There is an old saying, attributed to Morocco’s King Hassan II, that captures something no diplomatic communiqué ever could: “When a Jew leaves Morocco, we lose a citizen, but we gain an ambassador.” It is a beautiful sentiment, generous and historically grounded, and it has been quoted so often in the decades since that it has acquired the comfortable patina of a proverb.

But what is less often quoted – and what matters far more for the question of who should lead Israel next – is what the same king said in his extraordinary 1993 memoir, La Mémoire d’un Roi: “I am convinced that when Israelis of Arab origin have a real responsibility in conducting negotiations, we will seriously approach peace. They are the ones who will negotiate best.”

Hassan II died in 1999. Nearly three decades later, not a single Israeli of Mizrahi or Moroccan origin has ever served as prime minister – not one, in the entire 78-year history of a state where Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews now constitute the demographic majority.

Every prime minister, from David Ben-Gurion to Benjamin Netanyahu, has come from an Ashkenazi or European Jewish background, products of a founding elite that arrived with the ideological architecture of European Zionism and built its political institutions in its own image.

David Levy, born in Rabat, rose from the social and geographic margins of Israeli society to become one of the country’s most senior political figures, serving as deputy prime minister for much of the period between 1981 and 2000 and three times as foreign minister. He twice sought the leadership of Likud, in 1992 and 1993, but never reached the premiership.

Amir Peretz, born in Boujad, came closer from the other side of the political divide: he led the Labor Party and entered Ehud Olmert’s government in 2006 as both deputy prime minister and defense minister. His political standing was badly damaged by the Second Lebanon War, and he lost the Labor leadership the following year.

Both men rose to within sight of Israel’s highest office, yet neither crossed the final threshold. It is difficult to separate that history from the deep social contempt, institutional prejudice, and cultural hierarchy that shaped the treatment of Moroccan and other Mizrahi Jews in Israel for decades.

They were brought into the state as citizens but too often treated as an inferior human material to be disciplined, relocated, patronized, mocked for their accents, and pushed to the political and geographic margins by an establishment that saw itself as more European, more modern, and more entitled to rule.

Against that history stood the unmistakable sense........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)