Shadowing Practice: How Arab Jews Decide Israeli Elections - Learn English Speaking with Video
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Many of these people are Arab.
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They support the party of Benjamin Netanyahu and the far right in Israel.
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But their parents and grandparents came from Baghdad, Casablanca, Damascus, Cairo, and Sana 'an.
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They spoke Arabic, they ate
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Arab food, and they composed some of the Arab world's most famous music.
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And today, many of their descendants are the backbone of Israel's far right.
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So, how does an Arab Jew become anti -Arab?
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To understand that, we have to go back to an identity that today almost sounds like a contradiction.
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The Arab Jew.
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The education and then in the army tried to erase the Arab identity.
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Being called barbaric and primitive, that we're coming from places where there's no culture, no education.
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The truth is I grew up with a lot of shame around my identity.
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And what happened to them tells us something much bigger about how Israel was built and why
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Israeli politics looks the way it does today.
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So who were the Arab Jews?
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For centuries, Jewish communities lived across the Arab world, from Morocco and Egypt to Yemen, Syria and Iraq.
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Some of these communities were ancient, existing long before the arrival of Islam.
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Jews lived in Iraq since the time of the Babylonians in 600 BC, and before 1950, one -third of Baghdad's residents were Jews.
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Arab Jews weren't one single people called Mizrahi.
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They were Moroccan, Iraqi, Egyptian, Syrian, and Yemeni.
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And they spoke Arabic as their mother tongue.
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My father is a teacher of the Hebrew language in the Yahudian classes.
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And I am a teacher.
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I studied it and I wanted to be a teacher.
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But I did not have a teacher.
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In places like Baghdad, Jewish writers, musicians, and intellectuals participated in the creation of modern Arab culture.
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Take the Al -Koweiti brothers, for example, Saleh and Dawood.
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These two Jewish brothers weren't outsiders to Arab culture.
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They were among the architects of modern Iraqi music.
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See, there isn't a single
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Arab Jewish experience.
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It varied enormously.
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Like anywhere in the world and different parts of history, there were periods of extraordinary flourishing and coexistence, and also periods of discrimination nation.
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But for many of these communities, being Jewish and being part of the Arab world were not contradictions.
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So how did we end up here?
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Well, Zionism and the creation of the state of Israel.
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Jewish history is written from an Ashkenazi perspective.
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There is a Eurocentric perspective about Jewish history.
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That is, Jewish history is a never -ending cycle of suffering,
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persecution, discrimination, violence, culminating in the Holocaust.
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And I'm prepared for argument's sake to concede that this is a reasonable account of European Jewish history.
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But I strongly deny that this history applies to us,
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the Jews of the Arab lands our own history, which is very different.
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It's a history of centuries of harmony between
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Muslims and Jews and Christians and the other minorities.
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And it doesn't fit into the Eurocentric version or the lacrimal version of Jewish history.
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This is Avi Shlaim.
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He's an Israeli historian at Oxford University and happens to be a Jew of Iraqi descent.
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The Arab Jewish story and identity has been almost completely erased
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because it didn't fit neatly into the ideology put forward by European Zionism,
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which was predominantly led by Ashkenazi Jews who colonized Palestine.
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In the last few decades, Jewish immigration has been adding steadily to the European element in the country.
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Israelites are returning from practically every country in Europe, from England, from France and Belgium, from Germany, Poland and Russia.
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See, Zionism needed a binary, an us versus them, and so the Arab couldn't also be Jewish.
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He needed to be the enemy.
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Zionism which tried to reshape my identity and it wasn't benign.
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My original identity was that of an Iraqi Jew.
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In Israel they tried the education and then in the army tried to erase the Arab identity
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and I was ashamed of my Arab heritage.
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Growing up in Jerusalem in Israeli society, Arab is such a demonized identity.
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Like whatever is Arab is seen as horrible.
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And that is kind of the environment that I grew up in the society.
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And, you know, for Arab Jews that grow up there, it's this very intense experience because you're taught that
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Arab is wrong and, you know, like horrible and all these things.
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But then you go back home and you're like, we listen to Arabic music.
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We listen, we like eat
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Arab food and, you know, aren't, isn't that us?
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We are good, we are good, we are good.
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We are good.
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We are good.
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We are good.
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We don't understand you as Arab citizens.
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We are Jews, we came from the Arab country, but we are not Arab.
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And this was the brainwashing of Arab Jews.
