Post‐Zionist orientalism? Orientalist discourse and Islamophobia among the Russian‐speaking intelligentsia in Israel

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 ‘Russia’s 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 discourse's 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 ‘Soviet‐made’ 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 Russian‐Israeli 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.