Mone way or the other, one can look to the domestic political crisis in Israel. Some believe that judicial reform is directly linked to the person of Benjamin Netanyahu โ the prime minister is trying to get rid of the corruption case against him. Others see a link to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, which the religious Zionists in Netanyahu’s coalition want to expand unhindered. For still others, the current conflict is a front in a decades-long struggle between the secular segment of society and the ultra-Orthodox Jews who want to tie Israel into a tight religious corset.
A fourth perspective starts from a different contrast: that between the Jews who immigrated from Europe and those who came from the Near and Middle East. The latter, the so-called Mizrachim, were suppressed by the Ashkenazim for decades, and they are still worse off today. For this reason, Mizrahi voters today support parties whose positions are opposed to the liberal, secular, cosmopolitan values โโof European Jewry. The current government – the most right-wing the country has ever seen – is in a sense the “revenge” of the oriental Jews on the western Jews.
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