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And it all started in 1948 with the creation of Israel, which was a giant rupture across the Arab region.
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In the first two decades after its creation, about 260 ,000 Jews from Arab countries went to Israel.
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Why did they leave?
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Well, we have two reasons, and part of the answer lies in the wave of nationalism sweeping the Arab world following Ben -Ekbe.
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This nationalism wasn't an overnight transformation.
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Tensions had been building for years.
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A Zionist settlement, European colonial rule, and the escalating struggle over Palestine transformed the politics of the region.
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But the Neqbe and the creation of Israel brought those tensions to a breaking point.
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These ancient Jewish communities that had lived as part of Arab societies for centuries now found themselves caught in the middle,
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between the societies they had long called home and a new Zionist state claiming to represent Jews everywhere.
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Governments responded in different ways, sometimes with restrictions, arrests, confiscations, and policies that made
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Jewish life increasingly precarious.
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An Arab Jewish life that had existed for hundreds if now thousands of years would fundamentally change forever.
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The second reason for Jewish departure to Israel is something out of a spy novel.
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The Zionist underground and its intelligence officers planned and carried out bombings within
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Jewish communities across the Arab world.
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They wanted to turn them against their homelands by increasing the violence, fear and urgency to drive them to Israel.
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One was the Masoudah Shem Tov synagogue in Iraq that wounded 10 people and killed four.
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In March 1950, the Iraqi government passed a law which said any
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Jew who wants to leave the country is free to do so.
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They have a year to register.
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And initially, very few
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Jews opted to up sticks and go and live in Israel.
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But the situation deteriorated and the series of bombs created a panic and a sense of uncertainty which led more and more
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Jews to register to leave the country.
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Iraqi Jews were convinced that Israel had a hand in uprooting them,
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and they were very resentful of that.
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Another was the infamous Levan Affair in Egypt.
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In 1954, Israeli intelligence ran
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Operation Susanna, where they recruited
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Egyptian Jews to plant bonds in civilian locations in Cairo and Alexandria, including American and British cultural facilities and cinemas.
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The intention was to have attacks blamed on groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood, Egyptian Communists or other
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Egyptian extremists to undermine Western relations.
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with Egyptian President Jamal Abdel Nasser's government.
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The plot was discovered when the bomb ignited prematurely in the agent's pocket.
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The investigation that followed led to the arrest of 11
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Egyptian Jews for acting on behalf of Israeli intelligence to carry out false flag attacks.
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What ended up happening, though, was the exposure of the operation further increased resentment toward the Jewish community in the country.
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As mass demographic changes swept the region and Arab Jews started to arrive in Israel, they didn't receive the welcome they expected.
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Referred to as Mizrahi or Eastern Jews,
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they arrived in a country ruled by the Ashkenazi or European Jews who had been colonizing Palestine for the past decades.
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Like other colonists around the world, these European Jews were imbued with a sense of supremacy and superiority over for those who they considered native.
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And so they looked down on Jews of Arab origin.
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Mizrahi identity, which, you know, was coined with the establishment of the state of Israel, to refer and to basically lump all
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Middle Eastern Jews into one category.
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Mizrahi means Eastern.
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So it's like always such a wild thing to be an Easterner in a Western state, you know.
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Arab Jews quickly discovered that being
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Jewish did not make them equal.
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The Ashkenazi elite, led by the ruling Mapai labor establishment, saw them as culturally backward and need of modernization and civilization.
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Hundreds of thousands were sent into camps where they lived in horrific conditions, where they were treated as the dirty and unwanted Arabs.
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It's an episode that repeats itself among Iraqi Jews.
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They place the DDT on us because their assumption is that if we came from our country, we probably are not very clean.
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Being called barbaric and primitive and, you know, that we're coming from places where there's no culture, no education, and no any of that.
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Because we're lumped into the whole
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Arab thing and the Arabs have been dehumanized.
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Exactly.
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Jewish Arabs from Yemen were taken to separate camps.
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And in the infamous child affair, many Yemeni babies were stolen from their mothers and given to Ashkenazi families.
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This was just the beginning.
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Class was being built along racial lines, and Arab Jews found themselves concentrated in lower -paying jobs,
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underrepresented in positions of power, and facing inequalities in education and access to resources.
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Jewish immigrants from North Africa, or Mizrahis, banded together to bring attention to their dire social and economic situation.
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We the Mizrahim were just like the blacks in the U .S.
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And we saw the European Jews as being like the whites in the U .S.
