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Race and Ethnicity in Israeli Society

Yemenite Jews at an intake center in Israel, 1948-49 (wikimedia commons)

Among the antisemitic slurs some of the idiots outside of Columbia’s gates hurled at a group of Jewish counter-demonstrators the other night was “Go back to Poland.” This is an especially vile and stupid remark for a number of reasons. First, there is the fact that basically all the Jews in Poland were killed in the Holocaust: Some 90% of its pre-war population of over 3 million. Even after the war ended, Poland was not a particularly welcoming place to its remaining Jews. There were a number of post-war pogroms, including the infamous one at Kielce in which 42 Jews were murdered. Then, in the late 1960s, the Communist Gomułka regime launched an “anti-Zionist” purge against remaining Jews in the party, resulting in the emigration of some 11,000 Jews to Israel. Funny way to do anti-Zionism: putting more Jews in Israel. But finally, as many others have pointed out, more than half of Israeli Jews—between 50% or 55%—are Mizrahim or Sephardim, rather than Ashkenazim. (If you have only a vague understanding of these terms, that’s okay: I tend to find it to be a bad sign when non-Jews have a very detailed knowledge of Jewish ethnic subgroups.)

Mizrahi means “Easterner” or “Oriental” in Hebrew and refers to Jews from Arab, Persian and Turkic lands. They were once also sometimes referred to as “Arab Jews.” Sephardim are the diaspora of Spanish and Portuguese Jews that were expelled during the Inquisition and found refuge around the Mediterranean: in Southern Europe, North Africa and the Levant. Ashkenazim are the Jews that settled in Central and Eastern Europe.

The fact that most of the Israeli population is of non-European descent—including a sizable population of Ethiopian Jews—somewhat complicates the picture given by some Western activists of Israel as a white supremacist settler-colonial state lording it over darker peoples. The Mizrahi population tends to be more religious, more conservative, less educated, less prosperous, and to vote for right-wing parties, like Likud, Shas and the Judeo-Fascist Otzma Yehudit, headed by the national security minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, himself of Mizrahi descent. Demographically speaking, “Mizrahi” refers to all Jews that came from the Islamic world, but in a political context, it most often refers specifically to Jews of Maghrebi origin, from North Africa. And even though Mizrahim and Sephardim are technically distinct groups, the terms are often used interchangeably in political discourse.

Mizrahi and other non-European Jews are also more likely to be IDF combat troops involved in the most dangerous and violent missions in the occupied territories and Gaza: They do a lot of the grunt work of repression. For instance, the Netzah Yehuda battalion recently sanctioned by the U.S. State Department has a very high proportion of religious Mizrahi recruits. A few years ago, IDF recruiters were even caught on a recording talking about how they sorted Mizrahi and Sephardi youth into the brigade.

Mizrahim tend to perceive the Israeli left—in so far it still exists, at all—as elitist and primarily for the Ashkenazim, who have formed the social elite since the formation of the state. “Living in Israel is for us, coming from Arab countries, the continuation of our Jewish identity. Whereas the programme presented by the left is cosmopolitan - in which nationalism is overcome - we, Mizrahi Jews, do not relate at all to this discourse, in which human and civil rights come before our Jewish identity,” as one Likud activist told Middle East Eye.

The Mizrahi/Sephardi majority in Israel and their right-wing tendencies has led to a slightly racist alibi deployed by some American liberal Zionists of Ashkenazi descent: “Hey, don’t look at us, it’s all those crazy Mizrahim over there.” Some on the Israeli left would say this perception comes by by design, or at least is structural: part of an entire racist social apparatus where the most brutal work is given to the underclass so that a white elite can keep its hands (relatively) clean. In a recent piece on the Netzah Yehuda brigade, the Israeli left-wing magazine +972 writes of “Israel’s tendency to outsource the ugliest functions of its colonizing apparatus to marginalized social groups is a fundamental, yet frequently overlooked, piece of the puzzle.” There’s a somewhat analogous discourse in the Arab world portraying Mizrahim as pawns of Zionist Ashkenazim who have endeavored to erase their Arab identity. But these discourses around Mizrahi Jews are problematic: they downplay or excuse the enthusiastic embrace of the Zionist project by many Mizrahim and dismiss their political agency. At its extreme, this discourse can become antisemitic, with evil Ashkenazi overlords depicted as brainwashing the brown hordes. Working-class Mizrahim are often spoken of as “voting against their own interests,” in a similar way as the white working class who vote Republican in the United States. Like in America, this is not said without a little tinge of liberal condescension.

