Begin, Chach'chachim , and the Birth of Israeli Identity Politics

Begin, Chach'chachim, and the Birth of Israeli Identity Politics Eran Kaplan (bio) On 28 June 1981, two days before the elections to the 10th Knesset, Prime Minister Menachem Begin gave his final public speech of the campaign at a rally in Tel-Aviv's main square. On the previous night, the Labor Hama'arach party held a rally at the same square. The election campaign was one of the most heatedly contested in Israeli history. The Likud won 48 seats, while Hama'arach, led by Shimon Peres, won 47. Hyperinflation, which grew at an alarming rate after the introduction of programs to liberalize the Israeli economy, and debates over the ongoing Palestinian autonomy talks between Israel and Egypt dominated the headlines; but perhaps more prominent, certainly in the public imagination, the campaign was characterized by a growing Ashkenazi-Mizrahi divide. Events that took place during the Ma'arach rally and Begin's speech the following night would cement this ethnic divide as one of the chief dynamics of Israeli politics, and would signal Likud's, and the Israeli Right's more broadly, emergence as the hegemonic force in Israeli politics. In the 1970s, Israeli politics experienced a tectonic shift. Mizrahim, who since their mass immigration to Israel in the 1950s were relegated to the lower socio-economic rungs, shifted their support from the establishment party (Labor) to Menachem Begin's party. A growing number of Mizrahim embraced Begin and the Likud as an anti-establishment alternative. The Likud under Begin's leadership allowed this population to shift its struggle for status and upper mobility in Israeli society to the political realm.1 If earlier struggles by Mizrahim for better housing and jobs were led by local groups or by non-politically affiliated social movements, the Israeli Right, which for decades was marginalized by the Labor establishment, could offer Mizrahim a political home that would channel their own grievances against the Laborite establishment. Begin, despite his unmistakable Eastern European appearance and manner, became a populist hero [End Page 68] for the Mizrahim, an anti-establishment crusader who could upend the established social order. In his memoir A Tale of Love and Darkness, Amos Oz, who grew up in a Zionist Revisionist household, described a political speech by Begin that he attended as a child in 1950s Jerusalem: There was a fine invisible dividing line between the front three or four rows, which were reserved for the prominent members of the [party] intelligentsia ... who mostly came from Poland, Lithuania, White Russia, and Ukraine and the throngs of Sephardim, Bukharians, Yemenites, Kurds and Aleppo Jews who filled the rest of the hall. This excitable throng packed the galleries and aisles, pressed against the walls ... an ocean of fervent believers, a loyal, devoted throng of tradesman, shopkeepers, workmen, many of them sporting skullcaps.2 Similar fervent believers, in much larger numbers, cheered Begin on the podium on that hot June night in 1981. Begin's speech began with his customary attacks on the Left, going on to enumerate the many horrors inflicted by the Soviet regime against the Jewish people and the State of Israel. The Zionist Left were agents of international Bolshevism, the Laborites worshiped the ideology of an anti-Semitic regime, forgoing national honor in the name of what has been a tool of oppression of the Jewish people. To Begin, the crowd in front of him were the real (Jewish) people; the Laborites, mostly Ashkenazi and secular, were but detached elitists who forgot their national roots and worshiped false, foreign idols. Begin turned to the Ma'arach rally the previous night, whose master of ceremony was Dudu Topaz (born Goldenberg), a famous actor and comedian. Topaz told the Ma'arach supporters that they were the combat soldiers who were making the ultimate sacrifice for the country, while the chach'chachim (a derogatory term that alludes to Mizrahim as roughnecks) who support the Likud are the shin-gimelim (those of guard entrances to military bases—a derogatory term to describe those who contribute least to the army). The irony was that Topaz himself served in an army entertainment troupe, but what caught the public attention was his use of

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