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 development towns become what Bat Yam’s Eli Cohen has become: neglected, crime-ridden, and bleak. Hundreds of thousands of Oriental-Jewish youngsters in Israel are raised with no father, no discipline, and no meaning to their life.

  “Those who were saved,” Deri says, “are those who had strong mothers. This is a mother’s generation. The mothers are the true heroines of Israel’s Oriental story. But as in my case, the mother could not cope alone. She needed a boarding school. Those who went to a religious boarding school, as I did, became Torah scholars. Those who went to secular boarding schools became engineers or insurance agents. Only the combination of a strong mother and a decent boarding school could save you from the chaos. Only if you were sent away from home could you survive the collapse of your father and the breakdown of your culture.

  “I told you I don’t hold a grudge against Labor,” Deri says. “That’s true and not true. There is one thing that does make me angry: the spiritual aspect of absorption. When it built the immigrant camps and the housing estates and the remote factories, Labor had no malice in its heart. But in spiritual matters it certainly did. The veteran Ashkenazim of Labor thought that most of the people who emigrated from the Arab world were primitive and therefore had to be put through a process of secular European indoctrination. The melting pot was a Western melting pot that was supposed to totally transform us. Those Labor Ashkenazim didn’t honor our civilization. They didn’t see the beauty of our tradition. That’s why they severed us from our roots and our heritage. That was a terrible, vicious mistake. What these people did was to destroy, not build. They took the soul we had and did not give us another in its place. And since they didn’t really give us a new culture or identity they left us with nothing. Facing extreme economic and physical hardship, we found ourselves standing in the world spiritually naked.

  “Into this void stepped the ultra-Orthodox,” Deri says. “In the first years, I was not really God-fearing. I learned what I was taught and did as I was told and dressed as I was instructed. When I was by myself, at home, I was not profoundly religious. Only when I reached Jerusalem at the age of thirteen did I discover the richness of the world of Torah. I was deeply drawn to the Porat Yosef rabbis who treated me like a son. I was attracted to the mysticism of the Old Jerusalem Kabbalists. The Western Wall captured my heart. The holiness of Jerusalem enchanted me. I began observing Judaism religiously.

  “I didn’t encounter the Oriental issues until later,” he says. “Because I was transferred from one Sephardic hothouse to another, I didn’t encounter non-Sephardic Jews. I didn’t encounter non-Orthodox Israel, either. Only in the Hebron Yeshiva did I notice that the Sephardic students bowed down to the Ashkenazim, and their leaders bowed down to the Ashkenazi leaders. There was no anger toward the Ashkenazim, on the contrary. There was gratitude for taking us in and accepting us and teaching us. But there was a self-abasement that I didn’t like, that I was not willing to be part of. And gradually I noticed other things I hadn’t noticed before: there was no Sephardic spiritual leadership, no Sephardic political representation, no quality Sephardic education. We were totally dependent on the Ashkenazim. We were picking up the crumbs they were kind enough to let us have.

  “At first I didn’t think politically,” Deri continues. “I was not really a part of Israeli society and didn’t understand how it functioned. That’s why all I wanted was to establish a high-quality yeshiva for Sephardic boys. But in Rabbi Ovadia’s house I started to understand politics. I saw the persons and the powers shaping Israel. That’s how I got the idea for Shas. I believed an alliance between Rabbi Shach and Rabbi Ovadia would produce a political body that would give representation to Sephardic Judaism and enjoy the religious backing of the Ashkenazim. I didn’t want to rebel. The thought of some sort of Israeli Black Panthers was totally foreign to me. All I wanted was to give my people a voice and a place of honor. To return the divine crown to its rightful place.”

