Mizrahi voters could decide Israel’s election between Netanyahu and Eisenkot

Service, courts and security deepen the mistrust

On Oct. 27, retired Lt. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot could end Benjamin Netanyahu’s nearly two-decade tenure in power, and Mijal Bitton, a sociologist who specializes in Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewish communities, writes that Mizrahi voters could decide which of the two leading contenders prevails. Israel’s electorate is a crowded ecosystem, Bitton writes: a dozen or so parties have a realistic chance of winning seats, divided by religion and origin, each with its own constituencies and demands. Polls are yo-yoing between the two, and Netanyahu’s coalition is widely seen as the most right-wing in the country’s history. American coverage frames the election around Gaza, Iran, the conflict with the Palestinians, the fate of liberal democracy and Netanyahu — framings Bitton calls true. One group runs through nearly all of the parties, she writes: Mizrahim, who will play a significant role in deciding what has become one of Israel’s most consequential elections. No matter who prevails, Bitton adds, Mizrahim are no longer simply a constituency to be courted; they have become the country’s center of gravity and are key to understanding Israel.

Universal service — military or civilian — is the issue that may matter most to Mizrahi voters deciding between the candidates, and Eisenkot has made it central to his campaign. Mizrahim have a strong pro-army culture, Bitton writes, and the ultraorthodox communities’ widespread exemptions from army service have exacerbated tensions within Netanyahu’s bloc. For Mizrahim, who tend to be collectivist and family- and community-minded, the lack of service betrays an obligation they assume everyone shares: a man who sits out the army while his neighbor’s son fights in Gaza, Bitton writes, has broken the first rule of family-based morality. Eisenkot, a general whom sociologist Nissim Leon of Bar-Ilan University calls someone who “comes from the people,” and who buried his son Gal, can make that case. Netanyahu, who needs the ultraorthodox parties to build a coalition, cannot.

On the courts, Bitton writes, many Mizrahim still feel that the establishment secular Ashkenazi founders built — the courts, academia, media and military leadership — looks down on them. That helps explain why Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul struck such a nerve. Because Israel has no written constitution, its Supreme Court exercises significant powers of judicial review, and its role in selecting new justices has become a flashpoint. To many Mizrahi voters, Bitton says, the Court represents the last stronghold of an old Ashkenazi elite, one that can override the choices they make at the ballot box. Eisenkot is campaigning on responsibility: fighting corruption, military or national service for all, and a state commission of inquiry into the failures of Oct. 7. According to Mizrachi, some right-wing Mizrahi voters object not to his proposed impartial investigation but to an appointment process which gives the Supreme Court president the authority to choose the commission’s members.

Religion and security deepen the mistrust, Bitton writes. Some right-wing Mizrahi voters see parties such as Yair Golan’s Democrats, Eisenkot’s coalition partner, as hostile to religion, and fear Eisenkot would depend on the Arab party Ra’am to govern, despite his pledge not to do so. After Oct. 7, these right-wing Mizrahi voters also doubt that a left-leaning government, or even one reliant on left-wing allies, can keep them safe. For these reliably right-wing Mizrahi voters, Leon says, the real contest is inside Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition. That includes Shas, the Sephardic ultraorthodox party, and Otzma Yehudit, led by Itamar Ben-Gvir, who is of Iraqi Kurdish descent. Bitton writes that Otzma Yehudit draws disaffected young Mizrahim with an abrasive, deliberately provocative nationalism.

Mizrahim now count more than half of Israel’s Jewish population, descendants of Jewish communities across the Arab world. Israel’s census does not record ethnicity, Bitton notes, so how Mizrahim vote can only be extrapolated from results in areas with large Mizrahi populations. Ever since Menachem Begin broke the Labor establishment by winning the prime ministership in 1977, they have been Likud’s base, and under Netanyahu they have stayed there. Netanyahu is Ashkenazi — Jerusalem-raised, American-educated and the son of a historian of the Spanish Inquisition — and Likud has long been a political home for Mizrahim. Eisenkot, who leads the new Yashar party, is the working-class son of Moroccan immigrants.

