Labour finds its campaign voice by reviving the Ashkenazi-Mizrahi rift
“THE TRIBAL Demon” makes an appearance at least once every Israeli election campaign.
Even though many pollsters and sociologists believe that, for most Israelis, the Ashkenazi-Mizrahi divide is no more — and certainly not a political issue — elections have a way of dredging up deep and dormant traumas.
Usually it happens when some luminary of the left issues a gem of bigotry against the “mezuzah-kissing riffraff” and the leaders of the right are quick to use it to rally their base.
In the 2019 election, however, it is the left that is generating the grievance.
Labour leader Avi Gabbay launched the broadside last Saturday night when he said that “a self-respecting Mizrahi, one who respects his parents and heritage, and his parents’ aspirations to one day be equal in Israel, who thinks his child is equal ... cannot vote for the Netanyahu family.”
Mr Gabbay, himself the son of immigrants from Morocco, was referring to the fact that Likud’s official campaign photograph of party leaders featured seven Ashkenazi men, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Knesset Speaker Yule Edelstein and five ministers.
Conspicuously missing from the frame were the only two Mizrahim — and only women — in the top ten spots of the Likud’s candidates list, Miri Regev and Gila Gamliel.
Eager to position Labour as the main opponent to Mr Netanyahu’s party and to chip away at Likud’s Mizrahi vote, Mr Gabbay said their exclusion was an “act of racism.”
He also alluded to a series of antiMizrahi statements that were allegedly made by Mr Netanyahu and his wife Sara over the years.
One of these remarks, which Mr Gabbay subsequently referenced in an interview, is at least 40 years old and taken from the memoirs of Sir Max Hastings, the veteran British journalist and historian.
Mr Hastings was commissioned in the late 1970s to write a biography of Yoni Netanyahu, who was killed commanding one of the special forces teams that rescued Israeli hostages from Entebbe Airport in 1976. In his own memoirs, Going to the Wars, Mr Hastings dedicates a chapter to his time working on the biography and recounts a conversation “at Bibi Netanyahu’s dinner table in Jerusalem”.
It was here that he reported the future prime minister, then aged 29, as saying of the Golani Brigade, an infantry unit with a high proportion of Mizrahi soldiers: “they’re okay as long as they’re led by Israeli officers.”
At the time, Mr Netanyahu was a private citizen. Saying such a thing today of the popular Golanchikim, would be political suicide.
When Sir Max’s memoirs came out in 2000 Mr Netanyahu denied the quote vehemently, saying that the author was “anti-Israel”.
It is true that over the years Sir Max has severely criticised Israeli policies in his columns, but his ardently proIsrael coverage of the Yom Kippur War was one of the reasons he was commissioned to write Yoni Netanyahu’s story.
He fell out with the Netanyahu family, so he claims, when the manuscript he produced was not sufficiently hagiographic.
Whether or not this old quotation will stick to Mr Netanyahu and the Mizrahi issue will have any effect on the election results, it is at least a sign of how the Labour Party has realised that the Israeli opposition can only win by, to quote one of its senior politicians this week, “fighting dirty
like Netanyahu.”