To understand why the Mizrahim became so right wing and nationalist, we have to look to the process by which they became integrated into Israeli society and politics. In the wake of the U.N. Partition vote of 1947 and the 1948 Israeli-Arab war, some 900,000 Jews from the Middle East fled their homes. Around two thirds of these would end up in Israel. When they arrived, the Israeli state was dominated by the largely Ashkenazi founding generation, figures you will have heard of like David Ben-Gurion, Chaim Weizmann, and Golda Meir. The Ashkenazi elite had a paternalistic and prejudiced attitude towards their newly arrived cousins, who were often extremely poor and uneducated. For instance, at the Labor Party Central Committee meeting, Ben-Gurion spoke of “the danger we are faced with is that the great majority of our children whose forebears have been uneducated for generations will sink to the level of Arab peasant children…In another 10 or 15 years they will be the nation, and we will become a Levantine people.” Army Chief of Staff Mordechai Gur’s remarks were even more offensive: he referred to a “retarded mentality deeply rooted in underdeveloped modes of thought, from which even the academic Orientals cannot free themselves sufficiently.” Nasty attitudes were linked with material deprivation and lack of social opportunity. These patterns of discrimination eventually lead to social unrest and protest. In 1959, a series of riots that started in the community of Wadi Salib over the killing of a Morroccan Jewish man by police. And in the 1970s, Mizrahi and Sephardic radicals organized themselves as the Israeli Black Panthers, based on the American Black Panther Party. Some in those radical circles became critics of Zionism, viewing it as an intrinsically racist system, reached out to the Palestinian left and opposed the occupation of the territories. Others merely demanded full integration into Israeli society. But in the latter part of the 1970s, it was the right that ultimately took advantage of Mizrahi alienation.

From the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948 until the end of the 1970s, David Ben-Gurion’s Mapai party and its successor the Israeli Labor Party were the hegemonic force Israeli politics. Then in May 1977, came the Mahapach, the “upheaval” or “revolution”: for the first time, Menachem Begin’s Likud bloc along with several other small religious and right-wing parties won a plurality of the seats in the Knesset and were able to form a government. Although Likud’s leadership, like Labor’s, was overwhelmingly Askenazi, their victory came on the backs of second-generation Mizrahim who resented the high-handed European elites. Begin was able to leverage an outsider image as a tough guy, a former member of the Irgun terrorist group who always opposed the establishment. The party had also made a concerted effort over the course of the decade to build ties with Mizrahi voters and be seen as an alternative to Labor. As the scholar Nissim Leon writes, “The Mizrahim became, for the Likud, what the veteran kibbutz sector and the new Ashkenazi middle class had been for the Labour party: a relatively stable electoral base that rested upon a combination of the promise of socio-economic mobility and respect for the elements of ethnic identity. Among Mizrahim, these elements were first and foremost religious tradition and nationalism.” (This did not mean that Mizrahi Jews ascended to leadership: Likud remained Ashkenazi dominated, a fact that would contribute to the formation of parties like Tami and Shas, which have a more explicit commitment to Sephardic and Mizrahic interests.)

Likud’s ideology is Revisionist Zionism, the far right tradition that has always held maximalist territorial goals for Eretz Israel. In December 1977, Begin told the Knesset, "We do not even dream of the possibility—if we are given the chance to withdraw our military forces from Judea, Samaria and Gaza—of abandoning these areas to the control of the murderous organization that is called the PLO. . . . We have a right and a demand for [Israeli] sovereignty over these areas of Eretz Yisrael. This is our land and it belongs to the Jewish nation rightfully." The Likud government would attempt to “deepen and make permanent Israel’s presence in the West Bank and Gaza,” Mark Tessler writes. In 1981, the election was very close and the rhetoric of the campaign extremely heated. At one rally, Labor chairman Shimon Peres called Mizrahi hecklers “Khomeinists” and told them to go back to their own countries. (Maybe those anti-Zionist protesters outside Columbia should see how that rhetoric worked out for the Israeli Labor Party.) An Israeli comedian named Dudu Topaz used the term “chach’chachim,” a derogatory term used for Mizrahim that means something like a “ruffian.” (An Israeli explained to me it’s a little like “thug “ in American English, colorblind on the surface, but racialized in context.) In a populist masterstroke, Begin told a rally that he had never heard the term before and even pronounced it such a way that made it sound like he was unfamiliar with it. (This would not be the last time an Ashkenazi celebrity used a slur that may handed Likud an election.) Likud would win one more seat than Alignment, the Labor bloc. In 1982, Israel under Begin would invade Lebanon in an effort to uproot the Palestine Liberation Organization, an ill-fated adventure that lead to the massacres of Sabra and Shatila, damaged Israel’s international reputation, and lead to the birth of Hezbollah.

It would be a mistake, however, to put too much weigh on the Ashkenazi-Mizrahi distinction as the sole explanatory factor in Israeli politics. The ethnic issue is often a proxy for other things. A recent study shows that as educational attainment rises, voting behavior starts to look the same. Some argue that increasing rate of mixed marriages is reducing the saliency of ethnic politics. Not all class differences map easily onto these ethnic differences: for instance, Iraqi Jews are often part of the elite. One should also not map Mizrahi onto “Settler” or Religious Zionist: Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich is the head of the more Ashkenazi National Religious Party. The push for “judicial reform” that has roiled Israeli society is sometimes portrayed as an ethnic conflict, but it’s actually a more complicated coalition driving that move. “The three forces driving this are Netanyahu and the Likud's populist drive towards dismantling checks and balance on power; Settlers wanting free reign in the West Bank (and now Gaza) and perceiving the courts as constraining the goal of Jewish supremacy; and ultra-orthodox who want to maintain their sectorial sovereignty against claims of equality (both with the rest of the population and internally, e.g. with segregated schools),” Lior Erez, an Israeli political theorist, explained to me. Still, the simmering resentment of Mizrahim over perceived Ashkenazi privilege and exploitation remains an important factor in Israeli politics.