Hen Mazzig

Hen Mazzig is an Israeli-American activist, writer, and Senior Fellow at the Tel Aviv Institute whose advocacy has been defined by a powerful counter-narrative: as a Mizrahi Jew of Tunisian and Iraqi heritage, he embodies the reality that half of Israel's Jewish population descends not from European Ashkenazi Jews but from Middle Eastern and North African Jewish communities with roots in Arab lands — a biographical fact that directly challenges the framing of Israel as a European colonial project imposed on indigenous Middle Eastern peoples. Born in Israel, Mazzig served in the IDF as a humanitarian and civil affairs officer before moving to the United States to pursue academic and advocacy work.

Mazzig's advocacy focuses on several interconnected fronts: the history and experiences of Mizrahi Jews in Arab countries — including the expulsions, property confiscations, and violence that drove approximately 850,000 Jews from Iraq, Morocco, Egypt, Yemen, and other Arab countries between 1948 and 1975; the erasure of this history from mainstream discussions of the Middle East conflict; and the implications of that erasure for how the conflict's origins and justice claims are understood. His presentations, articles, and social media presence — he has built a substantial following on X — have exposed audiences to historical facts about Jewish communities in Arab lands that are systematically absent from the progressive anti-Israel narrative.

His personal story is not abstracted history: his grandmothers were refugees from Tunisia and Iraq respectively, and his family's experience of displacement from Middle Eastern homelands is the biographical foundation of his Zionism. At Rank 81, Mazzig is the Mizrahi voice who complicates simplistic narratives about Israel by asserting the reality that for half of Israeli Jews, Israel is not a settler colonial project but the refuge their families reached after being expelled from the Middle East itself.