Becoming Mediators: Mizrahi Jews and the Making of the Jewish-Arab Borderlands

This lecture traces the emergence of Mizrahi Jews as go-betweens within the shifting political, linguistic, and cultural geographies of the modern Middle East. As new national and territorial borders transformed the region, Mizrahi Jews came to occupy a range of intermediary positions: translators, interpreters, broadcasters, spies, intelligence agents, and collaborators. Rather than understanding mediation as a fixed identity or an inherent position “between” Jews and Arabs, the lecture approaches becoming mediators as a historical process shaped by the making and remaking of borders. These intermediary roles were deeply ambivalent. Mizrahi Jews were called upon to mobilize their knowledge of Arabic language and culture in the service of the Jewish national project. At the same time, the same forms of linguistic and cultural proximity could generate suspicion of assimilation, divided loyalties, and transgression. Mediation thus involved both crossing boundaries and participating in their production and maintenance. Drawing on case studies including Kol Yisrael in Arabic (The Voice of Israel in Arabic), the lecture develops the idea of geographies of mediation to recover cultural and political practices often reduced to the categories of propaganda, espionage, or collaboration. By approaching the border not simply as a territorial line but as a dynamic social and cultural space, it asks how Mizrahi go-betweens simultaneously navigated, reinforced, and unsettled the emerging boundaries between languages, cultures, communities, and national identities in Israel/Palestine and the wider Middle East.