5 Inequality Facing Mizrahi Jews in Israel

This chapter focused on the intersection between the socio-economic divide and the ethnic divide in Israel and especially the inequality the Mizrahi Jews face.

We suggest this citation for this chapter:

Tennison, Eli J (2024) “Inequality Facing Mizrahi Jews in Israel.” In Zeedan, Rami (ed.), Israel’s Divides Explained. The University of Kansas. https://opentext.ku.edu/israelsdivides/

1. General Introduction:

Hello!

Welcome to a new episode of the podcast series “Israel’s Divides Explained.” Titled The Ethnic Divide: Inequality Facing Mizrahi Jews in Israel.

Although this episode will cover a variety of sociocultural relationships among Israelis, the overarching focus will be on the Ethnic Divide within Israeli society, which covers the divide between Jewish Ethnic groups within Israel.

This episode was produced during the spring semester of 2023 as part of Professor Zeedan’s course, Israel: From Idea to Statehood, at the University of Kansas.

I’m your host, Eli Tennison, and I’m a junior and a history major at the University of Kansas.

This topic bears particular relevance and interest to me because I am of Ashkenazi Jewish descent on my mother’s side via Hungary and was raised Jewish. Still, I do not have a familial connection to the Holocaust like many Hungarian Jews and European Jews as a whole because my great-grandparents came to the United States after World War I. As a result, I find myself empathizing with both Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Jews from their perspectives after World War II; many Ashkenazi Jews were terrified of what the future held if they allowed themselves to be governed by an establishment that could turn on them once again, and Mizrahi Jews were simultaneously negatively affected by the rising political temperature created by Ashkenazi Jewish settlement in Palestine and were disappointed by the increasing formation of a state that seemed to exclude them in the name of honoring the trauma of the Holocaust, even though it claimed it was for all Jewish people

2. Topic introduction:

The topic I will be focusing on is the inequality that faces Mizrahi Jews within Israel after the founding of the state in 1948. After the founding of the state, many Mizrahi Jews, characterized as Jewish people of Middle Eastern or North African descent, were expelled from their countries and came to Israel, hoping to find refuge from the problems they’d faced, only to enter a society that continued to see them as unequal. This inequality has been a continuing problem for the entirety of Israel’s history.

The overarching question is: In what ways do Mizrahi Jews face inequality in Israeli society?
This is important for a variety of reasons. Israel considers itself a state of equality within its founding documents so it is necessary to examine the status of the ethnic divide to discern whether that promise to the people is being upheld. Additionally. with current events pointing towards possible continued policies of inequality within the country, it is essential to assess how the Ethnic Divide plays into the problems that Israel faces today.

Events like the passing of the Nation-State Basic Law (2018) and how it affects the viewed legitimacy of the Arab culture of Mizrahi Jews by the state also represent how the Ethnic Divide continues to be highly relevant in modern Israel.

The information here is based on a selection of primary and secondary sources; however, this survey is not exhaustive.

One of my primary sources for this episode is Morris, Benny, and Yaron Tsur. from 2010.

It primarily concerns the history of Mizrahi inequality in Israel compared to their Ashkenazi counterparts and how historical forces shape this ongoing inequality by classification. It also traces how generational inequality for Mizrahi Jews continues to compound and affect the Mizrahi population into the modern day. I will be posting my sources online. More details are at the end of this episode.

In our episode today, we will discuss four major items: Item 1 will be a Short introduction to Israel, Item 2 will be an Introduction to the six divides and the Ethnic divide in Israel, Item 3 will be the answer to the central question, “The Inequality Faced by Mizrahi Jews,” and Item 4 will be Looking to the future.

To get started, here’s a fun fact: Did you know that the Mizrahi Jews of the 1970s had their own political party based upon the ideals of the Black Panther Party?

3. Central Section

3.1 Introduction to Israel

We’ll start with a quick history of the Ethnic Divide and Israel.

The Balfour Declaration (1917) marks the point at which European Jews began settling in Palestine in large numbers, with the governing body’s permission (Britain). This was the first major step towards mass immigration into Palestine and establishing a state for Jews, an imperial superpower with jurisdiction over the area approved of it.

