The legacy of racism toward Mizrahi Jews
The publication of the protocols of the riots in Wadi Salib, disclosing the racism of Israel’s founding generation toward the Mizrahi Jewish population, could have initiated a genuine debate.
In November 2005, Shimon Peres lost the Labor chairmanship to Amir Peretz. A short time after his victory, Peretz triumphantly announced that ethnic tension in Israeli society had come to an end.
"This is the moment we bury the ethnic demon in Israel," Peretz proclaimed in his victory speech. However, the Moroccan-born Peretz discovered soon enough that numerous communities that had supported the Labor Party in the past as far back as its Mapai days (the Mapai was the dominant force in Israeli politics until its merger into the Israeli Labor Party in 1968) — from the big cities as well as the kibbutzim — abandoned Labor together with Peres to support Kadima.
Internal polls ordered by Peretz’s headquarters before the 2006 Knesset elections showed that about six mandates associated with what is commonly called the "white tribe" had stopped supporting the Labor Party. In their eyes, Peretz was a sectarian Mizrahi (Oriental) leader. Labor under Peretz garnered 19 mandates in the elections only because he succeeded in recruiting an alternate electorate from the cities in the periphery.
Later on, Peretz discovered that the same ethnic demon he had supposedly buried on the night of his victory at the primaries threatened to bury him under a landslide of racist stereotypes that reached their height during the Second Lebanon War when he served as defense minister. And when he did speak, afterward, about his disillusionment during those days and his disappointment at his lack of success in serving as a national leader, he did so briefly and quietly. Peretz justifiably did not want to become the latest Mizrahi crybaby of Israeli politics.
