AHC: Get Mizrahi Jews to back Left Wing Parties

TinyTartar

Banned
One of the biggest trends in Israeli politics is the racial divide. Traditionally, white Ashkenazi Jews have backed socialist parties and the Mizrahi Jews (ones from Arab and North African countries) have backed right wing parties or religious parties, with Likud and Shas being the most notable of the two. Russian ex-pats on the other hand tend to support extreme nationalist parties.

I have never really understood this divide, but I am interested in how it could be changed. Historically, the Mizrahi were victims of discrimination when they arrived, often living in squalid tent cities for years after fleeing Arab countries, and to an extent, there is still a racial issue. Ashkenazi Jews tend to attend college in much higher numbers, have more relative wealth, better job security, and face less challenges in gaining housing. Prejudice still exists, and this past election was a huge racial talking point, with Ashkenazi intellectuals afterwards castigating the Mizrahi for their support of Likud, often in racist dialogue.

Basically, I am wondering how this trend could have been changed. The Mizrahi were a huge factor in the election of 1977 that overthrew the Socialists for the first time. Do you think that had the Socialist government been less discriminatory towards the Mizrahi at the time of their arrival in the 50s and 60s, we might see a more vibrant Mizrahi Left Wing?

By the same token, for a party that attracts a lot of Mizrahi and Sephardic votes, Likud has a very white leadership group. Do you think this could have changed as well?
 

TinyTartar

Banned
Maybe have the left be more nationalist.

The left is plenty nationalist, or at least was when the Mizrahi arrived. Maybe a little bit too much so, seeing as the Socialists in charge back then were basically racist assholes to the Mizrahi and did not see them as "proper" Zionists due to their aversion to Kibbutzim and tendency to represent the "Old Diaspora Jew" who meekly submitted to other groups and permitted oppression, as they were forced out of Arab countries and not because they wanted to go to Israel for the most part.

The Mizrahi were frequently more religious than the secular Zionists from the second Aliyah that included famous leaders like Ben-Gurion and Moshe Dayan. This allowed the settler faction to make inroads with them.
 
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At university I took a class on ethnic relations taught by an Israeli expat, and one lesson was devoted to the plight of the Mizrahi(can't recall if he used that name, but that was clearly the group he was talking about).

One of the things he mentioned was that there was a militant, left-wing group of Mizrahi, who called themselves, in an obvious appropriation, The Black Panthers. I don't recall all the details, but apparently one of their big "actions" was smashing milk bottles that had been left outside peoples homes for morning delivery. So, evidently, not the most bloodthirsty bunch of revolutionaries around.

The prof wrapped things up by saying that most of the Mizrahi drifted into the Likud, but he didn't dwell on the contradition between this and the earlier emergence of the Panthers. I guess maybe the Mizrahi were sort of the Okies of Israeli politics, ie. a slight militant fringe during the 1930s(at least going by that famous book), but morphing into the biggest bunch of rednecks imaginable after settling in California for a few years. (Yes yes, I know, generalizations)
 
Don't have the Ashkenazi left-wing establishment treat them like second-class shit during the early years.

What's funny is that the Ashkenazi right-wing actually treated them worse, but wasn't the Establishment, and so was later able to manipulate them by pointing out leftist discrimination [that the rightists only didn't perform because they hadn't had the opportunity]
 
What's funny is that the Ashkenazi right-wing actually treated them worse, but wasn't the Establishment, and so was later able to manipulate them by pointing out leftist discrimination [that the rightists only didn't perform because they hadn't had the opportunity]

Pretty much.

I think you need a left-wing reformist leader who bridges the gap between the old-guard Mapai left and the rising Mizrahi New Left. I don't know who that would be, but an early-splintering Mapai combined with a Gahal/Likud that wins faster and doesn't moderate as much in terms of policy might leave an opening for a third force on the reformist left, especially if the remnants of Mapai align themselves with the bourgeois liberal parties.
 

TinyTartar

Banned
Pretty much.

I think you need a left-wing reformist leader who bridges the gap between the old-guard Mapai left and the rising Mizrahi New Left. I don't know who that would be, but an early-splintering Mapai combined with a Gahal/Likud that wins faster and doesn't moderate as much in terms of policy might leave an opening for a third force on the reformist left, especially if the remnants of Mapai align themselves with the bourgeois liberal parties.

