It's already become a permanent fixture in elections: The ethnic card is being played yet again. It appears to be unavoidable — at some point, there will always be someone who will pull that card from the deck and reawaken all of the gaps and rifts between Mizrahim (Jews of north-African and Middle-Eastern origin) and Ashkenazim (Jews of East European origin) to get voters to the polls and vote the right way.
The technique for creating an ethnic campaign is simple: First, choose a short and catchy slogan such as "recapturing the glory of the past." Then, try to evoke a little of the pain of discrimination felt by the Mizrahim, while tapping into the fury against the elite social groups, and finally, strengthen how closely they identify with those very feelings of discrimination down the generations. At the end of this process, they go cast their ballots.
The man who elevated the technique of the ethnic campaign to an art form was, of course, Menachem Begin, the former leader of the Likud who was elected prime minister of Israel in 1977. Although he was Polish by ancestry and in his mannerisms, Begin was the first to recognize the tremendous electoral potential of the sense of alienation felt by the Mizrahim. As he was also a gifted speaker — some would say a "gifted demagogue" — Begin’s speeches in development towns and town squares, the best-known of which was the so-called chach-chach (derogatory word for Mizrahim) speech against the “Ashkenazi” Labor Party, captivated masses of Mizrahim, who found a home with the Likud, a party that had its roots in Eastern European revisionism, as did most of its leaders.
A few years later, in the 1980s, the Shas (Sephardi Torah Guardians) party was formed. It was founded to counter the Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Ashkenazi parties, which until that time were the only representation of Haredim in politics. The great success of Shas is its stability. The Mizrahi-Haredi party has been part of this political landscape for decades, with a hard core of Haredi and traditionalist Mizrahi voters.
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