The challenge of the new mizrachi narrative for multi-cultural education in Israel

The new Mizrahi narrative was devised and presented by radical Israeli groups such as The New Democratic Rainbow. It challenged the Western Zionist Ashkenazi narrative with its new educational message, proposing a multicultural alternative. This article briefly reviews historical-philosophical research regarding the claim by the new Mizrahi narrative that the image of the Mizrahi Jews in Israel was forged by the over-arching Ashkenazi hegemony. It begins with a description of the structure of the pre-state Jewish community at the revolutionary stage of its development, consisting mainly of Ashkenazi Jews arriving from Europe until the dramatic change in the wake of mass immigration during the first decade after the establishment of the state. This article proposes a threestage model for the analysis of counter-narratives, attacking the hegemonic metanarrative. According to this model, counter-narratives evolve in three stages and implement a variety of different procedures at each stage, enabling it to resonate within social networks of narratives. At the initial stage it challenges the hegemonic narrative; at the second stage it tries to wipe out the borderlines of the hegemony; and at the third stage it liberates its authors from their lowly position. The concluding analysis points out that the new Mizrahi narrative has fallen into a trap of its own making; however, to this day it represents one of the main philosophical, cultural and historical schools of thought in Israel, calling for turning Israel into a multi-cultural state, which would be finally integrated within the Middle East.