European Jews continually migrated to Palestine, especially after the Holocaust, and they achieved independence as a state in 1948. Establishment as the “Jewish AND Democratic” state; the state is created FOR Jewish people, but not necessarily exclusively OF Jewish people.

1948 Arab-Israeli War, “The Nakba/The Catastrophe”; Israel begins to form its own national identity in response to aggression from surrounding Arab states over their founding of the state of Israel within Palestine. At the same time, Palestinians face a significant blow to their own national interests in the formation of a state in the wake of British withdrawal.

Many Jews in Arab countries are exiled, and others leave as a result of rising political temperatures leading to anti-semitism; Israel’s founding documents specifically outline their status as complete equals under the law and welcome within the new state. “Jewish AND Democratic State” in theory applies to them, but it is quickly learned that it does not always apply in practice.

Settlements placed on the periphery began to be populated primarily with Mizrahi Jews, while European Jews lived mainly in the economic center. These ‘development towns’ include incredibly sparse infrastructure and little communication with the dynamic city centers being formed in developed Israel.

1971, Formation of the Israeli Black Panther Party in response to the failures of the Israeli Government in addressing the infrastructural and resource-based needs of the Mizrahi Jewish community.

During the 1970s, a shift began to occur in which Mizrahi Jews disenfranchised by left-leaning parties in control began to vote en masse for Likud.

2018 Nation-State Basic Law, demotion of Arabic as the state language (Zeedan, 2020).

If you want to learn more, read Morris, Benny, and Yaron Tsur (2010). “Israeli Historiography and the Ethnic Problem.”

3.2 Introduction to the Six Divides and the Ethnic Divide

Within Israeli Society, six major divides exist: the Political Divide, the National Divide, the Ethnic Divide, the Socioeconomic Divide, the Religious Divide, and the Gender Divide. Each of these divides represents how the people living within Israel experience conflict due to numerous vectors of personal identity; they are the primary struggles Israel faces within itself (Zeedan, 2024). This episode is explicitly about the Ethnic Divide, which concerns the division between ethnic groups of Jewish people within Israeli society; this covers groups including but not limited to Ashkenazi Jews, Mizrahi Jews, Ethiopian Jews, and Russian Jews within Israel. The primary facet of the ethnic divide that will be explored within this podcast episode is the interaction of Mizrahi Jews in Israeli Society and the inequality they face as a result of their ethnic identity. Hence, this intersects with the socio-economic divide.

The identity of ‘Mizrahi’ is a relatively new construct related to Israeli Society; before 1948, many Middle Eastern and North African Jews just considered themselves a Jewish ethnic group within their country’s national population (Moroccan Jews, for example). Mizrahi’s presence in Palestine did not exist pre-state as many of the Mizrahi Jews were still living in their home countries in North Africa and the Middle East.

It wasn’t until the founding of the state and the exiling of Jews from those countries that Mizrahi Jews began to settle in Palestine and were discriminated against by the new Israeli state; both the exiling and the discrimination contributed to the formation of a new ethnic identity in opposition to those forces. As a result of the discrimination, Mizrahi Jews were faced with a unique crossroads; they were no longer welcomed into many of their home countries but were simultaneously second-class citizens within a country that claimed to be ‘for them.’

The Israeli Black Panther Party arose in the early 1970s as a result of the government’s discrimination against Mizrahi Jews and tried to create infrastructure to help fulfill the needs of the community that the government was not meeting. Mizrahi settlements, up until this point, had broadly been qualified as ‘development towns’ based on the economic periphery, and their rights/resources were heavily infringed upon, so the Israeli Black Panther Party demonstrated in the early 1970s to try to galvanize the government towards equality for Mizrahi Jews. More about this movement can be read in Shalom Cohen and Kokhavi Shemesh’s “The Origin and Development of the Israeli Black Panther Movement” (1976), which will be linked below.

