During the late 1980s and early 1990s, government minister Haim Ramon and Shas Chairman Aryeh Deri were a political pair of contradictions with significant power. Ramon, a blue-eyed Ashkenazi, was considered a rising star in the Labor Party. Deri, a native of Meknes, Morocco, was Shas' boy wonder, minister of interior at age 29. The two men hypnotized the press. The height of their collaboration was 1990's Foul Trick, which led to the collapse of the unity government headed by Likud Chairman Yitzhak Shamir.

Ramon later said that what he loved about Deri was his daring, his refusal to be obsequious toward the Ashkenazim “who run the country” and his ability to negotiate as an equal with Yitzhak Rabin, the ultimate sabra (Ashkenazi Israel native), as if he were the prime minister, and not the reverse.

Ramon also noted that his own party included talented and educated Mizrahi who attained key posts, but when facing the Ashkenazi elite, he contended, they acted like little, grateful children, even when they experienced systemic ethnic discrimination. It seems Ramon was thinking of, among others, Shlomo Ben-Ami, a brilliant historian and native of Morocco raised in the northern periphery town of Kiryat Shmona. Ben-Ami had been a rising star in the Labor Party at the end of the 1990s, when in 1999 the party chairman, Ehud Barak, appointed him minister of home security of all things. At that time, that portfolio was regularly given to politicians of Mizrahi background.

This anecdote — whose significance Ramon, with his sharp political senses, discerned — is more than a narrow political analysis. Ramon essentially came to see Shas, and Deri, as its leader, as an expression of proud and unapologetic Mizrahi identity. This perspective won the hearts of hundreds of thousands of Mizrahi voters for Shas.