On Tuesday Israel votes, and the arithmetic is already published: neither bloc can govern. I’ll come to that at the end, because the number only makes sense after a story most people outside this country have never heard.
Here is the thesis, so you know where I’m going. To be fully Israeli, you have to prove you are not an Arab. Some people can pay that price. Some people cannot, because they are Arabs. On Tuesday you’ll be able to see exactly where that line falls — printed in a newspaper, in three columns.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yfm9Um97QrD8YCMGL9zMgNIs7daC0mxl/view?usp=sharing
Who built it
The people who built this state were refugees from violence. Not from the Holocaust — that came later. From the pogroms. Kishinev in 1903. The Russian pogroms before it. The Ukrainian pogroms of 1918 to 1921, which killed something on the order of a hundred thousand Jews. Ben-Gurion came from Płońsk in 1906. The generation that ran the Labor party, the army, the unions and the kibbutzim came out of that.
I am not going to tell you that being a victim turns a person into a victimizer. That’s a cheap law, it isn’t true, and it is the precise shape of an argument that gets used against Jews as a people.
What I will tell you is narrower and harder to answer: having been a victim did not prevent it.
Half the country, speaking Arabic
Then came the Jews of the Arab and Muslim world. Morocco, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Iran, Tunisia. We call them Mizrahim — Easterners. Hundreds of thousands within a few years, most arriving with nothing.
Within about a decade they were roughly half the Jewish population of the country.
And here is the thing that governs everything that followed. They arrived speaking Arabic. Arab names. Arab food. Arab music. Liturgy in Arab melodies. They were, by every cultural measure the new state used, the thing the new state had defined itself against.
The price of admission
So they were asked to pay.
Hebraize the name. Drop the language — and their children dropped it, which is why Arabic died in two generations in families that had spoken it for a thousand years. The music stayed off the radio. The religious practice was reclassified as folklore. The family structures became a problem for social workers.
And the clearest possible proof that you had crossed over, that you were on this side now, was hostility toward the people you had just stopped resembling.
That is not psychology. It is a visible, documented mechanism, and Israeli sociologists have written about it for forty years. It explains more about this country than any amount of talk about trauma.
The sorting
They were sprayed with DDT on arrival, in the reception camps, in front of each other.
They were held in ma’abarot — tent and tin-shack transit camps. They were directed to the development towns on the periphery: Dimona, Yeruham, Ofakim, Kiryat Shmona. Not offered. Directed. Their children were streamed into vocational tracks while European children went academic.
The state did not think they were enemies. It thought they were raw material.
Not nice people
In 1971 the children of those camps organized. They called themselves the Israeli Black Panthers, taking the name from Oakland, deliberately, because they understood exactly what they were describing.
The Prime Minister at that time, Golda Meir, of the Labor party, met them. Afterwards she said “they were not nice people”.
Ask an Israeli of a certain age what Golda said about the Panthers. They’ll know.
1977
Six years later the Mizrahim did what any sorted people eventually do. They voted against the people doing the sorting. Menachem Begin’s Likud won. We call it the Mahapach, the upheaval — twenty-nine unbroken years of Labor government ended, and it ended on Mizrahi votes.
The Israeli Left has not forgiven them in forty-nine years, and the vocabulary has been consistent the whole time: they’re uneducated. They’re primitive. They vote against their own interests. They’ve been manipulated by the Right.
Americans will recognise that list. It’s close to what your own left says about the people who stopped voting for it.
Every one of those sentences is the same sentence that sent their parents to Dimona.
What the price bought, and what it didn’t
Let me be fair about what they achieved, because the usual version of this story is condescending in its own way.
Mizrahim transformed this country. The music is theirs now — it’s what plays everywhere. The religious life is theirs. Shas is a major political force. Much of the governing coalition’s base is Mizrahi. They did not merely change the government in 1977; they changed the culture permanently.
What they never got is the top chair.
Begin was born in Brest, in Poland - Ashkenazi. Shamir in Ruzhany in Poland - Ashkenazi. Netanyahu’s father in Warsaw - Ashkenazi.
In seventy-eight years this country has never had a Mizrahi prime minister. Not once. The Left produced one serious Mizrahi contender — Amir Peretz, born in Morocco, who won the Labor leadership in 2005 — and the Israeli press spent his campaign on his moustache.
They paid, and it bought nearly everything. The music, the politics, the religion, a place in every coalition. It never once bought the prime minister’s office.
And then there’s the boundary
Everything above is about hierarchy among Jews, and I don’t want to blur what comes next, because it is different in kind.
Palestinian citizens of Israel — about twenty percent of this country, the people who stayed in 1948 and hold Israeli passports — cannot pay the price of admission. Not because they refuse. Because the price is proving you are not the thing, and they are the thing.
There is no name to Hebraize their way out of.
Tuesday
Israel’s parliament has a hundred and twenty seats; you need sixty-one to govern, and nobody ever wins that outright, so you build a coalition.
This week’s four-poll average puts the opposition bloc around fifty-four and Netanyahu’s bloc around fifty. Neither reaches sixty-one.
The Arab parties hold about fourteen and a half. Which is exactly what either side needs.
Now look at how the table is printed. Change bloc in one column. Netanyahu’s bloc in another. The Arab parties in a third, off to the side, outside both.
Not as an argument. As a formatting decision. Nobody writes a sentence explaining it, because nobody thinks a sentence is required.
And it isn’t one man’s doing
After the 2021 election Netanyahu tried it himself — went looking for a coalition resting on an Arab party’s support, and his own far-right partners refused to sit in any government that depended on them. It collapsed. Then his opponents did the identical deal, and for the first time in Israel’s history an Arab party sat in a governing coalition.
Netanyahu spent the following two years telling the country that this proved the government was illegitimate.
One side cannot. The other side did it once and was punished thoroughly enough that nobody will hurry to try again.
What I’m not going to tell you
I’m not going to tell you what comes next for Palestinian citizens of Israel. I don’t know, and I’ve been wrong about endings before.
I’ll tell you what’s on the record. The Nation-State Law of 2018 declared national self-determination in Israel to be exclusive to Jews and downgraded the status of Arabic. Ministers in the current government came out of Kahanist politics, and proposals for loyalty oaths and population transfers have been made by people who now hold office.
That isn’t a prediction. Those are laws already passed and proposals already made, by people who hold office now.
So
Nothing changes on Tuesday. Not because the Right wins, not because the Left wins — the Left is polling at eight percent and had to merge two parties to manage it; Labor alone won more than a third of the parliament in 1992.
Nothing changes because a government that can only be assembled out of Jewish parties contains nobody who needs this to end.
The Mizrahim paid the price and got almost all the way in. On Wednesday morning the rest of the arithmetic will be printed in three columns, and nobody will remark on the third one.
It’s the racism, stupid. It always was.
Unbelievable story. Thank you for shining your continuing light.