The Forgotten Majority of Israel Nobody Talks About

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]When the state of Israel declared independence in May 1948, nearly half of its Jewish population spoke Arabic as their primary language at home. A demographic reality that would be systematically erased from public memory within a single generation. Most of these Arabic speaking Jews had arrived not from Europe but from Iraq, Yemen, Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, Syria and Egypt carrying with them traditions that predated the destruction of the Second Temple. How did the majority of Israel's founders become forgotten people and why does their story remain buried beneath decades of official silence? On the conventional narrative of modern Israel begins in Eastern Europe in the stetls and cities where Theodor Herzl's vision took root among Yiddish speaking Ashkenazi Jews fleeing pogroms and persecution. But that story however dramatic and well documented represents only one stream in a much larger river.

[00:00:56]Between 1948 and 1967, approximately 850,000 Jews from Arab and Muslim majority countries arrived in Israel. Most within the first decade of statehood. They did not come as voluntary Zionist pioneers. They came because their ancient communities, some established before the rise of Islam itself, were being systematically dismantled by governments that viewed them as potential fifth columns in the new Arab-Israeli conflict. In Baghdad, where Jews had lived continuously since the Babylonian exile 2,500 years earlier, mobs attacked the community in June 1941 during the festival of Shavuot killing at least 180 people in what became known as the Farhud.

[00:01:37]That pogrom marked the beginning of the end for Iraqi Jewry, though few recognized it at the time. The Iraqi Jewish community had thrived under Ottoman rule and even during the British mandate period dominating commerce and the professions in ways that mirrored Jewish success in Central Europe. But when Iraq gained independence and pan-Arab nationalism intensified, the ground shifted beneath their feet. In March 1950, the Iraqi government passed a law allowing Jews to emigrate if they renounce their citizenship, a trap disguised as tolerance. Within months, Zionist operatives working underground in Baghdad registered over 120,000 Jews for departure, organizing an airlift that would become known as Operation Ezra and Nehemiah. But between the registration and departure, the Iraqi parliament passed another law freezing all Jewish assets turning immigration into confiscation. Families who had owned businesses, properties and bank accounts for generations left with a single suitcase and 10 dinars.

[00:02:37]The entire community constituting roughly a third of Baghdad's population vanished between 1950 and 1952. If you're watching this because you want to understand the Jewish history that doesn't make it into mainstream accounts, the stories buried under simplified narratives and political convenience, then subscribe now because this channel exists to excavate exactly these forgotten chapters, the ones that complicate what we think we know. On similar patterns unfolded across the Middle East and North Africa, though each country's Jewish exodus had its own distinct character and timeline.

[00:03:11]In Yemen, Operation Magic Carpet airlifted nearly 50,000 Jews between June 1949 and September 1950, many of whom had never seen an airplane and interpreted the experience through biblical prophecy about being carried on eagles' wings. The Yemeni Jewish community had maintained its distinctive religious traditions in near total isolation isolation for centuries preserving pronunciation of Hebrew and liturgical customs that scholars believed extinct. They arrived in Israel practicing a form of Judaism so ancient that Israeli rabbis initially struggled to recognize it as legitimate creating tensions that would define communal relations for decades.

[00:03:51]In Libya, anti-Jewish riots in November 1945 killed more than 140 Jews in Tripoli and surrounding areas and a second wave of violence in June 1948 killed another 14 and destroyed most synagogues in the city.

[00:04:06]By 1951, essentially the entire Libyan Jewish community of approximately 35,000 had departed for Israel.

[00:04:14]The Egyptian Jewish community faced a more gradual strangulation. Cosmopolitan and multilingual, Egyptian Jews had been integral to Cairo and Alexandria's commercial life dominating banking, department stores and import-export businesses. The 1956 Suez Crisis became the turning point. President Gamal Abdel Nasser issued a proclamation stating that all Jews were Zionists and enemies of the state and the government began systematic expulsions arresting thousands and giving families a few days to leave the country.

[00:04:43]Between November 1956 and the late 1960s, approximately 25,000 Egyptian Jews fled to Israel, another 15,000 to Europe and the Americas. They left behind property worth hundreds of millions of dollars, synagogues filled with rare manuscripts and cemeteries containing a thousand years of family history.

