Last week I watched one of my favorite programs on Channel 11, A Meeting with Roni Koban, in which Koban interviewed MK Orly Levy-Abecassis. Koban is one of the gentlest interviewers on Israeli TV, but nevertheless manages to get the utmost out of his interviewees by means of his calm, charming and non-aggressive manner and extraordinary insight.
Koban is physically a big fellow, and I was delighted to see him significantly slimmer than usual. Levy-Abecassis seemed to have returned to her calmer, more charming, articulate self of yesteryear – not one of the troupe of assertive, generally good-looking shrieking female Likud MKs of Mizrahi origin who seem to compete with each other as to who will be more extreme and bitchy in her presentation of hate toward Ashkenazim in general, and the current government in particular (or the other way around).
Unfortunately, the collective image of Mizrahi female politicians today is that of those like Miri Regev, Galit Distal Atbaryan, Keren Barak, Keti Shitrit and May Golan. Labor’s Emilie Moatti is no less Moroccan than her Likud counterparts, and no less sensitive to the discrimination of Mizrahim that she experienced during her childhood and youth. Yet she is soft-spoken and gentle, though her agenda is anything but parve. Incidentally, she does not only raise sympathy among her Ashkenazi ideological colleagues (I voted for her in the Labor primaries), but even in today’s stormy and even hellish Knesset plenum she is warmly embraced by MKs from the opposition: Mizrahim, Ashkenazim and even haredim.
But back to Orly Levy-Abecassis’s interview. About 10 minutes into the broadcast I suddenly realized that I was wrong: Koban hadn’t lost weight and Levy-Abecassis had not returned to be someone I used to enjoy listening to and sympathizing with. It was simply a replay of a program first broadcast on November 30, 2017, when Koban was really slimmer, and Levy-Abecassis was in the early stages of forming her own party – Gesher – after she had left Yisrael Beytenu when Liberman entered Netanyahu’s fourth government as defense minister, without demanding anything from Netanyahu in the social field, which was, and still is, the apple of Levy-Abecassis’s eye.
Since then, Levy-Abecassis ran in the elections to the 21st Knesset on her own, and failed to pass the qualifying threshold; ran with the Labor Party under Amir Peretz in the elections to the 22nd Knesset (a move I was pleased with at the time); ran in a hopeless coalition between, Labor, Meretz and Gesher in the elections to the 23th Knesset, which she subsequently left at the same time as Peretz and Itzik Shmuli from the Labor Party, to join Netanyahu’s national emergency government. In the elections to the 24th Knesset, she ran within the Likud, to serve in the opposition, and most recently failed to be chosen to serve on the Committee for the Selections of Judges on behalf of the Likud.
In the 2017 interview, Levy-Abecassis spoke very frankly about her father’s nasty experience with Netanyahu during the 1993 Likud primaries, when Netanyahu falsely accused MK David Levy of heading a Mafia gang allegedly responsible for threatening to make public a sex tape (which never existed) showing Netanyahu with a woman with whom he was allegedly having an affair. This finally resulted in David Levy leaving the Likud in 1995 and forming his own party – Gesher – the name adopted by his daughter 20 years later.
Levy-Abecassis also spoke of how in the 19th Knesset, as chairwoman of the Knesset Internal Affairs and Environment Committee, Likud MK Miri Regev had undermined a bill she had submitted on public housing (in 2012 Regev, and MK Dov Hanin from Hadash had co-sponsored the Bill with her) by blocking its promotion and throwing Levy-Abecassis out of the committee.
“The greatest betrayal I ever experienced,” she commented.
In the conversation with Koban, Levy-Abecassis also spoke of the disparagement she had experienced as a child in Beit She’an in contacts she had with children from the neighboring kibbutzim. However, her approach seemed to be that it was primarily up to her to take her fate into her own hands, as she actually did. Levy-Abecassis did not attack Ashkenazim as a collective, or mark them as an enemy, which is what she appears to be doing these days in her speeches within the framework of the endless opposition filibusters, which do not even pretend to be constructive.
I can understand why many Mizrahim find it easier to view all Ashkenazim as part of a collective that Mizrahi intellectuals such as Ron Cahlili (a filmmaker, and writer) believe (to go by his last article in Haaretz) ought to stand on trial in the International Court of Justice in the Hague for the "crimes" they committed against the Mizrahim in the early days of the state, and allegedly continue to commit to the present day.
The truth is that in the past, and perhaps even today, many Ashkenazim also viewed the Mizrahim as a collective – an inferior collective – that includes exceptions. These two sets of collectivizations do not contribute anything to bringing about an overdue change in the status of the Mizrahim, especially the weaker and poorer among them. On the contrary, they make any change more difficult.
Incidentally, Cahlili also believes that the Ashkenazim ought to voluntarily give up their money, power and honor (which Likud MK Miki Zohar stated several years ago to be what he seeks for himself). I’ll be damned if in my advanced age I will give up a single shekel of my money (most of which I earned from hard work), any of the little power I ever had (if at all), or my honor, which I believe I earned honestly through being a decent person, to please Cahlili. All these things, if one does not inherit them, must be constructed or earned, not simply transferred by means of a totally unrealistic social act.
I can see how viewing the other as a collective (despite a growing number of Mischlingen in the middle) simplifies the picture, and may help one feel better about oneself, at least temporarily. However, for the life of me I cannot see how viewing all Ashkenazim as a nasty, haughty, elitist collective that deserves punishment will improve the status of the Mizrahim in Israel.
I believe that the main problem of the non-haredi Mizrahim is lack of effective leadership, both political and social. I admit that I was naive enough to believe that Avi Gabay, who won the leadership of the Labor Party in July 2017, was potentially such a leader. Among the numerous Mizrahi MKs of the Likud today, though there is no lack of talent, there seems to be a lack of ability and/or willingness to break free of the Ashkenazi shadow in general, and that of Netanyahu in particular.
Regev’s surprising announcement several days ago that she considers herself as the first Mizrahi leader of the Likud after Netanyahu will leave the scene within the next few years isn’t very promising. A big mouth, offering jobs to party members, and pooh-poohing Anton Chekhov might help build a power base, but they do not make a leader.
The writer was a researcher in the Knesset Research and Information Center until her retirement, and recently published a book in Hebrew, The Job of the Knesset Member – An Undefined Job, soon to be published in English by Routledge.