[6] Her father and his friends were told to stop speaking Arabic in the workplace and Shohat herself recalls similar messages being communicated to children at school.
[6] She described herself and other schoolchildren as "unknowing targets of mental colonization [...] [who] were expected to delete [...] the past across the border [and] also the transplanted Baghdads, Cairos or Rabats of our homes and neighborhoods".
[8] Kelly noted that Shohat "constructs meaningful parallels between dislocated Arab-Jews and displaced Palestinians with the establishment of the Israeli state in 1948" in order to "point to the multiple violences that animate life in the wake of occupation and exile".
[8] Israeli historian and activist Ilan Pappe named Shohat as one of a group of notable scholars, along with Sami Shalom Chetrit, who have "done much to expose" the "invidious process of de-Arabisation" that the Mizrahim were put through when arriving in the new state of Israel.
[7][10] Ella Shohat's work has been translated into many languages including Arabic, Hebrew, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Polish, Turkish, Italian and Japanese.