favourite restaurant. Her assailant, a young Palestinian woman who lives in a village near Hebron, has a personal story that helps to shed light on this murderous act. She is 22 and despite her unattractive appearance she had a fairly good chance of getting married. However, she transgressed and slept with her former schoolteacher. And as if this was not enough, she also got pregnant by him. It is quite clear to her that from now on, her days are numbered: when this state of affairs becomes known, her brothers will undoubtedly kill her to prevent her from bringing shame on the family, since theres no other way. At this stage the wretched young woman gets help and advice from her teacherlover. True, he is not exactly enthusiastic about marrying her, but he is willing to show her what he considers the surest way out of her predicament: Go and murder a Jew, he told her, Then theyll lock you up in jail, youll give birth there, and youll stay there with your baby. And that way youll bring honour and veneration on your family (Rubina, 1999, pp. 3045) Rubinas story of the young Palestinian woman can be identied as nothing more than an upgraded version of the representation of the Uzbek Orient in Camera Approaching! While the image of the Muslims in Uzbekistan as a people unable to love to a large extent remains a theoretical assertion, at most supported by a declaration by the Uzbek hero, in the Palestinian context this image is expressed in a more concrete form. To put it another way, the Palestinian heroines understanding that theres no other way that is, that in the Muslim family it is impossible to deal with cases of extramarital pregnancy other than by executing the pregnant woman, hence the operative decision to forestall violence with violence in order to try to transform shame into honour reinforces and provides empirical proof for the Uzbek Muslims declaration that indeed We dont love! In this way the author also provides her readers in Israel and in her country of origin alike with an original explanation for the phenomenon of Palestinian terror: that Palestinian terror is not related to the Palestinian-Israeli whirlpool of blood rather, it is rooted in the character of the Muslims, who know neither love nor compassion. Compared with her representations of the Muslim Orient, Rubinas discourse on the Jewish Mizrahim Oriental Jews appears to be more complex. Thus, for example, when the heroine of Here Comes The Messiah! arrived in Israel, she discovered that We, basically, are an Oriental people. She accepted this with perfect composure, just as a mother welcomes her baby for the rst time (Rubina, 1999, p. 15). But the Orient that the heroine accepts and even welcomes has nothing whatsoever to do with the concrete Israeli being. This is the biblical Orient, as imagined by her on seeing the landscapes of Judea and Samaria, which are, it would appear, primarily populated by Russian and Ashkenazi settlers, with fairly colourful personalities. The Jews from Islamic countries, on the other hand, do not appear in the book as independent gures: they either provide silent ornamentation, or they are there to personify what is

