forced assimilation mizrahim sephardim non-european jews in israel

Zionist occupation reshaped diverse Jewish communities by imposing European ideals and suppressing their cultural heritage

When Theodor Herzl, a noted atheist, first spoke of a Jewish homeland, promised by a god in whom he did not believe, he did so from Switzerland—in a part of Europe where many of the Jewish diaspora had been living for nearly two millennia.

Herzl's vision for a new Jewish nation-state was distinctly European in its archetype, reflecting the ideals and aspirations of Western nationalism.

What it failed to account for, however, was the fact that Arab Jews had lived continuously in the region for centuries, existing within a vastly different cultural and historical context.

Prior to the arrival of proto-Zionism in the region, Arab Jews, known as Mizrahi, shared the area with Arab Christians and Muslims alike.

Once established, however, the state of Israel immediately imposed policies aimed at westernizing the region, subsequently assimilating non-European Jewish communities into a decidedly European-Jewish identity, disregarding their cultural heritage.

This strategy of forced assimilation, which echoed the tactics of other colonial powers, was all part of a larger plan to keep Palestinians from their homeland and supplant them with a new Zionist population.

Herzl Der Judenstaat The Jewish State manifesto — *Herzl’s manifesto,* *Der Judenstaat,* *which calls for the establishment of a World Zionist Organization, is not unlike Hitler’s Mein Kampf in that each serves as a blueprint for a Euro-nationalist ideology.*

A European Vision for a Jewish State: Early Zionist Biases

The Zionist movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries focused almost exclusively on European Jews.

Leaders such as David Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weizmann viewed European Jews as the architects of the Jewish nationalist state. Their goal was to build a nation that reflected Western values, technological progress, and perceived cultural sophistication.

Initially, non-European, semitic groups, including Mizrahi, Sephardi, Ethiopian, Indian, Bukharan and Mountain Jews of the Caucasus were considered irrelevant—or worse, unsuitable—for this vision.

Arthur Ruppin, a prominent figure in the Zionist movement, expressed these biases explicitly in 1911 when he described Mizrahi Jews, particularly Yemenite and Persian Jews, as ideal only for “menial labor. “

Ruppin’s view, that it was "desirable that only the racially pure come to the land,” reflected a broader European-centric prejudice within Zionist leadership, on which saw non-European Jews as culturally "backward" and in need of "modernization."

Similarly, many early kibbutzniks saw all Arab peoples as lowly, even hiring them as cheap labor.

This prejudice laid the foundation for a hierarchy that would soon place Ashkenazi (European) Jews at the top and relegate others to the margins.

Demographic Realities Post-1948: Turning to Non-European Jews

When Israel declared independence in 1948, the need for a Jewish majority to secure the nascent state's survival became apparent. If the state was going to successfully cleanse the land of its rightful inhabitants, it would need to set up strategic settlements to fill the disputed* territories.

*a term deliberately used by Israel as a means of controlling the narrative, despite its international recognition as Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT)

European immigration, which had been prioritized, began to slow following the end of World War II.

Facing a demographic and labor crisis, the state turned to Mizrahi Jews, many of whom, incidentally, were fleeing rising anti-Semitism in Arab countries, stoked in part by the audacious assertion of Zionism and its historically divisive tactics.

1950 jewish immigration to palestine — In 1948, Israel's declaration of independence on Palestinian land led to an invasion by five Arab nations, in addition to widespread repressive measures against Jewish communities in surrounding areas. This resulted in mass migration from of those communities into Israel.

Mass immigration campaigns like Operations Ezra and Nehemiah brought over 120,000 Iraqi Jews to Israel.

Similarly, Operation Magic Carpet transported approximately 49,000 Yemenite Jews. Of course, despite the revisionist narrative presenting this operation as a miraculous journey of salvation, the reality was far grimmer.

While the initiative involved cooperation between Israeli authorities, Jewish organizations, and local rulers in Aden and Yemen, the operation's hasty execution led to catastrophic failures.

Hundreds of Yemenite Jews lost their lives due to organizational mismanagement by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the Jewish Agency, and the Israeli government.

These operations, presented as efforts to rescue Jews from persecution, were, in reality, deeply pragmatic moves to populate areas emptied of Palestinians and provide a labor force for the new state.

