Precarious Citizens: Iraqi Jews and the Politics of Belonging

Abstract

AbstractThis article examines the politics and practices of citizenship among Iraqi Jews, using one woman's life history to explore the dynamics of exile and belonging. In 1950–1951, the Iraqi government issued a law that stripped Iraqi Jews who had migrated to Israel of their citizenship. Iraqi citizenship laws and directives did not only define citizens and noncitizens but also emerged as a venue of internal differentiation. Ruling elites facilitated political closures and constructed internal others within the very category of the Iraqi citizen, whereby practices of denaturalization and deportation of citizens became forms of state and colonial governmentality. In Israel, Iraqi Jews faced systems of racialization since their Arabness was associated with the enemy and racial inferiority. Iraqi Jews found themselves entangled in structures of power that rendered their Arab Jewishness an unintelligible category. However, Iraqi Jews resisted these conditions of dispossession and exclusion, and asserted a notion of Iraqi citizenship based on political activism with the aim of writing themselves onto the Iraqi social and political landscapes. Their political activism—whether in Iraq, Israel, or the diaspora—became sites of resistance that carved new ideas about community and undermined formal and legal definitions of citizenship. [citizenship laws, exclusion, legal violence, exile]