ABSTRACT
The Mizrahi protest vote of 1977, against three decades-long rule by MAPAI (which ran a list for these elections together with some satellite parties, under the title Ma’arach), gave the Likud thirty-two Knesset (parliament) seats of Mizrahi votes, fourteen more than in the previous election cycle.1 The 1981 elections results intensified the Mizrahi Ballot Rebellion, Mizrahi votes were responsible for thirty-six parliament seats for Likud and three for TAMI. One can say that a third of Knesset seats were decided in 1981 by one of the greatest ethnic protest votes in the history of ethnic struggles. One must note, in considering this, that until 1973 half of the Mizrahim consistently voted for MAPAI. From 1973, Likud came consistently to win half of Mizrahi votes.2 Even after this shift, Mizrahi Knesset members numbered twenty-seven in all, not even a quarter of the the Knesset membership. Ironically, in the Tenth Knesset (elected in 1981), only nine of Likud’s forty-eight Knesset members were Mizrahim, compared to eleven Mizrahim out of forty-seven Ma’arach Knesset members.3 In both parties, “integration” of Mizrahi ICs still dominated; they were placed on the candidate list to attract Mizrahi votes. Shevah Weiss, one of Ma’arach’s leaders at the time, wrote after the 1977 upheaval: “The pseudo-technical and artificial integration of characters from the ethnic communities in Ma’arach, coming out of the continuous patronizing attitude and their noninclusion in the actual party leadership-caused the Ma’arach real damage.”4 The Mizrahi block vote for Likud was not to find representation until a system of primaries was implemented and party members determined the list of candidates.