Political parties have historically ignored the voices of Mizrahi Jews. Imposed legislation like the Nation-State Basic Law affects many of the things that Mizrahi Jews identify with, like language and Arabic culture and how the government perceives them. The demotion of Arabic from a state language to one with a ‘special status’ is just an example of how Likud works against the interests of equality and cultural respect for Mizrahi Jews. But, it is important to remember that part of Likud’s political power is drawn from the fact that left-leaning parties also massively hurt the interests of Mizrahi Jews through institutions like development towns.

The YouTube video I included from 2020 concerns a group of Mizrahi Jews protesting against the Nation State Basic Law. The primary reason behind this is that it creates a false dichotomy of Arab vs. Jewish that Mizrahi Jews do not feel represents them; they have Arab cultural and ethnic roots and Jewish religious roots, so the Nation-State Basic Law is discriminating against half of their identity. Additionally, based on Israel’s geographic location, Arabic is the indigenous language of the land and has been for centuries, so the Mizrahi Jews also see the restriction of it to just a “special status” as the erasure of Arabic and Mizrahi Jewish history in the region.

3.3 The answer to my question: The Inequality Facing Mizrahi Jews

• Socially Instituted Marriage Restrictions

By looking at the source from the Times of Israel (2022) linked below concerning the invention of new statistics for Mizrahi Jews, it is clear how the government disenfranchises modern Mizrahi Jews in several facets.

In Israel, ethnic lines reinforced by the Ethnic Divide create great societal pressures towards marrying within both Ethnic and Religious lines. As the data from a 2022 article from the Times of Israel shows, in 2018, only 15% of Israelis in the 25—to 43-year-old age group were of mixed ethnic heritage. This seems to be primarily a social problem in isolation, but it becomes significantly more complicated when socioeconomic factors are considered, like class mobility.

This can be quantified as a form of social discrimination or isolation that manifests itself in economic inequality; it is representative of the broader lack of integration within Israeli society that Mizrahi Jews face. Intercultural marriages can often be representative of and serve as a means towards societal integration, which can incentivize greater steps towards equality for all; by instituting these kinds of social boundaries and norms, Israeli society can maintain the status quo of inequality and segregation without ever necessarily involving the government.

This also ties into the greater Ethnic Divide because it is indicative of the complex social and cultural dynamics around Judaism within Israel; Mizrahi Jews and Ashkenazi Jews have always been theoretically equal under the banner of the “Jewish and Democratic State,” but there are still extremely well-defined dynamics around the separations between the two, primarily instituted out of ethnic discrimination.

• Educational Inequality

In Israel, Ashkenazi Jews generally have higher outcomes and representation both socioeconomically and academically, largely because of many of the advantages associated with their elevated position in Israeli society. Coming from a Middle East Eye article (2021) and its statistics, there are rough estimates of 43% of Ashkenazi men possessing higher education experience versus 27% of Mizrahi men, with the gap seemingly only growing wider by percentage points for every further generation.

There seems to be a greater societal pressure on Mizrahi Jews to enter the workforce upon completion of mandatory schooling, probably out of an economic need to provide for their families.
Higher education is directly tied to earning potential, which means that the significantly lower rates of higher education among Mizrahi Jews greatly affect their socioeconomic status. The next point ties into that.

• Earning Inequality

As the article from the Middle East Eye linked below describes, Mizrahi Jews below age 25 see an increased socioeconomic standing than their Ashkenazi counterparts. However, that is only because they enter the workforce much younger due to their lower higher education rates. Mizrahi Jews entering the workforce have a significant headstart on earning, but because of the lowered education rates and thus lowered lifetime earning potential, it amounts to pretty much nothing in the long run statistically.

This advantage disappears just five years later, on average, and then Mizrahi is statistically economically disadvantaged from that point on. This is confounded by a variety of factors, most importantly that many jobs with significant economic upside in Israel require a degree from a higher education institution.

Additionally, as the data shows, Mizrahi families who do not seek or are not afforded higher education often have children who also do not seek or are not afforded higher education; this causes a snowball effect that increases the gap in earning potential across generations.

