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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Israel
Index
An Arab village scene in the occupied West Bank
Courtesy Palestine Perspectives
The Orientals' electoral rejection of Labor and embrace of
Likud can thus be seen as the political part of a larger attempt to
try to lessen the socioeconomic gaps that have separated these two
broad segments of Israel's Jewry. The gaps are reflected in the
close correlation between Israel's class structure and its ethnic
divisions along several critical dimensions, among them educational
achievement, occupational structure, housing, and income.
In education, the proportion of Orientals in junior high
schools and high schools has risen through the years, but in the
late 1980s a gap remained. For example, in 1975 the median years of
schooling for Ashkenazim was 9.8, compared with 7.1 for Orientals.
In 1986, although both groups enjoyed increased schooling, the
median for Ashkenazim was 12.2 years, compared with 10.4 for
Oriental Jews. Despite the expansion of higher education in Israel
after the June 1967 War, Orientals lagged considerably behind
Ashkenazim in their presence in institutions of higher education.
In the 1984-85 school year, only 14 percent of university degree
recipients were of Oriental heritage, up from 10.6 percent a decade
earlier.
In terms of occupational structures, Oriental Jews were still
overrepresented in the blue-collar professions. In 1982, for
example, 36.6 percent of Oriental immigrants and 34.5 percent of
second-generation Orientals were employed in the blue-collar
sector. Among Ashkenazim, 25.2 percent of the immigrant generation,
and 13 percent of the next (sabra or native-born) generation were
employed in the blue-collar sector. Among professional and
technical workers, the proportion for Orientals rose from 9 percent
in the immigrant generation to 12 percent in the sabra generation,
clearly some improvement. Nevertheless, in the same occupations
among Ashkenazim, professional and technical employment rose from
15.5 percent in the immigrant to 24.7 percent in the Ashkenazi
sabra generation. In the sciences and academia, the gap has
remained much larger, in generational terms.
As a result of differential income levels and larger families,
Orientals have lagged behind Ashkenazim in housing. In 1984
Ashkenazi households averaged 3.1 persons per room, as compared
with 4.5 per room in Oriental households. In 1984 the income of the
average Oriental family was 78 percent of that of the average
Ashkenazi family--the same proportion as it had been in 1946, and
down 4 percent from what it was in 1975. Studies of the regional
distribution of income indicated that development towns, most with
large Oriental populations, ranked well below the national average
in income. Data comparing the period 1975-76 with that of 1979-80,
however, indicated a significant improvement in Oriental income
status. In this period, there was a decrease in the proportion of
Oriental Jews defined as "poor" (having incomes in the lowest 10
percent of the population). These data on education, occupation,
and income indicate that although Oriental Jews have made progress
over the years, the gaps separating them from Ashkenazim have not
been significantly reduced. Moreover, these gaps have not been
closing under Likud governments any more quickly or substantively
than they had been under Labor.
The close correlation between ethnicity and socioeconomic class
in Israel remains the main axis along which the Ashkenazi-Oriental
cleavage is drawn. The "hardening" of ethnicity into social
class--what some analysts have referred to as the formation of
Israeli "ethnoclasses"--represents, with the Orthodox-secular
division, the most serious cleavage that divides the Jewish society
of Israel from within. In Israel's class structure in the late
1980s, the upper classes were predominantly Ashkenazi and the lower
classes predominantly Oriental. Mobility has been most evident in
the movement, even though gradual, by Orientals into the large
middle class.
Those Sephardim, however, who do rise to the middle class are
unlikely to think of themselves as Orientals. They identify more
with Ashkenazi patterns--in family size, age at termination of
child-bearing, nature of leisure activities, and the like. Upwardly
mobile Orientals loosen their ties with their own ethnic groups,
and for them the term "Oriental" is reserved for the poor or
underprivileged. This phenomenon has been seen by some as a sort of
co-optation of upwardly mobile Orientals by Ashkenazi Israelis.
Oriental upward mobility has strengthened the correlation for those
who do not rise in class between Oriental ethnicity and low class
standing. This correlation has led some analysts to speak of
Oriental cultural patterns as essentially the culture of a
particular stratum of society, the "Israeli working class." To some
extent, too, Oriental culture patterns mitigate the integrationist
effect of Ashkenazi-Oriental "intermarriage," estimated at nearly
30 percent for women of Oriental heritage who have nine or more
years of schooling.
The social manifestations of this rift, however, have been more
evident in the political arena than in the economic. Since the
mid-1970s, Orientals have comprised a numerical majority of the
Jewish population. Thus far, the beneficiaries of this majority
have been political parties, often religious ones and typically
right-of-center, that have ranged themselves in opposition to
Labor. The height of Ashkenazi-Oriental ethnic tensions occurred in
the national elections of the 1980s--especially 1981--in which
anti-Labor sentiment was expressed, sometimes with violence, as
anti-Ashkenazi sentiment. That Orientals supported in those
elections the Likud Bloc led by Menachem Begin, himself an
Ashkenazi from Poland, whose ultranationalist oratory served to
inflame the violence, was a paradox that troubled few in Israel at
the time. More troubling to many Israelis were the violence and
anti-Ashkenazi overtones of the opposition to the peace
demonstrations that were organized by Israeli doves in the wake of
the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and, from the doves' side,
the imputation of "anti-democratic" tendencies, en masse, to the
Orientals.
Some commentators have referred to these recent
crystallizations as the "new Oriental ethnicity." Unlike the
Oriental ethnicity of the 1970s, it has been less concerned with
promoting festivals, pilgrimages, and other cultural events, and
more explicitly focused on political power. In the 1980s,
self-consciously Oriental minor political parties have reentered
the political arena, the first serious and successful ones since
the Yishuv and early years of the state.
To some extent, the new ethnicity dovetailed with the new civil
religion, the new Zionism, in its positive orientation to
traditional Judaism and its negative orientation to the modern
secularism of Labor Zionism. In this sense, the new ethnicity has
contributed to the traditionalization of Israeli society. But the
two movements are not identical. As a group, for example, Oriental
Jews--although they are hawkish on the question of the occupied
territories--have been less committed than many ultranationalist
Ashkenazim to the settlement of the West Bank. The primary reason
has been that Orientals see such costly efforts as draining
resources into new settlements at the expense of solving serious
housing problems in the cities and development towns of pre-1967
Israel.
Around issues such as the Jewish settlement of the West Bank
can be seen the complicated interplay of ethnicity, religion,
politics, and social class interests in contemporary Israeli
society. In the late 1980s, the Ashkenazi-Oriental distinction
continued to be colored by all these factors. Both Israeli and
foreign observers believed that the Ashkenazi-Oriental rift would
remain salient for many years, partly because it was a source of
social tensions in Israel and partly because it was a lightning rod
for them.
Data as of December 1988
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