[00:04:59]The Moroccan exodus took longer but was ultimately even larger. Between 1948 and the early 1970s, approximately 260,000 Moroccan Jews left for Israel reducing one of the Arab world's largest Jewish populations from about 265,000 to under 5,000. These Jews arrived in Israel expecting to be welcomed as returning exiles, the ingathering of exiles that Zionist ideology had promised. Instead, they encountered a social hierarchy that placed European Jews at the top and everyone else substantially below. The term that came to define them was Mizrahi, an umbrella category meaning Eastern, that homogenized dozens of distinct communities with different languages, customs and religious traditions into a single subordinate class. Iraqi Jews who had been lawyers and merchants found themselves housed in transit camps, tin and canvas structures originally built for European Holocaust survivors. Yemeni Jews were sent to agricultural settlements in the Negev desert and told to farm land they had no experience cultivating. Moroccan families were dispatched to development towns on the geographic periphery far from economic opportunities and political power. The Israeli establishment dominated by Ashkenazi labor Zionists viewed these newcomers through a lens mixing paternalism with barely concealed contempt. David Ben-Gurion himself, Israel's founding prime minister and the face of the state's creation, expressed views that reflected this hierarchy in ways that would be shocking if uttered today. In private conversations and public addresses throughout the 1950s, he described Mizrahi immigrants as lacking the cultural and intellectual preparation for democracy suggesting they needed to be educated out of their primitive customs and Levantine mentality. The melting pot ideology promoted by the state was never about cultural exchange or mutual respect. It was about forcing Middle Eastern and North African Jews to abandon their languages, their music, their religious customs and their historical memory in favor of a European inflected Hebrew culture that treated Ashkenazi norms as universal and everything else as backward. This was not accidental policy drift. It was systematic cultural engineering backed by state institutions, educational curricula and media representation.

[00:07:07]The absorption camps where Mizrahi immigrants spent months or years became laboratories for this transformation.

[00:07:14]Health officials sprayed arriving immigrants with DDT, a dehumanizing ritual justified by hygiene concerns but experienced as humiliation.

[00:07:22]Social workers visited families to inspect their homes and instruct mothers on proper European standards of child care and housekeeping. School teachers punished children for speaking Arabic, Ladino or Judeo-Arabic dialects imposing Hebrew as the only acceptable language even though many of these youngsters came from homes where literary Hebrew was reserved for prayer and study. The educational system tracked Mizrahi children into vocational schools while Ashkenazi children advanced to academic tracks leading to university. By the early 1960s, the achievement gap had become entrenched with Mizrahi students vastly underrepresented in higher education and the professions replicating in Israel the very social stratification that European Jewish immigrants had fled in Europe. Economic policy reinforced these divisions. The Histadrut, Israel's powerful labor federation controlled by the Ashkenazi labor establishment, operated as a state within a state controlling employment, housing allocation and access to social services. Mizrahi workers found themselves channeled into construction, textile factories and low-wage service jobs while white-collar positions in government ministries, universities and the growing tech sector remained overwhelmingly Ashkenazi. Geographic segregation became permanent as development towns established in the 1950s remained economically stagnant, their residents locked into dependency on government subsidies and unable to accumulate wealth or educational credentials. By 1970, poverty rates among Mizrahi families were more than double those of Ashkenazi families and the wealth gap was even more dramatic, a socioeconomic divide that persists in modified form into the present day. The most explosive and least discussed chapter in this story involves what happened to the children.

[00:09:01]In the early 1950s, hundreds of Yemeni Mizrahi and Balkan immigrant families reported that their infants and toddlers had disappeared from Israeli hospitals and clinics taken away while sick and never returned. Parents were told their children had died but they never saw bodies, never received death certificates and were never allowed to conduct burials according to Jewish law.

[00:09:22]For decades, these families insisted their children had been stolen and given to childless Ashkenazi couples and for decades they were dismissed as hysterical, uneducated people prone to conspiracy theories. The Israeli government appointed three separate commissions to investigate these claims in 1967, 1988 and 1995 and each time the official conclusion was the same, the children had died and the cases were closed. But the testimony kept accumulating. Mothers who had been told their babies died later received military draft notices for those same children. Families discovered burial records listing multiple infants in single graves or no graves at all. In 2016, the Israeli government finally declassified some documents related to these cases, revealing systematic irregularities and evidence that at least some children had indeed been taken and placed for adoption without parental consent. Though the full scope remains disputed and documentation incomplete.