  Deri leans over his wide desk, his eyes glittering. “Only when I became director general of the Ministry of the Interior did I truly understand the Oriental-Jewish problem in Israel. Only then, in office, did I truly leave the closed world of ultra-Orthodox Judaism and come to know Israeli society. And suddenly I realized that of the hundreds of municipalities I was responsible for, the weak ones were almost all Arabic or Oriental. I suddenly realized that most of the suffering in Israel is Oriental suffering. In every remote development town I visited, I found neglect. In every impoverished neighborhood, I found Oriental Jews who had lost their pride and their identity. I found communities destroyed, families torn apart, their honor and tradition taken away, and the spark in their eyes extinguished. While on the surface Israel was thriving, just below the surface there was an Israel that was fatherless and rabbi-less and hopeless. Traditional Oriental Israel was left to fend for itself and quite often it failed miserably.

  “In my first years in government,” Deri tells me, “I wanted to integrate, not self-segregate. I was very popular at the time. I was a political star and a media darling. I established close relationships with many secular Ashkenazi politicians, journalists, and businessmen. They liked my directness and openness and energy. We found common ground between their Israeliness and mine. So I believed it was possible to bridge the gaps between the Sephardics and Ashkenazim, between religious and secular. I believed that just as the elite accepted me, they would accept the public I represented. I felt my purpose was to heal and unite. To strengthen the Oriental Jews and the ultra-Orthodox Jews, but to integrate them into a multitribal Israel in which they would find a place.

  “But then the newspapers came up with their allegations. The state comptroller, the police, and the judiciary came after me. Both the right- and the left-wing elite turned their backs on me. Rabbi Shach, whom I loved and admired more than any other person I knew, deserted me. He never forgave me for trying to form a peace government with Shimon Peres in 1990. I was alone. I was without my new friends from the secular world, and without my old rabbi and the Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox. Now I was not loved but persecuted, not a hero but a pariah. All I had left was my tribe: Sephardic Jews. Only they believed in me and embraced me. The Oriental Jews identified with me. They saw me as someone whose life story was similar to theirs. They were convinced I was a Moroccan Jew who had opened his heart to Israel and was accepted by Israel until one day Israel slammed the door in his face and did all it could to break him.

  “It was hard not to break,” Deri whispers. “The loneliness was awful. I had no one to turn to or look up to. Simultaneously I lost the Israel that I had taken for a mother and Rabbi Shach, whom I had taken for
a father. So I was attracted to the Kabbalah. I went up to the Galilee on religious retreat. I traveled to the Ukraine to lie upon the tomb of Rabbi Breslau of Uman. Although I am not a man of mysticism, I needed the comfort of mystics. I turned to fundamental faith. The support of Sephardic Judaism, mysticism, and fundamental faith gave me the power to stand tall when everything was collapsing around me. At night, I found myself talking aloud to our Father in heaven.

  “So the use of Kaduri’s talismans and blessings in the 1996 election campaign was not purely manipulative,” Deri continues. “It also expressed my personal distress and my emotional need. So was the rage of the 1999 election campaign. J’accuse wasn’t only a brilliant political maneuver but an authentic emotional outcry. All during the 1990s, there was an astonishing correlation between what was happening to me, Aryeh Deri, and what the Oriental Jews of Israel were experiencing. Fifty years after it was founded, Israel was facing an internal revolt that was about to change its identity.

  “They perceived me as a threat,” Deri tells me. “Here stood a person who was as good as they were. Not afraid, not ashamed. An organizer, a planner, a leader. And that person operated in the most modern and effective way. But he represented Judaism and he spoke for Oriental Jews. And he took the ultra-Orthodox out of the ghetto they lived in, and he rescued the Oriental Jews from under the oppression they lived in. And throughout the country he created change—he built alternative schools and community centers and gave people other options. He threatened Ashkenazi Israel’s cultural hegemony and chipped away at its identity as a Western nation. And he was growing stronger by the day, leading the most important revolution in Israel’s short history.

  “This is why they had to take me out of the game,” Deri says. “To remove me from government and cut me off from state resources. To assault my character so that even my constituency would denounce me. That’s why they investigated me like they had never investigated anyone else—with a fine-tooth comb. And judged me like they had never judged anyone else—against all evidence. They lynched me and created the impression that I was an evil octopus. And in a sense they succeeded: they expelled me from politics and jailed me and turned me into a demon.