92 Dimitry Shumsky regarded by the heroine as Levantine characteristics of Israeli culture, such as indolence, complacence, or irresponsibility (Rubina, 1999, pp. 16, 114). In this context, special attention should be given to the gure of Mustapha the Weird, a mentally unstable Persian Jew who spends his days on the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv bus. He sells items to the regulars on this route, as well as to the peddlers at the central bus stations in both cities, going by the name of Messiah because he is for ever singing the Hassidic melody, Here comes the Messiah (Rubina, 1999, pp. 1720). Hence Mustapha plays an important symbolic role in the novel: the song constantly on his lips gives the novel its title, while his strange and mysterious character keeps the reader tensely anticipating what is going to happen to the books primary heroine. No less symbolic, however, is what happens to this character at the end of the novel. After her death, Ziama meets the real Messiah who turns out to be her beloved grandfather, a Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi Jew (Rubina, 1999, p. 31). Thus a crazy Mizrahi Jew, who gives off an odour of sweat, beer, urine and deodorant hands over the role of Messiah to a Russian-European Jew (Rubina, 1999, p. 17). This converting of the Mizrahi Messiah into an Ashkenazi one in Rubinas novel provides us with an instructive reection of immigrant intellectuals discourse about Israel, comprising two basic steps: reading Israels cultural map and locating the self on that same map. As far as the rst step is concerned, on a fundamental level one can indeed subscribe to the view of those scholars who consider that immigrants read the Israeli reality with critical eyes. However, one must be precise and say that at this point the Russian-Jewish intelligentsias stinging criticism is directed rst and foremost at what it designates as Oriental or Levantine. This point will help to clarify the meaning of the next stage in the Russian discourse that is locating the self. Tellingly, the most prominent Russian intellectuals wish to see immigrants involved in the cultural war on the Ashkenazi side against Israeli societys Oriental foundations. It is in just such terms, for example, that Alexander Voronel a Tel-Aviv University physics professor and editor-in-chief of 22, a prestigious journal of literature and ideas that denes itself as the organ of the Russian-Jewish intelligentsia in Israel presents the vocation of Russian Jews. As the diplomatic process gathers speed and there is a chance of relations between Israel and the Arab states warming up, he argues, only the RussianJewish immigrants can save the country from the horror of Levantisation which is bound up with these dangerous developments. Like Rubina, Voronel identies the primary characteristics of Levantisation as indolence, complacence, technological ignorance, and economic negligence (Voronel, 1998, pp. 233, 240). When it comes to the interpretative means that help the Russian-Jewish intelligentsia to chart its cultural identity in relation to Israels Jewish population, here the weight of the language of Russian-Soviet colonialism is no less great than in the case of Rubinas confronting the Muslim Other. Firstly, this intelligentsias criticism of Israeli-Jewish cultures Levantine characteristics emerges from an acknowledged position of ongoing afliation with the tradition of imperial culture. In the spirit of the Orientalist rhetoric of the great

Orientalist Discourse and Islamophobia among the Russian-Speaking in Israel 93 Russian writers and poets, non-Jewish and Jewish alike, the immigrant intellectuals present themselves as bearers of European culture in its improved Russian version, as opposed to the image of primitive natives inferior culture (Rubina, 1999, pp. 26364; Beltov, 2003). Secondly, the standard Soviet Asian images continue to be at the immigrants disposal when they need to categorise and label Moroccan, Yemenite, Persian Jews and so on. It is with good reason, therefore, that writer Boris Geller (2003), in a mordantly satirical essay about Israeli society published recently in the Vesti weekend supplement, combines the images of an ignorant Georgian from Kutaisi and a boorish Yemenite from Israel as the antithesis of an ordinary Russian-Jewish intellectual. For the associative nexus between swarthy Soviet and Israeli individuals, as well as the value differences between them and a Russian Jew, are supposed to be perceived by the Russian-Israel reader as something perfectly natural. And as if that were not enough, Geller gives Israel an extremely telling name one that should also be perfectly transparent to his readers in the light of their Soviet experience dubbing it the Little Sunny Republic (Geller, 2003, p. 26). This is a well-known denigratory expression in Russian-Soviet discourse, that at the time could have been applied to any Caucasian or Central Asian republic, irrespective, if truth be told, of its actual littleness. And indeed, the term refers, not to a republics territorial size, but to its negligible cultural weight compared with the imperial culture, as well as to the colour of its inhabitants skin sunburnt, as it were. Now, transferred to the pages of the highest-circulation Russian-Israeli newspaper as a term designating Israel, in effect this expression is used to spotlight these selfsame two elements, thereby isolating through images familiar to the immigrant that very feature of Israeli existence which must be critiqued above all its Oriental aspect. 3. IsraelRussia, IsraelEurope: The Global Dimension of Russian-Israeli Islamophobia The Oriental discourse, as a body of knowledge intended to nurture an understanding of Western cultural supremacy, is based on the tendency to describe the Orientals in as simplistic a fashion as possible, while completely ignoring the concrete geographic, economic and cultural contexts of their lives. At the same time, insofar as the rhetoric of this discourse is concerned, it is generally far from being simple. On the contrary: while it expresses Western civilisations dark and contrasting side, the Orient must simultaneously attract and repel. The combination of Arab cultures enchanting renements and outrageous inanities, for example, as expressed in Orientalist texts analysed by Said (Said, 1978, pp. 22830), is intended therefore to enthral the Western observer and especially to render fascinating the challenge of controlling the Muslim Orient. Hence images which are on the sketchy side are frequently presented as beguiling and intricate mysteries. Furthermore, the very people who give voice to and shape the Orientalist discourse wish to impart a hint of complexity, expertise and objectivity to their approach to the Orient. On the other hand, when it comes to representations of the Arabs and Islam in the Russian press in Israel, generally we nd an extreme and simplistic

