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PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, SEPTEMBER 20, 1982
PAGE 14
Gradually political power has passed from the Ashkenazim, Jews of
European origin, to the Sephardim, those who emigrated from
Morocco, Iran, Yemen and other Arab countries after Israeli
independence in 1948.
At the time of the great Sephardi
migration,
z
ionist leaders assumed that Jews in large numbers
would also arrive from the West and from Eastern Europe but
relatively few actually did. Today the Sephardim, though � nly �
fraction of world Jewry, make� half of the Jewish population of
Israel, and, with a higher birth rate, they are growing
proportionately stronger.
It was no secret that the Sephardim, children of the Arab world,
had sharply different �itical traditions from the Ashkenazim.
What had not been anticipated was the appeal of Menachem Begin, a
Polish Jew with neither knowledge of nor interest in Sephardic
culture, to the Sephardi masses. Accustomed to emotion in their
politics,
the Sephardim were drawn to Begin's personal
flamboyance, soaring rhetoric, dramatic oratory. But it is sheer
coincidence that his revisionist concept of Zionism seems also to
have been tailor-made to fit them.
The seminal thinker of revisionism was the Russian-born Vladimir
Jabotinsky, who repudiated the tenets of mainstream Zionism,
which were: lawful purchase and colonisation of the land in
Palestine, negotiation with the great Powers to guarantee a
Jewish homeland, cultivation of a new Jewish society based on the
tenets of egalitarian socialism. [The Soviets backed Israel in
the 1948 war because of Zionism's intense socialistic ideals.
King Ibn Saud feared Israel would introduce Bolshevism into the
Middle East.] Jabotinsky had one objective, to establish a
powerful Jewish nation-state, and he believed it should be
achieved by the force of Jewish arms. Begin became a Jabotinsky
disciple in the late 1920's, joining the revisionist youth
organisation Betar in his native Brest Litovsk••••
Though Begin the politician has surely been faithful to
democratic procedures, Betar indisputably had an authoritarian
flavour.•..It trained tirelessly with arms to liberate Palestine
"on both sides of the Jordan...•
11
Before Teav1ng, the British
partitioned Palestine into two parts, in one of which the Jews
predominated, in the other the Arabs. A partitioned Palestine
was less than the mainstream Zionists wanted, but they chose to
accept it. The revisionists refused the compromise. It is this
issue that has left Zionist thought in angry disarray•...
The Sephardim have little sympathy for Labour's ambiguities, or
for Ashkenazi concepts of democracy, egalitarianism, socialism.
Begin offers strength, orthodoxy, certitude. More significant,
perhaps, the Sephardim respond to Begin's identification of the
enemy. For the Ashkenazim, shaped within the context of European
anti-semitism, the Arabs are a problem to be solved. To the
Sephardim, who lived for centuries under Islamic domination, they
are foe•••with whom there are scores to settle.
To the
Sephardim, the humanist Zionist dream is a European creation,
which they never really knew. To them, Begin's message is a call
to strike back.