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But this hierarchy was not only economic.
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Their Arabness itself was treated as something that needed to be extinguished there was an explicit process of assimilation and de -Arabization.
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And there in the airport, our Arabic name was changed to Hebrew name based on the decision of the bureaucrats.
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And I became David Rabi instead of Hikmat Rabi.
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And this was the first encounter that I realized that I'm in a different planet, different space and different time.
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I was so terrified of speaking Arabic, European Jews gazing at us for being different,
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almost not only making fun of us but really looking at us with hostility.
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Mizrahim went through like such an intense process of what I've called Israelification, where we really had to lose our identity in order to fit in,
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in order to belong.
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And And you know, psychologically, I think this need to belong is so strong for all of us humans.
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Like, we just want to belong, we just want to fit in.
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But sometimes we'll give up everything to just feel like connected to other humans.
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These Jews were expected to leave behind elements of the Arab societies from
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which they came and assimilate into a national culture largely shaped by European Zionists.
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Arabic, the language in which generations of Iraqi, Egyptian, Moroccan and Syrian Jews had written poetry.
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composed music, conducted business, and lived their everyday lives, belonged to a culture Israel now defined as the enemy.
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The vast and diverse histories and identities were compressed into a new category, the Mizrahi, the Easterners.
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They had arrived in a country that told them they had finally come home, only to discover that much of what they had brought with them,
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their language, their culture, their Arab identity was considered something they needed to overcome.
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And this is how
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Israeli society began to form and what laid the foundations of where we are today, the right -wing Arab Jew.
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Until then, Arab Jews had largely occupied the lower rungs of Israel's Jewish social hierarchy,
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beneath an Ashkenazi establishment that had dominated the Zionist movement and the state since its inception.
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Soon, another hierarchy was to take shape.
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The turning point came in the 1977 election.
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The kuld, led by Menachem Begin, reached out to Arab Jews and offered them something labor had often failed to.
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Dignity, belonging, and political power.
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Ashtonazi, Iraqi, Yehudi, Akhir, Rahabim!
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Instead of treating them as people who needed to be remade into the image of the European Israeli,
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Begin spoke to them as Jews who were already an integral part of Israel.
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His language of Jewish tradition, family, religion, and peoplehood resonated deeply with many
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Arab Jews whose traditional culture had often felt alien to Labour's secular European establishment.
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In 1977, more than half of Arab Jewish voters supported Likud, helping Begin destroy one of the longest political monopolies in the settler colony.
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Begin had transformed years of Arab -Jewish exclusion and resentment into a new political identity.
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Israelis called it Hamakhbakh, the upheaval.
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Another force was at play.
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As Israel began to colonize the West Bank, Jerusalem, and Gaza, this tranche of Palestinian land began to go to Mizrahi Jews.
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Jews, their Jewishness now gave them access to land, housing and political belonging that
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Palestinians living under Israeli rule did not have.
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Right -wing nationalism offered them something powerful, a new identity.
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Even if you remained marginalized by Israel's Ashkenazi elite, you could still belong firmly within the Jewish national collective above the Palestinian.
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And the occupation created a physical geography in which that hierarchy could be expressed.
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Across generations, large sections of the Mizrahi electorate remained attached to Likud and the Israeli right,
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even as the enormous social and economic gaps of early Israel narrowed.
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The old resentment toward labor remained and became intertwined with religion,
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nationalism, security, in a powerful sense that the right respected an identity the old establishment had once looked down upon.
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And this is the greatest ironies of this story.
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Communities whose parents and grandparents spoke Arabic, cooked Arabic food, created Arabic music,
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and had lived for centuries in Baghdad, Casablanca, Damascus, and Sana 'a, became a crucial constituency of an Israeli right,
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increasingly defined by its confrontation with the Arab world and Palestinians.
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Kill them first.
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See, the Arab Jew didn't disappear,
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but through Zionism he was reimagined and remade to fundamentally separate the meaning of both.
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Arab and Jew.
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As another Israeli election is almost upon us, over 60 % of Arab Jews will likely vote for Likud and the far -right in Israel.
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Arab and Eastern Jews make up the majority of Israel's Jewish population.
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Simple math will tell us that once again, they are likely to determine who rules in this settler colony,
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where there is no such thing as left -wing or centrist parties in electoral politics, but only degrees of Zionist nationalism,
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ethno -nationalism and religious ethno -nationalism.
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People often ask me what I see as the solution giving the bleak picture of Israeli society and politics.
