Word: sephardim
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...inability to appeal to the Sephardic Jewish immigrants from North Africa. Labor's failure to do better was all the more glaring because Peres' opponent was not, as in 1977 and 1981, the impassioned Menachem Begin but the untried and colorless Shamir. The outcome confirmed that the Sephardim, who now constitute a majority of Israel's population, have become a potent political force. Many of them hold a grudge against Labor for supposedly neglecting their needs during the 1950s and 1960s...
Outnumbered and outclassed, the Sephardim quickly drifted to the bottom of the social hierarchy. There they remained, thanks in large part to the shortage of housing: with rental accommodations almost nonexistent and mortgages scarce, the ill-qualified immigrants who longed to settle in Jerusalem, the city of their prayers, found themselves herded instead into cheerless prefabricated tent towns, remote villages precariously close to Arab positions or the Negev wilderness. The more fortunate families that managed to stay in Jerusalem did well to find single rooms, in abandoned Arab houses. There was little work to be found and little food. Often...
...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...
...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...
...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...