• Historical Placement in Development Towns

This information is primarily drawn from Aziza Khazzoom’s (2005) article, “Did The Israeli State Engineer Segregation?”. Upon the formation of the state of Israel and the realization that substantial unused land existed on the periphery of the new state’s borders, the Israeli government began instituting policies towards Jewish immigrants from Middle-Eastern and North African countries to a greater degree than European Jewish immigrants. The primary policy involved was the institution of development towns and their forced placement within.

These development towns, which existed primarily on the periphery of Israel, had little infrastructure and were concerned primarily with agricultural and textile production. Overall, these areas were of supreme economic instability in comparison to the center of Israel, and thus, the disproportionate number of Mizrahi Jews placed there were faced with bleak economic futures that passed down through generations.

This can be seen primarily through census data, referenced in Khazzoom’s article on the history of development towns in Israel. As the data demonstrated, the 1950s represented a significantly unequal placement of Mizrahi Jews in development towns that eventually began to narrow but still existed into the 1960s. Additionally, the data found that this level of inequality was not affected by the economic status of the immigrants; Mizrahi Jews with ‘high human capital’ or, as Khazzoom (2005) defines, small families and high occupational attainment, ‘successful,’ were just as likely to be placed within development towns as Ashkenazi Jews with ‘low human capital.’ This presents a gap that is entirely explainable by the ethnic discrimination against Mizrahi Jews upon their immigration to Israel.

• How They Connect

Mizrahi Jews not only face economic disadvantages due to their ethnic background a lack of equality of opportunity, but also because they are not afforded many of the means for social mobility present in modern societies, two important ones being marriage and education. While Mizrahi citizens still possess some degree of representation and rights in both of these areas, they are heavily discriminated against or disadvantaged.

As the Middle East Eye (2021) article showed, the cycle of a lack of higher education, and thus lowered earning potential through time, compounds upon itself and can worsen, especially when the government is not taking any additional steps to counteract the growing inequality within Mizrahi populations. This creates generational inequality both in social standing and economic standing, which is the most apt descriptor for a summation of the problems faced by Mizrahi Jews within Israel.

Additionally, the placement of Mizrahi Jews on the periphery only exacerbates these issues. With less access to infrastructure and sufficient resources historically, as well as a lack of proper equality of opportunity between the central and periphery of Israel, Mizrahi Jews face a winding web of forms of inequality, many of which have been going on for decades.

3.4 Looking to the future:

With the ensuing evolution of judicial reform policies in Israel, Mizrahi Jews face a constant crisis of identity between their ethnic heritage, often deemed lesser by the state and their religious identity. Preliminary acts like the Nation-State Basic Law represent ways in which this crisis of identity occurs; the government often treats “Jewish” and “Arab” as two distinct groups, when in reality, many Mizrahi Jews have Arabic heritage and/or culture ingrained in their everyday life.

On the ground, Mizrahi citizens in Israel are constantly fighting for their voice to be heard; one primary route towards this has actually been the heavy voting for Likud, who they feel more accurately represents their interests, whether that is true or not (Zeedan, 2024).

Still, many Mizrahi activists actively protest against the restrictions on Arab culture seen in the video earlier in the podcast. Topics like the downgrading of Arabic to ‘special status’ have drawn reactions from Mizrahi groups who value their Arab heritage.

This largely depends on the judicial reforms of 2023. If passed, I cannot see a situation in which the future is better for anyone who is Arab, Jewish, or not; the trend of Netanyahu’s interests has always been the protection of himself and those around him, not working for his constituents or the broader people of Israel. Israel’s ruling parties have consistently shown that Mizrahi Jews are not at the forefront of their concern, whether they are indebted to them for their place in office or not; Netanyahu and his supports will continue to work against Arab interests in Israel, which is against much of the historical heritage of Mizrahi Jews.

Israel is incredibly complex because there are so many additional vectors of identity that aren’t necessarily thought about in other places. In Israel, not only is skin color a determining factor of societal inequality and government treatment, but the specific country of origin, as well as the type of religion, the devoutness to which one follows the religion, etc. Israel has so many hierarchies due to its highly unique demographic makeup and how the country was founded that I can’t say it’s comparable to any other country I’ve learned about.