94 Dimitry Shumsky version of the Orientalist discourse. Not only does this fail to make use of the traditional colonialist rhetoric as described above: on the contrary, it constantly undermines it, calling its operative effectiveness into doubt in view of the war of civilisations between West and East (Weiman, 2003). According to the tenets of this variant, which can be best dened by the notion of Islamophobia, European cultures tendency to be entertained by the romantic images of the Arabs and the Orient, while at the same time nurturing false hopes concerning the possibility of bettering and reforming the Arabs in the framework of colonial projects, has ultimately led Europe to capitulate to Islamic barbarism. What lies behind a radical Islamophobic tendency of this kind? One of the explanations advanced for this phenomenon in Israeli research ascribes it to the immigrants desire to thereby become an integral part of ofcial-patriotic Israeli discourse, demonstrating Jewish patriotism in view of a feeling of competing with the other leading sectors of the Israeli state (Kimmerling, 1998 p. 287). I doubt, however, whether expressions of Russian-Israeli discourse about the Arabs and Islam would enhance the Russian publics prestige in the eyes of Israeli society were they to be translated into Hebrew: even compared with the most extreme right-wing Israeli discourse, the representations of Muslims that ll the Russian press in Israel, spanning the entire gamut from the prestigious Vesti to tabloids such as Secret and Echo, are defamatory in the extreme. Expressions such as [Muslims are] the ugliest offshoot of the human race (Hayenko, 2001), the Oriental smell (Danovich, 2003), or The Protocols of the Elders of Islam (Sobol, 2003)6 would likely trigger a public outcry even during the Second Intifada, resulting in the Russian press being banished to the furthest fringes of political legitimacy. It seems to me that the role of Russian-Israeli Islamophobia can be elucidated if we pay attention to the focal points of the geo-cultural orientation of the Russian community in Israel, as revealed in texts of this kind. Notwithstanding the Israeli political context of the discussions about Islam in the Russian press, these focal points are without doubt Russia and Europe. The Russocentric and Eurocentric dimensions of the Russian-Israeli discourse about the Arabs and Islam are made very clear by reading countless articles in the press that deal with these subjects. The discussions Russocentric axis is programmed rst and foremost by a view that identies a shared destiny existing between the State of Israel and Federal Russia in all matters relating to their difculties in dealing with the Muslims rampant behaviour regarding their territories the Palestinians on the one hand and the Chechnyans on the other. As such, frequently the Russian-Israeli press expresses amazement and anger at the relative continuity of the Russian governments pro-Arab position, accusing it of complete blindness to the pan-Islamic conspiracy against the civilised world (Danovich, 2003) and betraying the real interests of the Russian people itself, which genetically cannot abide these evil Muslims (Ben-Ari, 2003).7 The Eurocentric axis, on the other hand, focuses on the discussion of the cultural and political ramications of the immigration to Europe by Third World natives generally and Muslims specically. As in the discussion about the Muslim problem in Russia, in this context too the

