Vignette. Oriental cooks [000J]
Reference. The Politics of Language in Multiethnic Militaries: The Case of Oriental Jews in the Israel Defence Forces, 1950-1959 [peled2000]
‘Military reports of the time incorrectly correlated illiteracy in Hebrew with general illiteracy among Oriental soldiers. The explicit assumption was that if a soldier did not command sufficient Hebrew knowledge, he was illiterate or poorly educated. For example, a team of military psychologists wrote in 1953: “One can fear that had these people been tested they would have lowered the [average] scores of their [Oriental] countries even further.’
‘The only course in which Oriental draftees performed better than the others was a cooking course. The singular success of Oriental conscripts in this cooking course turned into a pattern over the next few years. Within a decade, Oriental conscripts found themselves at the bottom of the IDF occupational ladder, employed in low-prestige and menial vocations such as cooks and drivers.
‘Ben-Gurion continued to preach his military melting pot vision despite his knowledge of the facts above. In public, he pretended that the military melting pot was operating smoothly. “There are no differences within the IDF, all the tribes of Israel are included among its officers,” he declared in 1954. Yet the alleged inclusion of “all the tribes of Israel” among IDF officers was rapidly approaching the proportions of tokenism. In August 1956, he wrote in his personal diary: “75,000 Iranian Jews are living in Israel. Only 10,000 of them know Hebrew. In the regular army there are two officers of Iranian origin.” Instead of commenting on these grim data, he proudly copied into his diary the names, ranks, ages and even places of residence of the two Jewish officers of Iranian origin.’