Most Mizrahim have moved into the middle class with university educations and professional careers, Bitton writes. Even so, sociologist Nissim Mizrachi of Tel Aviv University says they remain overrepresented in Israel’s social periphery and underrepresented in academia and other elite institutions. Bitton cautions that drawing group distinctions across three generations of intermarriage between Mizrahim and Ashkenazim is treacherous, but says the tendencies are consistent: Ashkenazim are more secular, more liberal and more individualist, while Mizrahim are more religiously traditional, patriotic and bound to family and community. Despite the early discrimination, Mizrachi says, most Mizrahim are “deeply rooted in a Jewish-Israeli identity and feel unwavering loyalty to the Jewish people and the Jewish state.”

The story the pundit wanted starts long before the camps. Eisenkot recalled that a media personality advised him to campaign on his parents’ meeting in a ma’abarah, one of the camps for Jewish immigrants; the problem, Eisenkot said, was that his parents met on a kibbutz, and the pundit responded, “That’s a lousy story.” Bitton writes that to an American following the election the exchange is a curiosity, and to an Israeli it explains everything. The ma’abarot housed many of the approximately 650,000 Jewish immigrants and refugees who arrived from across the Arab world in the years following Israeli independence in 1948, a population the state took in even as the secular European Ashkenazi founders looked down on them. For descendants known as Mizrahim, the camps evoke rescue and humiliation in the same breath, and for a politician to tell voters that his parents met in a ma’abarah is the shortest way to say, “I am one of you.” By the pundit’s standard, Bitton writes, Eisenkot is telling a lousy story.

Jews had lived in Aleppo and Fez for over a thousand years, and in Iraq and Egypt for more than two and a half thousand. With the rise of Arab nationalism and especially after the 1948 founding of Israel, the Jews of the Arab world became suspect — a fifth column for a state they had never seen. What followed varied by country: street violence and official harassment in some, expulsion and confiscated property in others. Over the 1950s and ’60s most of them fled or emigrated to Israel, driven both by anti-Jewish persecution and by the desire to be part of the Jewish state. All immigrants faced hardship, but Mizrahim stayed in the transit camps longer than Ashkenazim and were sent disproportionately to economically depressed development towns and remote settlements far from the center.

That loyalty to Likud has long puzzled analysts who take their cues from American racial politics, Bitton writes, but it is only a puzzle if one assumes that a group with a history of discrimination will adopt progressive politics. Most Mizrahim do not see themselves as oppressed, she writes. What they object to is condescension: many feel that the right treats their traditions with respect, while the left treats them as a problem to be modernized. Whether Eisenkot can break that pattern is the question she poses, and on paper it seems so. He was born to Moroccan parents and raised in a rough neighborhood in Eilat, at Israel’s southern tip. He rose through the army, commanded the Golani Brigade and became chief of staff; in December 2023, his youngest son, Gal, was killed fighting in Gaza. An American politician with that biography would campaign around it — the poor neighborhood, the ethnic barriers, the climb. Eisenkot does the opposite, Bitton writes: he plays down his Moroccan background, says he never experienced discrimination and talks about hard work and a shared Israeli identity. “A person’s origin in the State of Israel is not a reason to choose him for prime minister,” he has said.

For many Mizrahi voters, Bitton writes, his Mizrahi background is irrelevant. Mizrahi voters have a long record of not choosing Mizrahi candidates: Labor learned that lesson under Amir Peretz and Avi Gabbai, both Moroccans, who failed to win large numbers of Mizrahi votes in 2006 and 2019 respectively. Many Mizrahim mistrust the left on institutions, religion and security, and they associate Eisenkot with the left, Bitton writes. That is the disagreement she finds more interesting than the answer, since it depends on which Mizrahim are asked.

