How the Sephardim Won Political Clout in Israel

(3 of 4)

The founders of Israel hoped that children from both Sephardic and European families could be taught together, and in the process learn togetherness. In practice, however, classrooms only increased the sense of separation. Run in the main by Ashkenazim, Israeli schools concentrated on Western poetry and European history; their liturgies were the Ashkenazic ones. Not surprisingly, students from Ashkenazic homes with book lined shelves easily outperformed Sephardic children. "We achieved nothing," says Yehuda Amir, director of the Institute of Integration at Tel Aviv's Bar-ilan University. "The Sephardic children came from large families, lived in crowded quarters and could make little or no progress. Their drop-out rate was high. And it was impossible to have good schools in poor neighborhoods.''

Such inequities were aggravated by the open disrespect in which many Ashkenazic leaders held their compatriots. In 1950 one Ashkenazic writer in the Tel Aviv daily Ha 'aretz cavalierly described North African immigrants as "completely ruled by primitive and wild passions" and warned that "in their camps you will find dirt, cardgames for money, drunkenness and fornication." Though the Sephardim regarded Ben-Gurion as a messianic deliverer, he declared in a 1965 interview that " the Jews from Morocco have no education. They love their wives, but they beat them. The culture of Morocco I would not like to have here." Golda Meir hardly bothered to conceal her distaste for those from "countries that have not developed intellectually, industrially and culturally."

The first major eruption of those long-simmering tensions came on a hot summer's day in 1959 in the squalid Wadi Salib area of Haifa, where 15,000 people, mostly Moroccans, were crammed into tenements. After a policeman wounded a Moroccan, crowds of Sephardim unleashed their pent-up anger. They pelted policemen with stones, wrecked some 25 local shops, burned two buildings and, in the process, sent a shudder through the nation.

As recently as December 1983, when a policeman shot a Sephardi in a rundown area of Tel Aviv, local Sephardim ran riot, painting swastikas all around. Two months later, when the Peace Now movement, dominated by Ashkenazim, took to the streets of the capital to call for the retirement of former Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, his supporters, mostly Sephardim, stormed the rally, screaming obscenities and tearing up placards. One demonstrator was killed. In explaining why he forsook a career as a distinguished archaeologist to enter politics, the late former Deputy Premier Yigael Yadin of the Likud coalition said, "I thought [the ethnic trouble] was the greatest danger to Israel, more than all the Arabs put together."