The JIMENA statement also ignores the crimes of Zionism towards Mizrahi Jews. The most striking example is the institutional kidnapping of thousands of Mizrahi (mostly Yemeni) babies from their families. Other examples abound. When Jews from Muslim countries arrived in the nascent Israeli state in the 1950s, they encountered the racism of the Zionist institutions that established an Ashkenazi hegemony. Mizrahi migrants were treated differently than their Ashkenazi counterparts. After the Nakba (نكبة), which means “catastrophe” in Arabic and refers to the destruction of the Palestinian villages and cities and displacement and genocide of Palestinian people in what became the State of Israel, the now-vacant land was in the hands of the Israeli state. While European Jewish migrants were settled in central metropolitan areas and given housing by the state with the prospect of ownership, Mizrahi Jewish migrants were settled on frontier border areas, in underfunded public housing, in order to bolster the Zionist claim to the land of dispossessed Palestinians, and secure the border against invasion.
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