מקומו של השלטון המקומי במימוש הזכות לתרבות של מזרחים בישראל

This Article seeks to understand why is it that despite the long-lasting and heated public debate about the discrimination against “Mizrahi Culture,” very few legal challenges have been brought attacking central government’s policies that discriminate against Mizrahi culture. Moreover, the few cases that were filed – failed miserably in court. We offer two explanations for this puzzle: First, the right to culture is by definition a collective right, and due to the Zionist ideology that Israeli judges are embedded in,they are unwilling to recognize the Mizrahim as a distinct group with collective rights but only as individuals who are at times discriminated against. Second, Mizrahi cultureis an “essentially contested concept”, with no agreement over its contours or even its very existence. As a result, the public debate regarding the inferior status of Mizrahi culture were not, indeed could not have been, translated into legal arguments. We propose to reorient the discourse about the discrimination against Mizrahi culture in two important ways: First, to shift the attention from the right to culture as including only the right to create and preserve culture, to a broader understanding of the right to culture as encompassing also the right to access culture, which is a sine qua non to the ability to participate meaningfully in the creation of culture. The right of Mizrahim to access culture, as opposed to the right to create Mizrahi culture, can be easily monetized and assess, by looking into how much public funds are expended in places where Mizrahi people live, due to the entrenched segregated residential patterns of Mizrahim and Ashkenazim. Second, the article presents empirical data showing that local governments, rather than the central government, are the main source of public funding of culture in Israel. This reorientation of the discourse, we argue, will enable those who advocate the promoting of Mizrahi culture, to translate their grievances into valid legal arguments and back it with verifiable and reliable data about the inequality between Mizrahi and Ashkenazi local governments in the amount of public fund allocated to cultural event and institutions and demand its correction.