My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel

by Ari Shavit

Deri nods but is careful not to confirm my hypothesis in his own words. He just smiles his mischievous smile and carries on. “Listen,” he says, “I have no issue with Labor, or with the Ashkenazis. At home, no one ever said the Ashkenazis screwed us. The feeling was that we endured a catastrophe. I understood what happened back in the 1950s. After all, Israel was a poor, young state surrounded by enemies. It was fragile, recovering from war, with a population of six hundred fifty thousand people in all. And suddenly this tiny Ashkenazi nation is flooded with the entire Sephardic Diaspora of the Middle East—communities arriving one by one from Yemen, Iraq, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Libya, Lebanon, and Egypt. “So the state builds housing estates for the new immigrants. It sets up factories for them. Within a few years it dismantles the dreadful immigrant camps and gives the newcomers a roof and a workplace. That’s quite an accomplishment. But what the Ashkenazi-dominated state does not understand is that it is taking away from the Oriental immigrants their community and honor and tradition. It takes apart the social and normative structures that have kept them together in the Diaspora. They have no tools to deal with the new world, no education relevant to it, no awareness, no sense of where or why. They have no authority, no compass. All they have is the violence and dereliction of the street. And so a generation is lost. And then another. Dozens of slums and remote develop...