0CTOBER 1997
“But repentance, apology, and contrition, vitiate the severity of the sentence,” proclaim Jews in synagogue during the high holiday season. Indeed, Labor’s political fate has been a heavy burden to bear. With two brief exceptions, the Israeli Labor Party has been in opposition now for a generation. This glorious movement, which took a sliver Middle Eastern sand and swampland, gathered in the tattered remnants of a slaughtered people, and built a modern industrial society, has been unable to dislodge a government of slogan mongers since Menahem Begin first came to power in 1977. There is virtually nothing that Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres did not try: Good government, peace, prosperity, nothing seems to work.
Ehud Barak has now floated a gimmick, by publicly apologizing to Israel’s Sephardic Jews who were absorbed under harsh conditions in the 1950’s by Ben Gurion and his Mapai Party. It started with a much publicized press conference in Tel Aviv, followed by the convocation of the Labor Party convention in Netivot, a predominantly Sephardic Negev development town where Labor polled only 4 percent (!!) in the last election.
No one can deny the accumulated pain and anger at the loss of status and the insults suffered by the wave of Oriental Jews who immigrated to Israel shortly after independence. Settled in makeshift aluminum huts in full view of established kibbutzim, their children often raised in schools at veteran agricultural settlements where they learned to look down on their “backward” parents, North African Jewry is not willing to forgive or to forget.
The experience of Yemenite Jewry is similar. Hundreds of their children disappeared some 40 years ago, usually listed as having died of illness. In reality, many were adopted by European families, fueling the charge that Ashkenazi administrators deliberately stole newborns from their mothers in order that they be raised properly by “modern” foster families. The full story has not yet been told, but when the truth comes out, it will probably point to a combination of confusion and bureaucratic insensitivity at a time when the resource poor, fledgling state was buffeted by poor immigrants who doubled the country’s population every three years. Criminality? Deliberate malice? No. But one can safely assume that the parents of Ashkenazi children would have been better informed and more gently treated by the Mapai elite.
Still, Labor stalwarts are indignant over Barak’s apology. In their historiography, the 1950’s were a heroic period of national revival, when hundreds of urban and rural communities were constructed throughout Israel in the face of intractable Arab hostility. Indeed, it was Ben Gurion who decided to open the floodgates of Middle Eastern immigration at a time when experts urged a selective policy based on economic considerations. But the pain and anger are still there, and cannot be denied.
And so Barak has now apologized in the name of the “generations of the Labor Party.” Well, I suppose it cannot hurt, but will forgiveness ensue?
My electrician doesn’t think so. What the Sephardim want from Barak, he recently told me, is compensation, not contrition. He was referring to the demand, put forward by a Sephardic advocacy group, to grant residents of the inner cities title to the public housing in which they reside. An interesting idea, I told him. But what does Ehud Barak have to do with it? The last time I checked, the Likud was in power. My argument didn’t faze him. As far as my electrician is concerned, Labor is still at fault