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Well, I believe that there can be no liberation of Palestine without the liberation of the Arab Jew.
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which entails a process of de -Zionization and the reversal of decades of erasure that stripped people of their culture, tradition, and identity.
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Because perhaps the most radical challenge to the binary Zionism created is the identity it tried to make impossible,
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to be both
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Arab and Jewish.
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Episodes like this are possible because of our Patreon supporters.
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Doing this work takes time, resources, and editorial independence.
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and we're only able to do it thanks to our community.
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So if you believe in what we're doing and want to be part of it, consider joining our Patreon.
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It's how we keep it going.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This speaking lesson is built on the video “How Arab Jews Decide Israeli Elections”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: Arab, Jew, Jewish, Israel, identity. This video has 209 sentences and 2600 words to shadow. The speech runs for 21:19. The speaker talks at a steady 122 words per minute, a comfortable pace for shadowing. Only 76% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is demanding.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| belong verb | /bɪˈlɒŋ/ | To have its proper place. |
| nationalism noun | /ˈnæʃ(ə)nəˌlɪzəm/ | A more extreme form of patriotism; the idea of a more extreme support for one's country, people or culture. |
| establishment noun | /ɪˈstæb.lɪʃ.mənt/ | The act or process of establishing; a ratifying or ordaining; settlement; confirmation. |
| hierarchy noun | /ˈhaɪ.ə.ɹɑː(ɹ).ki/ | A body of authoritative officials organized in nested ranks. |
| erase verb | /ɪˈɹeɪs/ | To remove (markings or information). |
| resentment noun | /ɹɪˈzɛnt.mənt/ | Anger or displeasure stemming from belief that one or one's group has been wronged or betrayed by others; indignation. |
| horrible adjective | /ˈhɔɹ.ɪ.bəl/ | Causing horror; terrible; shocking. |
| elite noun | /ɪˈlit/ | A special group or social class of people who have a superior social or economic status and attendant power, advantages, or privileges in society; a member of… |
| intense adjective | /ɪnˈtɛns/ | Of a characteristic: extreme or very high or strong in degree; severe; also, excessive, towering. |
| increasingly adverb | Increasing in amount or intensity. | |
| discrimination noun | /dɪskɹɪmɪˈneɪʃən/ | Discernment, the act of discriminating, discerning, distinguishing, noting or perceiving differences between things, with the intent to understand rightly and… |
| affair noun | /əˈfɛɹ/ | Something which is done or is to be done; business of any kind, commercial, professional, or public. |
| tension noun | /ˈtɛnʃən/ | The condition of being held in a state between two or more forces, which are acting in opposition to each other. |
| colony noun | /ˈkɔl.ə.ni/ | A geographical area under the remote control of a country; especially to extract resources or exploit labor from that area. |
| transform verb | /tɹænsˈfɔɹm/ | To change greatly the appearance or form of. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| carry out verb | /ˈkæ.ɹi aʊt/ | To hold while moving it out. |
| end up verb | To bring to a conclusion. | |
| give up verb | To surrender (someone or something); to inform on (someone). | |
| go back verb | To return to a place or state after having been there at a previous time. | |
| go back to verb | To stem from; to originate in. | |
| go through verb | To travel from one end of something to the other. | |
| grow up verb | To mature and become an adult. | |
| leave behind verb | To abandon. |
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | Being called · was built · is written |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | history, which is · Israel, which was · those who they |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | has been · have been dehumanized · I've called |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 24 contractions and reduced forms, such as we're, didn't, I'm. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: beneath /bɪˈniːθ/, mathematics /mæθ(.ə)ˈmæt.ɪks/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: nationalism /ˈnæʃ(ə)nəˌlɪzəm/, establishment /ɪˈstæb.lɪʃ.mənt/, discrimination /dɪskɹɪmɪˈneɪʃən/, tension /ˈtɛnʃən/, liberation /ˌlɪbəˈɹeɪʃən/
- Long words — get the stress right: nationalism /ˈnæʃ(ə)nəˌlɪzəm/, establishment /ɪˈstæb.lɪʃ.mənt/, hierarchy /ˈhaɪ.ə.ɹɑː(ɹ).ki/, discrimination /dɪskɹɪmɪˈneɪʃən/, liberation /ˌlɪbəˈɹeɪʃən/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Shadow it sentence by sentence at normal speed, repeating each one until your rhythm matches the speaker.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like belong, nationalism, establishment.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.