SHLOMOAVINERI
287
always remained at the margin of Israel's political life. His party
numbered between eight to twenty members in the Knesseth, losing
eight parliamentary elections in a row between 1949 and 1973 .
The emergence of the non-European electorate as a major force
in Israeli politics in recent years introduced into the center of the
political scene of the country a population coming from a completely
different social and intellectual cutlure. In brief, most non-European
immigrants came to Israel from a background that was much more
Third World than European.
It is this different cultural background that is sometimes over–
looked in many accounts of the changing Israeli scene. The non–
European immigrants, coming as they do from 'Third-World'
Middle Eastern countries, came from highly traditional cultures.
Unlike Jewish communities in Europe (and America), the Jewish
communities in the Middle East have not gone through 100 or 150
years of secularization, emancipation, and enlightenment; their
leadership is still primarily religious and traditional; socialist, revo–
lutionizing Zionist Labor parties were not active among these
communities as they have been among Eastern and Central
European Jews; most of the 'Oriental' immigrants are religiously
orthodox, and their family structures remain hierarchical and male–
oriented. Egalitarian ideas advocating equality between the sexes as
well as between the elders and the youngsters never struck root
among them ; nor did these 'Oriental' immigrants come from a
political culture in which party politics ever played a significant role.
Hence the egalitarian ideas immanent in the Labor ethos never
really appealed to many of these immigrants; they react much more
positively to the style of hierarchical leadership like that of Begin and
are mostly lost in the labyrinthine ideological divisions among the
squabbling wings and factions of the Labor Party .
Similarly , a simple, if not simplistic, attitude to the Arab- Israeli
conflict as the one offered by Begin - 'This country is either ours, or
it is theirs' - strikes a much more responsive chord among the non–
European, traditional, and ethno-centric voters than the tortuous
compromises of Labor's attempts to square its Zionism with uni–
versalist and humanist ideas .
There is a further element, sometimes submerged even in the
political consciousness of Israel itself, and this has to do with some
general attitudes vis-a-vis the Arabs which can be found among
many Jews coming from Arab countries. Some pious hopes have
been expressed in the past that with the growing 'Sephardization' of
