As if happening these days in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1959, in Wadi Salib a former Palestinian neighborhood in Haifa, a community of Moroccan Jews led by David Ben Harosh rebelled against their systemic oppression and racism inflicted by Ashkenazi establishment. They were crushed by the police, the courts and the public. In this picture, here a young man holds the flag of Israel. What you cannot see here are two important things: first, the flag is stained with blood, and second it had a profound sentence written on it: “Hassan King of Morocco, Take Us Back”. Let us briefly reflect on this short and yet deep sentence. These people, all Moroccan Jews, were probably all traditional/Masortim, for whom Israel was their home and refuge from the Diaspora. They are now asking the Muslim King, from whom they were taken away, usually indoctrinated to believe that he was their enemy, to take them back. They want to go back to the Diaspora. לחזור לגלות. This begs many questions, but one common thread: a sense of alienation and diasporic identity has been created persisting nowadays, at that exact home, where diaspora was meant to end. Corresponding with the subject and themes of my research, this is translated into a sense of temporality, destruction. Of defeatism. Of people who do not feel any affiliation to their homes.

In my work I offer a new understanding of the role of ‘home,’ particularly public housing in Israel, as a site of both oppression, dispossessing Mizrahis of their homes and homeland, culminating in instilling feelings of homelessness, and of resistance and agency, even reconciliation, generating defiant memories and social justice, redefining Israeli property laws. A home as a project of both memory and forgetting.