Ella Habiba Shohat

In this article, Ella Habiba Shohat, discusses the domination of European Jews, the Ashkenazim, over the voices of the Arab Jews, the Sephardim. The Zionist master narrative portrays the idea that “Zionism ‘saved’ the Sephardim from the harsh rule of their Arab ‘captors,’” while modernizing and integrating them into their own European culture. (270). The Ashkenazi Israeli equates the Sephardi to the Arab, as uneducated and primitive, yet blame and view them as the “obstacle to peace” because of their supposed hatred of the Arab, creating an attitude portraying a colonial parallel operative. Shohat correlates the history of Zionism with that of the Palestinians and Sephardi, stating, “An essential feature of colonialism is the distortion and