Orientalist Discourse and Islamophobia among the Russian-Speaking in Israel 95 Russian-Israeli intellectuals wish their independent, unique voice to be heard the warning voice of those who know Islam well from their own Middle Eastern experience and have a background of combating it. They comment unfavourably on the weakness of European countries with glorious cultural traditions, like France, which is fast becoming hostage to multitudes from the Maghreb and Persian Gulf (Ben-Ari, 2003) and conversely laud the bravery of leaders such as Joerg Haider who are seeking to reinstate the European Continents real nature, as it was before it became a paradise for Africans and Asians (Borisov, 2000). Above all, the constant in such discourse is the image of Israel in the forefront of the European campaign against Islam, or more broadly against Islamic fundamentalism (Weiman, 2003). This being the case, it may be argued that the Islamophobic discourse plays a dual role in shaping the cultural identity of the Russian-Israeli intellectual. The global narrative fashioned by the Russian-Israeli press, according to which today Israel and Russia, as well as Israel and Europe, all share a common Other Islam helps this Russian-Israeli intellectual on the one hand to strengthen his cultural ties with her/his country of origin and on the other to heighten the validity of her/his self-image as part of European culture. The extreme tone of her/his rhetoric is intended to reect her/his unique place in the Russian and European discourse about Islam, by virtue of being a practitioner confronting Muslim barbarity on a daily basis. In this way, her/his perception of her/himself as having the ability to provide the Russians and Europeans with relevant insights into Islam by virtue of living in the Middle East can help to upgrade her/his imaginary geo-cultural position on two levels: (1) from the Russian-Israeli margins of the Russian-speaking diaspora toward the centre of the Russian imperial discourse (Israel-Russia); and (2) from a little sunny republic in the Middle East to the forefront of the battle for European values (Israel-Europe) (see Weiman, 2003). Conclusion In a series of articles devoted to elucidating cardinal aspects of the Zionist consciousness and Israeli culture, Israeli historian Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin recently propounded the view that one of the cardinal foundations of the modern Zionist discourse involves the basic acceptance of the Orientalist paradigm, which makes a dichotomous distinction between West and East as two diametrically opposed cultural entities. Raz-Krakotzkin argues that by adopting this view, Zionism aspired to dene the Jews as a European nation, highlighting an essential difference between them and their Oriental Middle Eastern surroundings. Thus in what appears to be a paradoxical fashion, the Jews departure from Europe and settling in the East ultimately led to their reintegration, as it were, in the West (Raz-Krakotzkin, 1998, p. 44; 1999, p. 258; 2002, p. 317). True, for the most part Russian-speaking immigrants are not Zionists. Moreover, as a number of studies emphasise, they can also be extremely critical about the key elements of Zionist-Israeli culture and consciousness, such as the Zionist ethos, ofcial-patriotic rhetoric, or the militaristic nature of Israeli

96 Dimitry Shumsky society (see footnote 4 above, as well as Epstein, 2002; Golden, 2001b, pp. 69 70). And yet, when it comes to the Russian-Jewish intelligentsias attitude to the Israeli Orientalist discourse, it not only accepts its framework, it expresses it even more strongly. In fact, what we have is a kind of parallel Russian-Israeli discourse, fed by cultural sources that are buried in the Russian-Soviet imperialist discourse about Russias Orient. The Orientalist dimension of this discourse contains all the defamatory representations of natives of the Caucasus and Central Asia which have been disseminated rst and foremost by modern Russian literature, including prominent Russian-Jewish writers. So when members of the Russian-Jewish intelligentsia arrive in the Middle East, they come armed with Orientalist interpretative tools, which help them in reading and deciphering the reality of a new country, by presenting it as a familiar reality, in this way aiding them in situating themselves on the Israeli cultural map. The reading and deciphering process is bound up with identifying and labelling dark-skinned locals, using negative concepts borrowed from the Russian-Soviet Orientalist repertoire. In this process the local Orientals the Palestinians on the one hand and the Mizrahi Jews on the other in the immigrant intellectuals eyes, come to stand for Israels character as a Levantine state, with a culture inferior to her/his own Russian-European culture. As a result, the immigrant locates her/himself within the Eurocentric Ashkenazi element of Israeli society, seeking to see her/himself as helping Israel overcome its Orientalness. This is not the only thing that the Oriental discourse does for the Russian community in Israel. In addition to its role as a compass that helps them in nding their way around the cultural experience of a new country, it is also used by a Russian-writing immigrant intellectual as a means of renewing her/his imaginary bond with the culture of the country of origin. As such, extreme Islamophobic rhetoric is of the utmost importance, structuring on the pages of the Russian-Israeli press the image of Islam as the Other an Other common to Israel and Russia alike. As such, the Muslim Other acts as a basic code in establishing the common language between a migrant and the country of origin, which underpins the imaginary Israeli-Russian dialogue that ostensibly addresses a common problem that of the pan-Islamic conspiracy. The Islamophobic rhetoric in the press also operates in a similar fashion in imagining the dialogue about Islam between Israel and Europe. In connection with their European self-images in the Israeli context, the immigrant intellectuals represent themselves to their European imaginary interlocutors as members of the European culture living in the Middle East and who, in view of their special experience in dealing on a day-to-day basis with the Palestinians, are likely to be able to help the Europeans with practical advice concerning the rampant behaviour of the form of Islam imported into their countries. The Russian immigrant in Israel, himself likely to be perceived by the Russian and European cultural discourses as someone on the margins, therefore shifts her/his imaginary cultural location to within the centre of the civilised world. As a result, we must once again unmistakably endorse Sammy Smoohas assertion concerning Russian Israelis Western orientation pattern. It may even be contended that Raz-Krakotzkins argument about the Orientalist paradox of

