Israel Studies

Israel Studies 5.2 (2000) 78-106

Class, Ethnicity, and the Rise of Immigrant Leadership; Beer-Sheva in the Early 1950s

Esther Meir-Glitzenstein

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Perspectives on Israeli Society

The economic, social, and political integration of the immigrants from Islamic countries in Israeli society and the relations between new immigrants and longtime residents, between people from Europe and from Islamic countries, have been discussed in many studies, chiefly in the social sciences. Because the immigrants from Islamic countries were concentrated in the geographical, economic, social, and political periphery of Israeli society in the 1950s, these studies have addressed the problem of the strong correlation between low socioeconomic status and Oriental ethnicity.

In the first two decades of the state, its leaders proposed the productivization of the new immigrants as a way to integrate them in Israeli society. ¹ The sociologists involved in the absorption process shared this attitude. Professor S. N. Eisenstadt, one of the foremost Israeli sociologists of the period, termed the absorption process "a process of group change among the immigrants" in response to the "demands of the host society, which expected various changes in the immigrants' social and cultural behavior, and not only in purely technical aspects." ² The process of change was perceived as part of the spread of modernization, as a developmental process involving an interaction between the modern and traditional segments of society; integration was to lead to the dissemination of modern values and social and cultural uniformity. The implication is that the full integration of the Oriental immigrants in Israeli society was perceived as a function of their ability to internalize the modern values of society in their socialist-Zionist form. ³ Accordingly, the socio-ethnic stratification was explained in terms of cultural-historical circumstances: "The immigrant groups from unindustrialized Arab countries come to Israel and remain at the low rungs of the class ladder because they are not adapted to the class structure of an industrialized society." ⁴ [End Page 78]

A different conception is brought up by Deborah Bernstein and Shlomo Swirsky in their article "Who Worked, at What, for Whom, and for How Much?" first published in 1980. ⁵ The authors argue that the theory of the evolutionary spread of modernization is merely an ideological elaboration intended to justify differential social development, ⁶ and the modernization and capitalist development processes that prevailed in Israel in the 1950s are what created or widened the social and ethnic rifts. According to this conception, the cultural differences between immigrant groups formed the basis for the distribution of labor in the capitalist economy that took shape in the formative years of Israeli society. To prove their case, the researchers looked at developments in several economic sectors, relying on surveys and statistics relating to the late 1950s and the 1960s. The data confirm that there was a cultural division of labor, but they say nothing about the process that brought about this division of labor or about the activities of those involved in this process.

The present paper examines the question of cultural division of labor from historical perspective using historical research tools to examine the economic and political integration of immigrants from Islamic countries in their first years in Israel. Methodologically, the paper will revolve around a test case--immigrants from Iraq in Beer-Sheva, an immigrant town in southern Israel, and their relations with the establishment--based on archival material from the early 1950s. The topic will be examined by looking at three systems of relations that shaped immigrant absorption in Israel: the national-Zionist value system, which advocated the equality of all Jews living in Israel; the notion of cultural hierarchy, which originated in the colonialist world of values that positioned Western culture at the top of the cultural scale and termed anything non-Western inferior ⁷ ; and, the system typical of encounters between newcomers and old-timers in immigration countries.

For about a decade, from the mid-1950s until the mid-1960s, public life in the immigrant town of Beer-Sheva was dominated by stormy relations between...