Not a matter of black and white

An artist’s election-season broadside reminded some of previous election tensions between Israelis of European and Middle Eastern backgrounds. Reality is happier.

By AMOTZ ASA-EL
Labor pre-election rally in Tel Aviv (photo credit: AMIR COHEN - REUTERS)
Labor pre-election rally in Tel Aviv
(photo credit: AMIR COHEN - REUTERS)
PAINTING, SAID Vincent van Gogh, is a faith and, as such, must ignore public opinion.
Artist Yair Garbuz personifies this view, having earned a reputation not only as one of Israel’s leading painters, but also as an eloquent columnist, sharp satirist and charismatic art professor. That is why activists thought it was a good idea to invite the longhaired septuagenarian to address a nighttime pro-Labor rally in downtown Tel Aviv as the recent election approached.
It was a bad idea. By morning, a verbal broad-brush Garbuz released into the crowded Rabin Square triggered a public outcry that two weeks on was punctuated by Isaac Herzog’s lamentation that the painter’s pro-Labor broadside contributed to its defeat.
Depicting “those who scream ‘death to the Arabs’” as “those with the yellow shirts and black symbols” – an allusion to the colors of soccer club Beitar Jerusalem’s proletarian following – Garbuz now lumped together corruption with religion and ethnicity.
“They told us they are but a handful,” he said, “the bribe-taking thieves… the corrupt and the piggish hedonists… the kissers of amulets, the idol worshippers… the prostrating atop saints’ tombs… the sexual abusers and rapists.” And having thus mapped his enemies, Garbuz asked the crowd, “How is it that the handful is ruling over us? How did the handful… become the majority?” This cultural, social and political salad mixed, albeit without naming them, former president Moshe Katsav, former prime minister Ehud Olmert and former finance minister Avraham Hirchson, who have been convicted respectively of sexual misconduct, bribery and embezzlement, with the country’s captains of industry and finance before bundling them all with the undereducated observant masses.
Though this attack’s targets included socalled Ashkenazim, meaning  Jews like Olmert and Hirchson, its disparagement of undereducated people’s religiosity was understood to be referring to Jews of Middle Eastern origins, just like the reference to “sexual abusers” brought to every mind the Iranian-born Katsav.
Grasping this diatribe’s electoral potential, ethnically driven Shas leader Aryeh Deri gave it a further twist when he misquoted it as including “kissers of mezuzas.” Now Garbuz’s targets were multiplied, because kissing a mezuza is a non-mystical gesture of faith done daily by millions as they pass through any door, whereas the much smaller population that kisses amulets and prays over sages’ graves expecting wealth, healing and fertility is mystically driven and its practice is derided by most rabbis as un-Jewish superstition.
Deri’s enrichment of the painter’s coloring was soon further dramatized by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “I heard someone speak scornfully about the kissers of mezuzas,” he said before asking, “Since when is it a crime to kiss a mezuza?” There were two weeks left to the elections when the painter made his quips, and the politicians were determined to make the most of them. While Netanyahu said of Likud, “We know about our tradition and our legacy,” Deri’s campaign managers coated Tel Aviv’s billboards with a question referring to Garbuz, “Who are you to be condescending toward us?” Finally, while Labor leaders like Shelly Yachimovich went out of their way to disown Garbuz and deride his attack as racist, and while the artist himself insisted that“the last thing anyone can say about me is that I am a racist,” Deri used the situation to further bolster his sectarian message with a new slogan: “Mizrahi” – literally “easterner” and figuratively “Israeli of Middle Eastern roots” – “votes for a Mizrahi.”
Set against this backdrop, some decried the resurgence of “the ethnic genie,” as Israeli political parlance calls social tensions between European and Middle Eastern Jews. In fact, the genie had never left its bottle, just like there was no denying the survival of Jewish Israel’s ethnic fault lines, or the social gap’s dramatic narrowing since Israel’s establishment.
Labor’s trauma, when it comes to ethnic politics runs deep and harks back generations.
The encounter between the mass immigration of the 1950s and the European-bred founding elite was often tense, as monumentalized in the 1964 cinematic classic “Sallah Shabati,” in which an unemployed patriarch from an unspecified Arab land displays a mixture of primitiveness and wisdom while grappling with Ashkenazi bureaucrats, politicians and kibbutzniks, after making aliya.
The first Israeli film to win an Oscar candidacy was made several years after angry immigrant mobs stormed elegant shops and Labor party headquarters in affluent parts of Haifa, following a cop’s wounding of a local drunkard. The riots spread to other towns as far south as Beersheba and ended with dozens of arrests, while immigrants hailed opposition leader Menachem Begin as their hero and derided the Labor establishment as their tormentor.
Though tensions never again reached that kind of boiling point, they continued to simmer, culminating in two more turning points: first, Labor’s loss of power in 1977, where the Middle Eastern electorate comprised a crucial part of the resurging Likud’s power base; and then, in the following election, when Labor leader Shimon Peres had to be whisked away from an angry crowd’s tomatoes and eggs in proletarian Beit Shemesh.
Those were traumatic moments for all of Israel, but particularly for Labor, not only because they animated its loss of political altitude, but because its members felt they were being unfairly punished as they never deliberately mistreated the Middle Eastern immigrants, whose hardships, they argued, reflected objective conditions rather than anyone’s policy.