Orientalist Discourse and Islamophobia among the Russian-Speaking in Israel 97 Zionism, based on reintegration in the West via a move to the East, is even more applicable to many members of the Russian-Jewish intelligentsia in Israel. For the process of reproducing the Russian-Soviet Orientalist paradigm a process which affects them as they move to the Middle East is ultimately bound up with a reafrmation of their Russian-European cultural identity, as they assert its complete contrast with their new Oriental surroundings. However, this is a form of Orientalism which is made in Russia, does not belong to mainstream Zionist discourse and hence is perhaps best dened as post-Zionist Orientalism. Dimitry Shumsky may be contacted at Got Levin St. 14/24, Haifa 32922, Israel, e-mail: dshumsky@study.Haifa.ac.il.

Notes 1. The centrality of this issue to studies of the Russian immigration to Israel has been underscored, for example, in the detailed research by Elazar Leshem and Moshe Lissak about the immigrants ways of collective consolidation: Leshem and Lissak, 1999, p. 163. In his other book, Kimmerling also identies the increase in this tendency among the immigrants. However, he still tends to primarily highlight the instrumental dimension of immigrants afnities with the Israeli-Ashkenazi culture (Kimmerling, 2001b, pp. 13649). In connection with social and cultural life in the former USSR, the concept of intelligentsia denotes a fairly heterogeneous group of educated people, including rst and foremost writers, poets, artists and journalists, but also people from the exact and technological sciences who are interested to some degree in art, literature and philosophy: Lissak and Leshem, 1995, p. 25. Kimmerling, 1998, pp. 27576; Lomsky-Feder and Rapoport, 2001, p 12; Lerner, 2001, p 43; Rapoport and Lomsky-Feder, 2002, pp. 23637. See, for example, an essay by psychologist Vadim Rotenberg (2003), who identies this spirit as being responsible for the immigrants sceptical attitude to the accepted norms of Israeli society and culture. The title of the article Pro[to]cols of Elders of Islam contains a Russian play on words, intended to present the Arabs as both evil and moronic, by contrasting the Arab of today with the anti-Semitic image of Jews in the nineteenth century, when they were perceived as evil and clever. In colloquial Russian, the word prokol means failure. So the author is arguing that while what was formerly perceived by anti-Semites as a global Jewish conspiracy seemed to be true because of the Jews superior cleverness, todays global Arab conspiracy is driven by the ignorance and stupidity of the conspirators. Incidentally, this article appears against the background of a caricature showing a monkey dressed as a man, wearing a T-shirt saying I love Darwin.

2.

3.

4. 5.

6.

98 Dimitry Shumsky 7. It should be noted parenthetically that this author, former businessman Zvi Ben-Ari (Grigory Lerner), is a fairly well-known gure in the Russian community in Israel. They consider him a hero who dared to stand up to Israels nancial establishment paying the price of spending a number of years in prison. In the 1990s the story of his trial and conviction, known as the Lerner Affair, rocked the Russian press in Israel, marking an important milestone in the immigrants collective consolidation process.

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