Ophir Toubul, a Mizrahi social activist and commentator, sees it differently. To him, Eisenkot’s Moroccan roots do matter to more educated and upwardly mobile Mizrahim, especially those who trust state institutions. “You won’t hear them talking about the deep state,” he says. These Mizrahim may be the voters who decide the election, Toubul says: moderate, right-of-center Israelis who remain open to crossing coalition lines. They look at Eisenkot and, Toubul says, think dialna, Moroccan Arabic for “one of us.” He estimates that, out of 120 seats in the Israeli Knesset, there are 10 to 12 seats’ worth of upwardly mobile Mizrahim who feel politically homeless. Eisenkot could offer them a home, and Toubul’s own Moroccan parents and their friends plan to vote for him. According to Leon, what attracts these center and center-right Mizrahim to Eisenkot is less his ethnicity than his life story — above all his command in the Israel Defense Forces of Golani, long known as a “brown” or Mizrahi brigade and one of the army’s great engines of integration. Leon argues that the appeal is also a protest against the status quo, a sense his voters have that ‘something isn’t being managed’ in Netanyahu’s camp.

Whatever the result, Bitton writes, Mizrahim have already won. Her colleague, the journalist Matti Friedman, calls Israel a “Mizrahi nation,” but she says that description is not about the demographics, music and food that dominate popular culture. It is, in her view, about how Mizrahi instincts run through the whole country, including Israelis with no Mizrahi grandparents: wariness of grand liberal visions for the region, attachment to tradition and God among people who are not strictly observant, and a sense that family and community come before the individual. Security is where she says the pattern shows most clearly. Leon says Oct. 7 made Israelis “more suspicious, more conservative.” Amos Harel of Haaretz wrote in Foreign Affairs that most Israeli Jews “do not trust the Palestinians or, for that matter, Arab neighbors in general.” Americans often read this as a turn toward illiberalism, Bitton writes; many Mizrahi families would call it memory.

Most of the nearly million Jews who had lived across the Arab world fled, were driven out or were formally expelled, carrying with them a sense of betrayal by neighbors who participated in their uprooting, or stood by as it happened, after centuries of shared life. The Farhud, the 1941 pogrom in Baghdad, Bitton writes, began the end of a 2,600-year-old community. A decade later its Jews left stripped of nearly everything they owned — some “weren’t even allowed to take family photographs,” said Eness Elias, a journalist and cultural researcher who has heard survivors describe officials tearing them up. The result, Elias says, is a deep inherited mistrust: Mizrahim don’t hate Arabs, and even feel cultural affinity with them, but they will not trust a Muslim majority to guarantee their safety. “That’s why they think there must be a Jewish state, with an army,” Elias says. For them—and for other Israeli Jews—Bitton writes that the Oct. 7 massacre reinforced what she calls a wariness indigenous to the Middle East: they will not entrust their safety to others.

This is the country Eisenkot is asking to lead, Bitton writes. Its Middle Eastern character is no longer in question; what is up for debate is its European inheritance — the judicial system, the liberal press, the officer class its founders built and the old ties to the West. Eisenkot, the son of Moroccan immigrants rather than the Ashkenazi Netanyahu, is the one who highlights keeping both. He speaks of security yet insists on an Israel that is “Jewish, democratic, and liberal.” Bitton writes that he seems to be describing an Israel that is Middle Eastern in its realism and Western in its institutions, avoiding the worst of both and keeping the best. Whether enough voters believe that balance can be held, she writes, will shape Israel long after this election.

Bitton argues that an Eisenkot victory would complicate a story often told about Israel, one she describes as a “European colonial outpost in the Middle East.” A prime minister with Eisenkot’s biography would be hard to fit into that picture, and a Netanyahu victory carried by Mizrahi votes would fit it no better, she writes — a point she says is lost on most of Israel’s critics. Whoever wins on Oct. 27 will govern a country that looks less to Europe than to its own Middle Eastern instincts on security, solidarity and tradition, even as it negotiates how to remain part of the West. Bitton concludes that Americans who see only Netanyahu and Gaza are debating an Israel that exists mostly in their imagination; the real one is already more Mizrahi than they realize.

Bitton is a sociologist who specializes in Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewish communities. She is dean of the Maimonides Jewish Leadership Institute and directed the landmark National Study of Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews in the U.S. at New York University. She serves as a spiritual leader at the Downtown Minyan, writes the weekly Substack newsletter Committed, co-hosts the podcast Wondering Jews and is a contributor to the podcast Call Me Back.