The recent election’s sense of déjà vu was intensified by memories from the 1981 election of another artist, the late comedian Dudu Topaz, who delivered his own ill-fated exhortation in the very same plaza where Garbuz delivered his.
Using the derogatory slang “chakh-chakhim” to stereotype Likud’s voters as primitive riffraff, Topaz played into the hands of Begin who soon afterward gathered in that same spot a mass rally where he picked up on Topaz’s theme, announcing to the crowd’s enthusiasm “the chakh-chakhim belong’ to the Likud.” Hours later the Likud won 48 Knesset seats, the party’s most ever.
Even so, analogies between the two situations are farfetched, electorally and socially.
First, though it made much noise, there is no indication that Garbuz’s speech steered any voters from left to right. Compared with the previous election’s voting patterns, and judging by polls before and after the speech, voter traffic happened mainly within the right and left blocs, and between them and the center, but few crossed the right-left divide.
LIKUD, BAYIT Yehudi and Yisrael Beytenu had 43 seats between them last time and now won 44. No one, effectively, moved. Labor’s nine new seats, at the same time, came from its merger with Tzipi Livni’s centrist Hatnua, which had previously won six seats while the remainder came from Meretz and Yesh Atid. Labor’s electoral contest, then, was with the center, not the right.
The electoral irrelevance of Garbuz’s speech is particularly visible through its failure to feed Moshe Kahlon’s Kulanu, whose predicted following remained generally stable during the election and pretty much equal to the 10 seats it won in the actual vote. Had Garbuz’s remarks affected voting, there should have been some traffic from Labor to Kulanu, whose leader’s parents immigrated from Tunisia, and whose social agenda, religious traditionalism, and political hawkishness should have appealed to such a swing vote.
Indeed, apart from the non-European population’s decline since Begin’s premiership from 45 to 27 percent of Israeli society due to the post-Soviet immigration – the current state of the social gap is but a dim echo of what once clouded Israel’s social future.
The sphere where Israel’s social transition is most visible is public office.
When he wanted to express his persuasion that Israel’s ingathering of the exiles would ultimately be a success, David Ben-Gurion said a day would come when the IDF’s chief of staff would be a Yemeni Jew.
Though a descendant of that specific community has yet to reach that specific office, in the past three decades five of 10 chiefs of staff have hailed from the Middle Eastern immigrations. So did four of nine ministers of defense; three of 10 foreign ministers; five of 15 finance ministers; and two of the Israel Police’s last three inspectors-general.
And the Middle Eastern immigrations’ share among mayors and lawmakers is much higher.
This prominence in the public sector, unthinkable only two generations ago, is matched in the private sector, where the short list of self-made billionaires is studded with names like Yitzhak Tshuva, who arrived from Libya as a baby with his family of 10, started off as a construction worker and became a developer and entrepreneur now worth an estimated $4 billion; or Zadik Bino, who arrived from Iraq at age six and started off as a bank teller before becoming CEO of the First International Bank of Israel, which he now owns; or Shlomo Eliahu, who also arrived as a child from Iraq and started off as a messenger boy in the Migdal insurance company, before becoming an independent insurer and eventually buying Migdal for more than NIS 4.2 billion.
While these are extreme cases, they nonetheless reflect intense social mobility in a society that admires enterprise and achievement and has little respect for lineage and hierarchy.
That may explain why the number of Israelis of joint European-Middle Eastern ancestry is rising steadily and, among the generation of 30-somethings, already stands at 25 percent.
The same goes for geography. While the share of Middle Eastern Israelis among the urban populations outside the big cities is higher than their share in the overall population, there is no physical dividing line in Israel of the sort that separates Italy’s north and south. Israelis of both backgrounds generally live pretty much everywhere, especially since the post-Soviet immigration joined the peripheral towns, where real estate is cheaper, in large numbers.
Having said this, problems surely still abound.
A recent study by the Tel Aviv-based social think tank Adva Center claims that descendants of the Middle Eastern immigration earn on average 20 percent less than those of European backgrounds.
Led by post-capitalist academics, who are themselves descendants of the Middle Eastern immigrations, Adva has been accused of tendentiousness by conservatives like Haifa University’s Steven Plaut. Yet even their studies indicate that the gaps are narrowing, with more than 45 percent of Israeli-born Middle Eastern households earning more than a monthly NIS 16,000 at the current decade’s outset, nearly twice their share 18 years earlier.
Yes, the gaps are still there.
Young Middle Eastern Israelis still have, on average, less money and education. All 12 Israeli Nobel Laureates and all 12 prime ministers have hailed from European backgrounds as have 12 of the Supreme Court’s current 15 justices, while hardly one in 10 Israeli professors has Middle Eastern roots.
Most tellingly, Deri’s Shas, with his blatantly anti-Ashkenazi rhetoric, still appealed to some six percent of the electorate.
Still, when viewed in historical perspective, non-Ashkenazi Israel’s social mobility is breathtaking, despite the Garbuz episode.
Never mind that violence of the sort the US faces periodically, like the recent months’ strife in Ferguson, Missouri, has not been seen in Israel since 1959. More than a tenth of Ethiopian Israelis, the latest non-European immigration, are already “intermarried” to non-Ethiopian Israelis.
That is not even half the rate among Middle Eastern Israelis, but it is more than twice the rate of black-white marriages in the United States.