This might do it, but I also think that maybe fundamentally altering Likud's outlook in the 70s would help. They actually made an effort to gain the Mizrahi vote by focusing on issues important to them, and most of all, were not so dismissive of religion. Perhaps having a figure other than Menachem Begin, who spoke out against the plight of the Mizrahi and made a tangible effort to gain support from that community, at the head would help.

Seeing as the Mizrahi took their religious faith much more serious than the secular Left did, the constant "haha those Superstitious and brown Moroccans" jokes had an effect that fundamentally excluded the Mizrahi from the left.

The Black Panther movement was something interesting but not really all that significant. What might have been far better approach to get the Mizrahi on board with the left would be to find a way to reconcile religious Judaism with secular socialist Kibbutz focused Zionism. If you do this, you have a start. Revisionist Zionism was always kind of fringe anyways, and the Israeli Right has always been more centered around Russian Jewish ideology rather than the Mizrahi issues themselves, making room for a wedge exist.
 

TinyTartar

Banned
Don't have the Ashkenazi left-wing establishment treat them like second-class shit during the early years.

Of course, I do wonder why this happened in the first place. You can call it racial or religious prejudice and be correct, but seeing as the immigrants gave Israel the manpower to defend themselves when they needed it badly, you'd think they'd be welcomed with open arms.

I guess left wing racism is also a thing.
 
Perhaps having a figure other than Menachem Begin, who spoke out against the plight of the Mizrahi and made a tangible effort to gain support from that community, at the head would help.

According to that prof I cited earlier, Begin's efforts at getting votes among the Mizrahi led to(obviously false) rumours that he was Mizrahi himself. The prof said these rumours were obviously implausible, given that Begin had fairly obvious Polish mannerisms.
 

TinyTartar

Banned
According to that prof I cited earlier, Begin's efforts at getting votes among the Mizrahi led to(obviously false) rumours that he was Mizrahi himself. The prof said these rumours were obviously implausible, given that Begin had fairly obvious Polish mannerisms.

I think it was more of a Bill Clinton "Honorary Black Man" type of thing, as Begin was one of only politicians from a major party who paid the recent arrivals much attention and made a serious effort to gain their votes, but yeah, he was well known to be Polish in origin. And let's be honest, if he wasn't European, he probably would not have become party leader to start with. As it has been pointed out, just because Likud became the party of the Mizrahi did not mean that they did not share the initial prejudices of the Socialist Establishment.
 
Of course, I do wonder why this happened in the first place. You can call it racial or religious prejudice and be correct, but seeing as the immigrants gave Israel the manpower to defend themselves when they needed it badly, you'd think they'd be welcomed with open arms.

I guess left wing racism is also a thing.

You should have seen some of the commentary coming from white "progressive" Canadians, when they finally realized that Rob Ford, who they had long lambasted as a white supremacist, was getting a significant amount of support from people-of-colour in the Toronto suburbs.

"Yeah, well, big surprise, most of these people come from third-world hellholes where they shoot girls for going to school, so I guess a guy like Ford seems pretty good by comparison."

Which is probably accurate, to some degree. The bar for tolerable political behaviour is likely to be set a bit lower for someone accustomed to living in a violent dictatorship. Still, it was the kind of rhetoric that progressives would have denounced as racist had it been used by right-wingers to dismiss POC support for left-wing parties.
 
Of course, I do wonder why this happened in the first place. You can call it racial or religious prejudice and be correct, but seeing as the immigrants gave Israel the manpower to defend themselves when they needed it badly, you'd think they'd be welcomed with open arms.

I guess left wing racism is also a thing.

There was definitely a strong element of racism from the Ashkenazi establishment.

Another part of it though was an effort on the part of Mizrahi Jews to clearly demonstrate that they weren't members of the lowest caste of Israeli society, Arabs. Most Mizrahi Jews had been fairly well integrated into Arab societies prior to the rise of Zionism and the colonization of the Middle East. Even into the 1930s, Baghdad was 40% Jewish. Most Iraqi and Egyptian Jews would have told you that they were Jewish Arabs, rather than Arab Jews or Mizrahi Jews.

Their expulsion from the Arab states over the course of the 1950s and early 60s led them to Israel. There, the Ashkenazi elite pushed them to assimilate into a newly constructed Israeli identity based on Ashkenazi settler norms. Part of that assimilation eventually became support for a more harsh, racist right that more loudly proclaimed Jewish nationhood, undivided by class or origin. Basically, Mizrahi Jews kicked down the ladder through their politics in order to demonstrate that they were full members of the dominant group.
 
