The ingathering: mass immigration and the Mizrahi experience
In its first years Israel's Jewish population more than doubles as survivors from Europe and Jews from the Arab world and Iran arrive, many to tent camps and remote development towns.
- Israel: A History — Anita Shapira, Brandeis University Press (2012)
- The Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times — Norman A. Stillman, Jewish Publication Society (1991)
- Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims — Ella Shohat, Social Text (1988)
- A History of Israel: From the Rise of Zionism to Our Time — Howard M. Sachar, Alfred A. Knopf (2007)
Israel’s Declaration of Independence promised to open the gates to Jewish immigration, and the 1950 Law of Return gave every Jew the right to settle. In the first three and a half years about 690,000 immigrants arrived, more than doubling the Jewish population.
- Israel: A History — Anita Shapira, Brandeis University Press (2012)
- A History of Israel: From the Rise of Zionism to Our Time — Howard M. Sachar, Alfred A. Knopf (2007)
About half came from Europe, many Holocaust survivors. The other half came from the Islamic world, where Jewish life became precarious after 1948. Almost the entire Jewish community of Yemen was airlifted in 1949–50, and some 120,000 Iraqi Jews left in 1950–51. Jews from Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria and Iran followed over the next two decades. In all, between 800,000 and 900,000 Jews left Arab countries and Iran, most of them for Israel.
- The Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times — Norman A. Stillman, Jewish Publication Society (1991)
- Israel: A History — Anita Shapira, Brandeis University Press (2012)
The state was poor and on rationing. Newcomers were housed in ma’abarot, tent and tin-hut transit camps, and many Mizrahim were then sent to new “development towns” on the borders and in the Negev. Ashkenazi officials often treated their traditions as backward. Protests such as the 1959 Wadi Salib riots in Haifa and the Israeli Black Panthers of the early 1970s gave voice to the anger, and in 1977 Mizrahi voters helped Menachem Begin end Labour’s rule.
- Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims — Ella Shohat, Social Text (1988)
- Israel: A History — Anita Shapira, Brandeis University Press (2012)
Communities thousands of years old were uprooted by persecution and lost their property, then met condescension in Israel: DDT sprayed on arrivals, transit camps, the suspected disappearance of Yemenite children, and pressure to shed Arab culture.
- Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims — Ella Shohat, Social Text (1988)
- The Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times — Norman A. Stillman, Jewish Publication Society (1991)
Arab governments and many Palestinians reject equating these Jews' departure with the Nakba, stressing Zionist recruitment, and object when Israel uses it to offset Palestinian refugee claims.
- The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood — Rashid Khalidi, Beacon Press (2006)
- The Israel-Palestine Conflict: A History — James L. Gelvin, Cambridge University Press (2021)
Push and pull both mattered: rising hostility and laws in Arab countries after 1948, such as Iraq's 1950 law stripping emigrating Jews of citizenship, alongside Zionist activism and Israel's need for population.
- The Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times — Norman A. Stillman, Jewish Publication Society (1991)
- Israel: A History — Anita Shapira, Brandeis University Press (2012)
Why it matters today
Roughly half of Jewish Israelis have Middle Eastern or North African roots. The hardships and slights of the 1950s fed a lasting Mizrahi grievance against the Ashkenazi Labour elite, which reshaped politics from 1977 and still colours debates about class, culture and who the "real" Israel is.