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ABSTRACT
This article provides a first-of-a-kind examination of Zionism and the Jewish state's shifting and unstable perceptions of Iranian Jewry, a particularly important Mizrahi group that has not yet received the attention it deserves in critical scholarship. By focusing on Iranian Jewry as objects of the Zionist/Israeli gaze, I demonstrate that while notions of "exile" and "homeland" and "East" and "West" have been known to be notoriously axiomatic and rigid when applied to Jews from the Arab countries, they appear fluid, overlapping and contingent when applied to Iran's Jews. As I demonstrate, owing to the twofold issue of ascribed ethnicity and distinctive history, Iran's Jews-perhaps more than any other Jewish "diaspora"-confounded the most fundamental Zionist convictions embodied in the notion of the "ingathering of exiles."
Introduction
Since the late 1970s, a vigorously critical literature on the exclusionary aspects of the Zionist project in Palestine has emerged. This literature has made far-reaching methodological and historiographical breakthroughs. Inspired by anthropologists and historians of empire, who have shown imperial spaces to be overlapping entities and sites of encounter, this scholarship demonstrated that Mizrahi politics of identity within Israel are intricately connected to what goes on beyond Israel's borders, particularly the surrounding Arab world. By demonstrating that the Mizrahim's inclusion, never quite successful, in the Israeli "melting pot" was conditioned on the creation of an impossible rupture between what were, up to their migration to Israel, compatible aspects of their identity - Arab and Jewish - this scholarship unveiled the colonial underpinnings of Zionism's attitudes towards its "Jewish victims" (Shohat, 1988). In doing so, it was able to show how "the same line has led from the walled ghettos of Europe to the West Bank barrier, separating Jews from the surrounding Arab population" (Klug, 2007).
Still, with toe benefit of hindsight, it is only reasonable to argue today that this scholarship has not been devoid of limitations. The underlying limitation from which most other limitations arise, I think, has to do with the fact that the term "Mizrahim" is almost invariably used in this literature to refer to Jews from Arab countties, thereby "[reducing] the relevance of Jews from non-Arab Middle Eastern coundies such as Turkey and Iran" (Goldberg and Baram, Forthcoming). Why critical scholars have generally tended...