  “But in another sense they failed: their attacks on me convinced the masses to follow me. A million Israelis felt that when they tried to take me out, they tried to take them out, too. When they locked me up, they kept them out, too. After they had finally raised their heads, they were pushed back half a century. The DDT, the immigration camps, the condescension. That’s why in 1999 we got seventeen seats in the Knesset. If elections had been held a month later, we would have gotten twenty-five or even twenty-eight seats. We would have replaced Likud as the leading right-of-center political force. And the plan was that when I got out of prison we would do just that. We’d pick up where we left off and gain thirty seats in the Knesset. But while I was in jail, I decided not to reopen the wounds, not to reignite the fire. It’s not that the wounds are not there. And the fire, too, lingers. You wouldn’t believe how much pain is still out there. But I came to the conclusion that enough was enough. What had happened was extremely dangerous. Israel almost went over the cliff. And I don’t want that repeated. When I think now about what nearly happened, I shudder. Only Providence prevented the great fire of the 1990s from burning down our house. As I relaunched my political career and reentered the public arena I wanted to do things differently. Now I want to deal with the old pain in a new way.”

  Deri and I are almost the same age. Our collective generational experiences are similar, and our perception of reality and our political opinions are not far apart. We have common beliefs and a common language. Deri is wired in a very direct Israeli way. He is quick and sensitive and his high IQ is matched by his inflated ego. There are sparks of genius in him. I like him. And yet, Deri lives in a faraway place. He has other commitments and loyalties. He is a citizen of a world I don’t know. He is so present yet so elusive, so open yet so inscrutable. He gives me the feeling that even he hasn’t quite figured out who he is and who he would like to be. A wanderer between worlds and between identities, he embodies the great Israeli social and cultural chaos.

  And yet Deri is not the issue but the metaphor. He will be fine. After a thirteen-year leave of absence, he is back in the public arena and is once again the political leader of Shas. His charisma is somewhat eroded and he has lost his larger-than-life stature, but he is a powerful player again in Israel’s power game. So as I leave his Jerusalem office I think not of him but of his community. The Oriental-Jewish story is simple and cruel, I think. Between the mid-nineteenth century and the mid-twentieth century, Arab world Jewry experienced a relative golden age. As it was close to French and British colonial rulers, it enjoyed their patronage. It won rights it had never enjoyed before. Many Jews in North Africa and the Middle East benefited from all that Baghdad, Damascus, Beirut, Cairo, Alexandria, Tunis, and Casablanca had to offer. But by the 1940s and 1950s the magic of the Orient had evaporated. Colonialism retreated, Arab nationalism was on the rise, and Zionism was triumphant. Within a few years a civilization collapsed. Thousand-year-old communities disintegrated within months. With one swing of history’s sword the soft underbelly of the old Levant was sliced open. The enchanting, pluralist Orient was gone. A million Jewish Arabs were uprooted, their world destroyed, their culture decimated, their homes lost.

  The Zionist story is also simple and cruel, I think. Israel was to have been home to the Jewish people of Eastern Europe—that is what the state was designed to be. But between 1939 and 1945, the Jewish people of Eastern Europe almost ceased to be. Having no other choice, Zionism turned eastward. The result was ironic. In 1897, when Zionism was gaining momentum, only 7 percent of the world’s Jews were Oriental. In 1945, after the Holocaust, only 10 percent of the world’s Jews were Oriental. But in Israel, by 1990, over 50 percent of Jewish Israelis were Oriental. A state designed for one population was populated by another. A state based on one culture was overtaken by another. But Zionism did not—and could not—acknowledge the sea change that had taken place. It could not admit that the original blueprint did not fit the new circumstances. So Zionism pressed on, willfully ignoring the harm it was doing. The Israeli melting pot worked with brutal efficiency: it forged a nation, but it also scorched the identities and scalded the souls it was to have saved.

