http://www3.haaretz.co.il/eng/scripts/show_katava.asp?id=24948
Ha'aretz, July 30, 1998
Labor and the Sephardim
By Daniel Ben-Simon
The relations between Sephardi voters of
Mediterranean and Middle Eastern origin and
the Labor movement began as a love story. From
one wave of immigration to the next, the
political strength of Mapai (Labor's
precursor) consistently grew.
The immigrants of the 1950s became voters
immediately on their arrival and they had the
power to change the balance of power between
left and right. They chose to vote for Mapai,
the same Mapai that brought them to the
country.
In the 1951 and 1955 elections more than 70
percent of the ma'abara (transit camp)
dwellers voted Mapai. Indeed, it's ironic that
in those years, while the party was losing
strength among more veteran Israelis, it made
up for those losses with more votes from North
African immigrants.
But as the years passed, the gap grew between
veteran immigrants and the Labor movement. The
great break came in 1977, which put an end to
Labor's 29-year dominance of the political
system.
Social oppression, life on the margin of
society, and a powerfully painful sense of
insult combined to accelerate the movement of
Sephardi voters from Labor to the Likud. Labor
looked patronizing, corrupt, determined to
keep the Sephardim on the bottom rung of the
social ladder, as if they were doomed to
eternal second grade citizenship, never quite
Israeli and incompetent to run the country.
They took their revenge. Since 1977, they have
voted Likud. Even after the Likud disappointed
them with hyper-inflation, an unpopular war in
Lebanon and the Intifada, Sephardi voters
found it difficult to go back to voting Labor.
Several factors contributed to that
reluctance, but in particular have been
damaging rhetorical gaffes by Laborites. Three
incidents stand out from the tight 1981
election campaign - one involving entertainer
Dudu Topaz, a second involving Shimon Peres,
and a third by the late Mordechai Gur.
Topaz started it at a Labor election rally in
which he called Likud voters "chach-chachim,"
meaning the "unwashed." A few days later,
Peres tried to shout down a mass of booing
Likud hecklers by calling them "Khomenists,"
and Gur, a former chief of staff, went even
further, calling out to a mob of screaming
Likudniks trying to break up a Labor rally,
"We'll beat you like we beat the Arabs." All
three gaffes created massive political fallout
that benefited Likud.
Now, Ori Orr's comments* have joined that
gallery of quotes of iniquity. It remains to
be seen whether the across-the-board
condemnation of Orr by the Labor establishment
will limit the damage.
(c) copyright 1998 Ha'aretz. All Rights Reserved
(*) In a 07/29/1998 Ha'aretz interview with Daniel Ben-Simnon on
MK Orr explained:
"The problem ... is that I cannot speak with these people
like I do with others who are more Israeli in character.
Every time you
say something they immediately jump, are insulted and
hurt, and begin to carry on." He singled out Israelis of
Moroccan descent, saying they "have no curiosity to know
what's happening around them and why." He said that defense
Minister Yitzhak Mordechai is "a champion of complexes."