[00:10:18]This wound, still unhealed, represents something larger than bureaucratic negligence or isolated misconduct. It symbolizes the expendability of Mizrahi families in the eyes of an establishment that viewed their primary function as providing demographic mass for the new state while their cultural identity and individual rights were secondary considerations. The stolen children affair, whether it involved dozens or hundreds of cases, revealed the power imbalance at the heart of Israeli society and the willingness of institutions to sacrifice Mizrahi families to competing priorities ranging from finding homes for adoptive parents to eugenic ideas about improving the genetic stock of the nation. That such ideas circulated in a state founded by Holocaust survivors is one of history's darker ironies, a pattern interrupt that forces us to recognize that victimhood in one context does not prevent the exercise of power and prejudice in another.

[00:11:14]Political awakening came slowly but inevitably in the 1959 Wadi Salib riots.

[00:11:20]Mizrahi residents of a Haifa neighborhood erupted in several days of violent protests against discrimination in housing and employment, shocking the labor establishment which had assumed these communities would remain passive and grateful. The real political earthquake arrived in 1977 when the Likud party, led by Menachem Begin, won its first electoral victory, ending 29 years of Labor dominance. Mizrahi voters delivered that victory, motivated less by ideology than by accumulated rage at the condescension and exclusion they had experienced under Labor governments.

[00:11:53]Begin himself, an Ashkenazi from Poland, understood their anger and channeled it, speaking directly to the humiliations they had endured and promising dignity and recognition. His coalition relied on Mizrahi support and he delivered symbolic gestures including appointing Mizrahi ministers and visiting development towns Labor politicians had ignored but structural economic inequality proved harder to dismantle.

[00:12:16]On the rise of the Shas party in the 1980s marked the next phase of Mizrahi political assertion. Founded in 1984 under the spiritual leadership of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, himself born in Iraq and raised in Jerusalem, Shas combined ultra-Orthodox religious identity with explicit Mizrahi ethnic politics, creating a vehicle that spoke simultaneously to religious tradition and social grievance. Rabbi Ovadia was a towering Talmudic scholar whose legal rulings carried weight across the Jewish world, but he also spoke in the accent and idiom of Middle Eastern Jews, delivering fiery sermons in which he denounced Ashkenazi elites with language that scandalized the secular press but electrified his followers. Shas built a parallel educational network, social service infrastructure, and political machine that allowed Mizrahi communities to bypass the institutions that had excluded them, creating autonomous space within Israeli society. At its peak, Shas held 17 seats in the 120-seat Knesset, making it a kingmaker in coalition negotiations and forcing mainstream parties to take Mizrahi concerns seriously.

[00:13:23]Yet political power did not translate into full cultural recognition or economic equality. The narrative of Israel's founding remains stubbornly Ashkenazi-centric, focusing on European Zionism, the Holocaust, and kibbutz pioneers while marginalizing the stories of Middle Eastern Jewish communities and their expulsion from Arab lands. School curricula devoted extensive time to the Shoah and Eastern European Jewish history while treating Mizrahi history as a footnote. Memorial days commemorated European Jewish suffering but not the Farhud in Baghdad or the pogroms in Libya and Egypt. The cultural canon celebrated Ashkenazi writers, poets, and musicians while Mizrahi artistic traditions were relegated to ethnic festivals and folkloric performance. This symbolic erasure mattered because it shaped how Israelis understood their own society, treating European Jewish experience as central and normative while everything else remained peripheral. The consequences of this historical trajectory extend far beyond internal Israeli politics. The erasure of Mizrahi history has allowed international discourse about Israel to proceed as though the state is simply a transplanted European colony with no connection to the region, ignoring the fact that the majority of Israeli Jews are themselves refugees from Middle Eastern and North African countries, people whose families lived under Muslim rule for over a millennium.

[00:14:41]When critics describe Israel as a purely European settler-colonial project, they erase the lived experience of more than half the Jewish population and the hundreds of thousands of Middle Eastern Jews who lost property, communities, and homelands in the mid-20th century. This does not resolve the moral and political questions surrounding Palestinian displacement and rights, but it does complicate the narrative in ways that are frequently ignored in polarized debates. The Mizrahi experience demonstrates that the Arab-Israeli conflict produced refugees on both sides, a reality obscured when the focus remains exclusively on Palestinian loss without acknowledging simultaneous Jewish expulsion from Arab countries.