Heh. From wikipedia...

Prior to the demonstration, representatives of the Panthers had met with Prime MinisterGolda Meir on 13 April, who characterized them as "not nice people".

A group of activists from Muslala named two routes through Jerusalem's Musrara neighborhood "Black Panthers Way" and "They're Not Nice Alley" in 2011, the latter taken from the comments made about the Panthers by Golda Meir.[6]

This quote must be pretty famous, since my prof quoted it when discussing the Panthers in that sociology class, though his version was "not nice kids".

link
 
I'm not an expert on the topic, and it may be an Arab-centric point-of-view, but I have always understand the Mizrahim's attachment to the right to be, largely, related to the pro-peace vs. hawks divide re: the Palestinian Peace Process. As was mentioned earlier, most the the Mizrahim were forced out of their homes, not necessarily because they had ipso facto a Zionist desire to immigrate to Israel. Given this historical memory, I assume(d) it plays a role.
 

TinyTartar

Banned
I'm not an expert on the topic, and it may be an Arab-centric point-of-view, but I have always understand the Mizrahim's attachment to the right to be, largely, related to the pro-peace vs. hawks divide re: the Palestinian Peace Process. As was mentioned earlier, most the the Mizrahim were forced out of their homes, not necessarily because they had ipso facto a Zionist desire to immigrate to Israel. Given this historical memory, I assume(d) it plays a role.

I think you make a pretty good point. I know for a fact that my grandparents on my mom's side will never cast a vote for the Democratic Party because of how Kennedy handled the Bay of Pigs invasion.

The treatment by the Ashkenazi Socialist Left Wing Elite did not help the matter in driving them towards Likud, but I am guessing that Mizrahi Jews driven out of their homes in a manner reminiscent of the Naqba are going to hate the Arab Muslims just as much as the Palestinians are going to hate the Jews.
 
Do not really see how the Ashkenazi Leftist Establishment can get the Mizrahi Jews to back Leftist parties, what given their Leftist Eurocentric discrimination and attempt to stamp out Mizrahi Jewish religous traditions soon after the latter has been dispossessed by the Arabs, who the Leftist establishment even during war has always sought to make conciliatory moves towards even after the 6-day War (with their post-war anti-religious actions likely further alienating the more religious-leaning Mizrahi Jews).

They would first have to ditch their Eurocentric Socialism in favor of a more religious indigenous Jewish Asian-centric form of Socialism (or ditch the Socialism entirely) and be much less conciliatory towards the Arabs then OTL in order to curry favor with Mizrahi Jews, except those Arabs who pledged their loyalty to Israel entailing an earlier POD.

The Leftist Establishment would have to do at minimum the following and even that has a limited chance of success.

1) Capitalize on the still-present grievances Mizrahi Jews have of the Jewish Nakba instead of ignoring it, begin the process of documenting the testimony of the Jewish refugees as well as the total loss of wealth, land and possessions of Mizrahi Jews (even those who left for Western countries instead of Israel) confiscated by the Arabs towards demanding Reparations in any peace agreement.

2) Teach Mizrahi Jewish history as well as of life under Islamic rule instead of making it a mythical yet curt historical footnote compared to European Jewish history that at times eerily resembles how Uncle Ruckus (from Boondocks) views the antebellum as a Golden Age.

Also aside from the minority of Assimilationists and Leftist-intellectual Mizrahi Jews, many Mizrahi Jews overall do not see themselves as Arab in much the same way an English-speaking Irishman or Scotsman do not see themselves as English.

3) Make the Holocaust into a more collective Jewish experience instead of exclusively a European Jewish experience by highlighting the unrealised and unrepentant genocidal intentions of many Arabs (the mufti of Jerusalem who like Hitler was inspired by the Armenian Genocide), the Farhud, what would have happened had the Nazis won at El Alamein and the North African victims of the Holocaust.

4) Embrace a type of Affirmative Action to allow Mizrahi Jews to integrate more quickly, though Israel could ill-afford such an idea.

The first 3 are more realistic though again the anti-religious socialism of the Ashkenazi Leftist Establishment would still alienate many Mizrahi Jews.
 
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