ABSTRACT
A close examination of the socioeconomic situation during the state’s first years reveals the roots of economic oppression relations between Ashkenazim and Mizrahim. Justification for this system was provided by “modernization” theory in academia, and by the official immigrant absorption approach that supported a classethnic structure and justified it with cultural excuses. Those approaches also gave birth to myths in the form of such simplistic slogans as “We have all been through transit camp,” or “The times were hard for everyone,” or “Everyone was equal, but the Mizrahim got stuck because they lacked education and were lazy,” or worse: “Those who wanted to, did make it.” These myths did not appear by themselves; they were developed by public opinion makers and by social policy. Take, for example, the following excerpt from the protocols of a 1954 interministerial committee for the investigation of conditions in transit camps: “It must be emphasized that immigrants with exceptional initiative, or who were well off, bypassed the transit camp in the process of their absorption, or found ways to leave it quickly and settle among the established yishuv. Those remaining were for the most part less apt at paving their own path through the new cultural frame.”1 The worst and most official myth was that of “absorption through modernization” by modern democratic Israel. According to the modernization theory, the Mizrahim had come from a “backward” society to a “modern Western” society, and were therefore objectively inferior, but over time, as they were to become modernized, they would be able to join the higher echelons of the economy and of society, which would become entirely heterogeneous.2 Today, even Israeli traditional functionalist sociology speaks of a conscious policy of inequality during the first years, and of the various elites’ denial of this policy’s existence. Thus, for example, Moshe Lissak:
This reality contained, in fact, much inequality, whose expressions were, first and foremost, a visible quantity gap in control of resources between recent and veteran immigrants. Second, a quality gap in the diversity of resources that were unequally distributed (income, property, profession, education, cultural assets, political power, etc.). All this was overshadowed by a grim perspective about the duration of time required for changing the situation.
