Word: sephardi
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...well. At a party meeting to approve the list of Likud ministers, Sharon warned against yielding to Labor on certain issues, including the pace of Jewish settlements on the occupied West Bank. Then a squabble developed over whether the National Religious Party (N.R.P.) with four seats or the Sephardi Torah Guardians (SHAS) also with four, would get the Ministry of Religious Affairs. SHAS, egged on by Sharon, insisted that Shamir deliver the Cabinet post. The N.R.P. demanded the position just as loudly. A predawn meeting on Wednesday between Peres and Shamir failed to break the stalemate...
Only recently have those discrepancies started to fade. "Now we preach social integration. We are busing our children. We have about 25% mixed marriages," says Eliezer Shmueli, a Sephardi who is director general of the Ministry of Education. "There is a renaissance of Sephardic culture and ethnic pride." A record 29 Sephardim sit in the 120-member Knesset; three are in Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir's 19-man Cabinet. Chief of Staff Moshe Levy is a Sephardic Jew, as is Israel Kesar, secretary-general of the 1.1 million-member General Federation of Labor. The second in command of both...
...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...
Such external threats merely compounded the internal traumas confronted by the government of Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. Only last month the opposition Labor Party forced Shamir to schedule early elections for July 23. Soon afterward, it became apparent that Deputy Prime Minister David Levy, a popular Sephardi who was defeated by Shamir for the leadership of their Herut Party last September, still harbored designs on that position. Shamir was, in a sense, saved only by the bell: just three hours before Levy was widely expected to make formal his challenge on national TV, he received a pointed phone call...
...campaign had exploded in anger and resulted in new and disquieting ethnic rifts in the population. Sephardi Jews, predominantly a working-class constituency in the new immigrant cities of Beersheba and Qiryat Shemona and the grimy slums of greater Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, rejected the traditional socialism of the Labor Party in favor of the radical right-wing nationalism of the Likud. In turn, the more affluent Ashkenazi Jews from northern Europe backed Labor. Ironically, Begin, an Ashkenazi from Poland, was idolized by his more extremist Sephardi followers, who proclaimed him "King of Israel" in campaign slogans and songs...