[00:15:19]Inside Israel, the legacy of discrimination has transmuted into complex new forms. Mizrahi Jews have achieved political power and cultural visibility unimaginable in the 1950s, producing prime ministers, Supreme Court justices, celebrities, and business leaders. Intermarriage between Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Jews has become common in urban centers, blurring some of the bright lines that once divided communities. Yet socioeconomic gaps persist, particularly in education, income, and neighborhood segregation.

[00:15:49]Development towns established in the periphery 70 years ago remain economically distressed. Their population still disproportionately Mizrahi. University faculty and high-tech executives remain disproportionately Ashkenazi. Cultural attitudes have shifted with Mizrahi music and cuisine now celebrated as part of mainstream Israeli identity rather than stigmatized as backward, but this commercialized multiculturalism sometimes feels like appropriation rather than genuine recognition.

[00:16:14]The religious dimension adds another layer of complexity.

[00:16:18]Mizrahi Jews brought with them traditions of religious observance that differed from both Ashkenazi Orthodoxy and secular Zionism. They practiced a Judaism more integrated into daily life, less rigid in its boundaries between sacred and secular, more comfortable with mysticism and folk practices. The Israeli rabbinate, initially dominated by Ashkenazi rabbis, often viewed these traditions with suspicion, questioning the validity of Mizrahi religious practices and even the Jewishness of some immigrants.

[00:16:47]This religious discrimination had practical consequences affecting marriage, divorce, and conversion processes.

[00:16:53]Rabbi Ovadia Yosef's scholarship was partly dedicated to defending and codifying Mizrahi religious tradition, establishing its legitimacy within Halakhic discourse, and creating space for Mizrahi religious identity within Israeli society. His legacy includes not just political mobilization but the preservation of a religious tradition that the Ashkenazi establishment had attempted to marginalize or absorb. Our recent years have seen a slow emergence of Mizrahi historical consciousness and cultural pride, driven partly by a new generation of scholars, filmmakers, and activists determined to recover silenced stories. Academic research has begun documenting the experiences of specific communities, the diversity within the Mizrahi category, and the mechanisms of discrimination and erasure. Films and television series have explored the immigrant experience, the transit camps, and the stolen children affair, bringing these stories to wider audiences.

[00:17:47]Memoirs by second and third generation Mizrahi Israelis have articulated the psychological costs of cultural erasure and the process of recovering ancestral identity. This cultural work matters because it challenges the dominant narrative, insisting that Israeli history must account for all its founders, not just the European pioneers who controlled the storytelling apparatus.

[00:18:08]The broader lesson extends beyond Israel to questions about nation-building, memory, and power.

[00:18:15]The Mizrahi experience demonstrates how even communities united by shared religion and existential threats can reproduce hierarchies of belonging, privileging some narratives while suppressing others.

[00:18:27]It shows how state institutions, even those created with democratic aspirations, can systematically disadvantage entire populations through policies presented as neutral or technocratic. It reveals the long shadow cast by cultural erasure, how denying people their history and traditions creates wounds that persist across generations even as material conditions improve. And it illustrates the resilience of suppressed identities, the way communities fight to preserve memory and demand recognition even when institutions refuse to grant it. What happened to the Mizrahi majority was not incidental to Israel's founding but constitutive of it, shaping the state's political culture, social structure, and self-understanding in ways that remain visible today. Their story is not a footnote to the real history of modern Israel.

[00:19:13]It is the real history, the foundation upon which the state was actually built, as opposed to the heroic pioneer myth that occupied official memory.

[00:19:21]Understanding this history does not diminish the significance of European Jewish suffering or the Holocaust's centrality to Jewish consciousness. It does, however, demand that we recognize the partial nature of narratives that center only European experience while treating everyone else as background characters in someone else's drama. The forgotten majority of Israel were never actually a minority. They were made invisible by institutional power and narrative control, a process that reveals as much about how nations construct their histories as it does about the specific case of Israel. The recovery of their story, still incomplete and contested, represents an ongoing struggle over who gets to be remembered, whose suffering counts, and which version of the past will shape the future.