  So when Deri was born in Meknes in 1959, the first secular Oriental-Israeli uprising erupted in the poor Haifa neighborhood of Wadi Salib. When Deri was in the wretched Hadera boarding school in 1970, the second secular Oriental-Israeli uprising erupted in the poor Jerusalem neighborhood of Musrara, with the appearance of the local Black Panthers. When Deri was a yeshiva student in Jerusalem in the mid-1970s, a secular, cultural Oriental uprising erupted with new Oriental music, ignored by mainstream radio and TV but played in every nightclub along the Bat Yam promenade. Deri was not aware of all these developments because he joined Israel late and because even then he lived in an ultra-Orthodox enclave. Even when Begin was elected in 1977 with the enthusiastic support of Oriental Israelis, Deri was not enthusiastic at all. As a disciple of Rabbi Shach, who never believed in the Zionist state, he did not approve of Begin’s Jewish nationalism. Yet after Begin faded away and left behind the orphaned masses of Oriental Israelis, Deri saw the vacuum and was quick to fill it. First he presented Rabbi Ovadia Yosef as an alternative father figure to Begin. Then he introduced Rabbi Kaduri as a comforting mystical figure. Then he defined himself as the martyr of Oriental Judaism. In this way he managed to detach himself from the political and the mundane and acquire for a while the other-worldliness of a semimythological figure.

  As I drive out of Jerusalem I listen to a compilation of songs by Zohar Argov. Argov was born in the same Rishon LeZion neighborhood that Deri’s family was sent to in 1968. For months the Argovs and the Deris lived not far apart. In the early 1970s, the tender, aching songs of the shy, lanky singer conquered downstairs Israel and became the anthems of
its struggle. They were sold on cassettes in Tel Aviv’s chaotic central bus station, they were sung at weddings, they were a hit in the Oriental nightclubs that popped up in Bat Yam, Jaffa, Netanya, Lydda, and Ramleh. For years Argov was not recognized by upstairs Israel. And when he was finally embraced, he took an overdose of drugs and died. Although his heartbreaking songs deal mostly with love and loss, they seem to fill my car with the great pain of the downtrodden. As I drive down the highway that the Deri convoy traveled to Maasiyahu Prison, I hear in Argov’s ballads the howl of the long-suffering Oriental Israel.

  When I was a child, Oriental Jews were not recognized as such. Although they already constituted almost half of Israel’s population, they were oppressed and ignored. In an odd sort of way they were present and not present, belonging and not belonging. They were followed by a constant cloud of doubt and suspicion. They were not our lot, not really us.

  In the army I was already a minority. In the paratrooper platoon I served in, elitist Ashkenazim like me were mocked. But only after the 1977 political upheaval that brought Menachem Begin to power—and the violent, inflammatory election campaign of 1981—was political power transferred to the other people. One could no longer ignore the fact that Oriental Jews were the majority. They came out of the immigrant camps and housing estates and development towns to which they had been confined for over a generation to capture the city square. Politically speaking, they were Likud. Socioeconomically, they were contractors and small business owners. Culturally, they were fans of Zohar Argov, whose music I did not yet appreciate.

  But in liberal Ashkenazi circles, the surge of Oriental Jews brought about an ugly response. The racism of the 1980s and 1990s was even more repulsive than that of the previous era, scornful and maligning: They are nouveau riche. They don’t behave. Their English is atrocious. They are so sensitive regarding their honor. They are Indians. Levantines. Likudniks. They disgrace the state we founded and eventually will take us down with them. In these comments, I saw the dark side of Israel’s enlightenment, a lack of a civility in people who claim to be civilized. The Oriental story fascinated me. As I listened to more and more immigrant stories, and to more and more stories of oppression, I realized we had done wrong. I feared that the pain of Oriental Israelis might one day blow us to pieces.