Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By richards on April 5, 2015

ROSH HA'AYIN, Israel Israel's visceral election campaign has exposed a rift that many here thought had long subsided the deep-seated schism between Jews of European and Middle Eastern descent.

Mizrahi, or Middle Eastern, Jews heavily backed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud Party, while Ashkenazi, or European, Jews mostly identified with the opposition Zionist Union.

That dynamic has been going on for a while, but passions have run particularly high this time, with jarring results. Since Netanyahu's win, the sides have been exchanging insults that have not been heard in public in a generation with the Mizrahi voters accused of being primitive and Ashkenazi voters viewed as elitist.

The dispute goes back to Israel's earliest days of independence. Arriving from Arabic-speaking countries in the Middle East and North Africa after Israel's establishment in 1948, many Mizrahi immigrants were sent to shantytown transit camps and largely sidelined by the European leaders of the founding Labor Party.

They found their political savior in Likud's Menachem Begin even though he was himself of Polish Jewish descent. With consummate skill, the longtime opposition leader cultivated an outsiders' alliance that appealed to their sense of deprivation and with massive Mizrahi backing, he swept to power in 1977 to break nearly 30 years of Labor rule.

The exact population breakdown is hard to calculate because intermarriage is now quite common. But Mizrahi or part-Mizrahi Jews make up roughly half of Israel's Jewish population.

They have long complained of discrimination by the European-descended elite that traditionally dominated government, military and business institutions.

The complaints have diminished, as has some of the domination, but gaps remain. There has never been a Mizrahi prime minister, for example. Mizrahim far outnumber Ashkenazim in prison and are far outnumbered in academia.

They account for many more poor people and yet the poorest towns, where they predominate, tend to support Likud and forgive it the capitalist policies than have often not served their economic interests.

Our parents and grandparents have voted only Likud since the upheaval of 1977, said Malkiram Bashari, who traces his roots to Yemen.

The rest is here:

Israel election exposes schism

Category: Ashkenazi
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