4. Wrap-up and closing remarks

Overall, Mizrahi Jews, or Jews from the Middle East and North Africa, face a considerable amount of inequality in Israel as a result of historical forces that primarily manifest themselves today within cultural relationships and socioeconomic standing. Despite the establishment of Israel as a nation for the Jewish people, Mizrahi Jews continually find themselves disenfranchised through a variety of factors that have continued since the dawn of the state. To start to bridge the gap of the Ethnic Divide, this inequality must be addressed because the disparity between Jewish ethnic groups is one of the dominant issues contained within the Ethnic Divide as a whole.

I will post my sources for this episode online. To see them, look at the page where you are listening to the episode.

I want to take a quick moment to thank you for listening to my episode of the podcast series “Israel’s Divides Explained.” This episode is the culmination of a considerable amount of research and is related to a topic I’m quite passionate about, so I appreciate your time.

If you want to learn about other aspects of the Ethnic Divide in Israel and the other five divides, please check out the additional episodes of Israel’s Divides Explained.

5. Bibliography
5.1 Primary sources:

“Education and Income Gaps Widening between Israel’s Different Jewish Groups, Says Report.” Middle East Eye, 11 June 2021. https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-education-ashkenazi-mizrahi-report. Accessed 10 October 2024.

“Israeli Declaration of Independence .” Main.knesset.gov.il, 1948. https://main.knesset.gov.il/en/about/pages/declaration.aspx. Accessed 10 October 2024.

DigitalUnderglow. “Melody 130.” Freesound.org, 9 May 2023. https://freesound.org/people/DigitalUnderglow/sounds/686510/ Accessed 10 October 2024.

Elia-Shalev, Asaf. “Inequality between Israel’s Mizrahi, Ashkenazi Jews to Be Measured in New Statistics.” The Times of Israel, 10 September 2022. https://www.timesofisrael.com/inequality-between-mizrahi-ashkenazi-jews-to-be-measured-with-new-statistics/. Accessed 10 October 2024.

Israel’s Mizrahi Activists Are Fighting the Racist Nation State Law. YouTube, 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZVBO5thIlU. Accessed 10 October 2024.

Marlowe, Jen. “Israel’s Mizrahi Activists Are Fighting the Racist Nation-State Law.” The Nation, 27 May 2020. https://www.thenation.com/article/world/israel-racism-mizrahis-palestinians/. Accessed 10 October 2024.

The Balfour Declaration (1917). https://www.britannica.com/event/Balfour-Declaration. Accessed 10 October 2024.

The Nation-State Basic Law (2018). https://main.knesset.gov.il/EN/activity/Documents/BasicLawsPDF/BasicLawNationState.pdf Accessed 10 October 2024.

5.2 Secondary sources:

Cohen, Shalom, and Kokhavi Shemesh. “The origin and development of the Israeli Black Panther movement,” Merip Reports 49 (1976): 19-22. https://doi.org/10.2307/3011125.

Khazzoom, Aziza. “Did the Israeli state engineer segregation? On the placement of Jewish immigrants in development towns in the 1950s.” Social forces 84, no. 1 (2005): 115-134. https://doi.org/10.1353/sof.2005.0106

Morris, Benny, and Yaron Tsur. “Israeli Historiography and the Ethnic Problem.” Essay. In Making Israel, 231–38. University of Michigan Press, 2010.

Shapira, Anita. Israel: A History. Brandeis University, 2012.

Yiftachel, Oren. “Social control, urban planning, and ethno‐class relations: Mizrahi Jews in Israel’s ‘development towns.'” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 24, no. 2 (2000): 418-438. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.00255

Zeedan, Rami. “Reconsidering the Druze narrative in the wake of the basic law: Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people.” Israel Studies 25, no. 3 (2020): 153-166. https://doi.org/10.2979/israelstudies.25.3.14

Zeedan, Rami. “Social Identity and Voting Behavior in a Deeply Divided Society: The Case of Israel.” Societies 14, no. 9 (2024): 177. https://doi.org/10.3390/soc14090177