Man Who Insists Mizrahim Just ‘Arab Jews’ Also Hates When They ‘Appropriate Arab Culture’

About half of Israel’s Jewish population boasts Mizrahi ancestry.

Amman, January 5 – A prolific user of social media with staunch political views continued to argue today both that the Jews who lived under Arab hegemony for most of the last 1500 years must give primacy to the Arab, not Jewish, element of their identity, and that when those Jews maintain the traditional cuisine, garb, music, and literature of the Arab world that produced them, they violate the progressive taboo of “taking” from a different ethnic tradition and exploiting it.

Ali Sharqawi, 23, spends at least two hours each day in total online, primarily on Twitter, where he has contended for at least a year that the Jews of the Middle East, North Africa, Iran, and the overall Islamic world represent not a distinct ethnic or cultural community from that of their majority neighbors for the last fourteen-plus centuries, but Arabs who happen to profess the Jewish faith. Also, he lambastes those Jews for making and selling Arab dishes such as falafel, shakshuka, hummus, tahini, knaffeh, tabouli, or kubbeh, or featuring a hamsa or traditional clothing in their public lives, phenomena that must remain the exclusive province of actual Arabs and not be cheapened or “stolen” by outsiders.

“Zionists falsify history when they attempt to wrench Arab Jews from their rightful place in Arab-Islamic culture,” he tweeted this morning. Four minutes later, the aspiring machinist posted, “I can’t stand the rampant cultural appropriation of Arab culture and food by ‘Israeli’ Jews. Kebab is Arab and they have no business claiming it as theirs.” About half of Israel’s Jewish population boasts Mizrahi ancestry.

The juxtaposition of the two sentiments occurred earlier this week, as well. On Sunday, Sharqawi, whose grandfather moved to present-day Jordan from Iraq, but considers himself 100% Jordanian, blasted Zionists for attempting to “erase” the Arab heritage of so many of the Jewish State’s citizens by refusing to call them “Arab Jews.” Fifteen minutes later, Sharqawi left a harsh comment on YouTube video in which an Israeli woman of Moroccan-Jewish extraction shared her family’s recipe for the spicy tomato-flavored fish that they serve at each Friday evening Shabbat meal.

“That’s Arab! Stop stealing our food and culture!” he wrote. “Go prepare your own dishes and share them, but don’t pretend you have any authentic connection to our cuisine. Go eat some matza brei, gefilte fish, or pickled herring,” he added, referring to foods with which Mizrahi Jews only became familiar after encountering them among Ashkenazi-heritage Jews in Israel over the last century or so.

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