In essence, these non-European Jews served as indentured placeholders to prevent Palestinians from returning to their homeland.

Building strategic settlements on illegally occupied land was one way Israel fortified itself against resistance by the indigenous of the land

Ethiopian Jews, known as Beta Israel, faced extraordinary challenges in their migration to Israel.

Geographic and political isolation relegated this group to something of an afterthought in Zionism’s grand design.

Despite their longstanding Jewish identity, they were met with skepticism upon arrival, being referred to by the disparaging '“Falasha,” historically used by Ethiopian authorities and European observers, meaning “stranger” or “exile.”

Indian Jews, including the Bene Israel, Cochin Jews, and Baghdadi Jews, experienced a similar struggle, largely treated as second-class citizens upon arrival.

Bukharan Jews from Central Asia and Mountain Jews from the Caucasus faced unique cultural and linguistic barriers, further marginalizing them in Israeli society.

Forced Assimilation and Cultural Erasure

Once in Israel, non-European Jewish communities encountered systemic efforts to erase their cultural identities. The Zionist leadership's preference for an Ashkenazi model of Israeliness—that is, white, European Jewishness—dictated policies that marginalized and suppressed the rich traditions of Mizrahi, Ethiopian, and other Jewish groups.

Not unlike the in the U.S., Israel's education system became a tool for erasure. and Sephardi histories, , and practices were excluded from the curriculum.

Not unlike the Indian boarding schools in the U.S., Israel’s education system became a tool for erasure. Mizrahi, Sephardi, Ethiopian, and Balkan Jewish histories, languages, and cultural practices were excluded from the curriculum.

Students were taught to abandon Arabic, Ladino, and other ancestral tongues in favor of a modernized version of Hebrew—created by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, a Zionist nationalist who spearheaded its “revival” and imposition. Ethiopian Jews faced similar erasure, with Amharic and their unique Jewish customs dismissed as irrelevant. Even for European Jews, Yiddish was often discouraged, and its usage mocked, as a symbol of exile and victimhood.

Haaretz writer Arieh Gledblum claimed in 1950 that North African Jews’ “primitivism is unsurpassed. They have little talent for comprehending anything intellectual” and “lack any roots in Judaism.”

The government relegated many non-European Jewish immigrants to ma'abarot (transit camps and development towns out of the immediate sight of Israelis). These areas were underfunded and isolated, perpetuating cycles of poverty and reducing access to quality education and employment.

Non-European Jews often found themselves in isolated, underfunded settlements, cut off from economic centers and opportunities. As with other Mizrahi groups, Moroccan immigrants faced systemic discrimination, including policies that funneled them into low-paying labor roles and deprived of access to the so-called Zionist dream.

This geographic segregation reinforced the systemic marginalization of non-European Jews, solidifying their roles as laborers rather than equal participants in the Zionist project.

Stolen Children: Ashkenazi Supremacy and the Yemeni Baby Affair

This marginalization wasn’t limited to culture and economics—it extended to the theft of life itself.

In the 1940s and 1950s, as thousands of Mizrahi Jews immigrated to Israel under promises of deliverance, hundreds of their babies disappeared. Most of these families were Yemeni, hence the popular term for the event, though Moroccan and Balkan families were also deeply affected. Israeli officials told grieving parents their children had died—but left no bodies, no graves, no death certificates. For decades, Mizrahi communities claimed their children had been stolen. They were right.

Investigations beginning in the early 2000s uncovered the horrific truth: babies were taken from their families and given to Ashkenazi parents within Israel, or trafficked abroad. These acts were not random. They were rooted in the supremacist logic of Zionism’s early statehood—an ideology that viewed Eastern Jews as primitive and less deserving of inclusion within the modern Israeli project. A white baby was seen as more “civilized,” more fit for the imagined future.

Again hearkening back to U.S. policy of ripping Indigenous children from their parents and placing them in Indian boarding schools, this was a state-sanctioned erasure of bloodlines, culture, and identity, carried out under the auspices of progress.

Just as those schools sought to "kill the Indian, save the man," the Zionist state sought to whiten the Jewish future by abducting and reassigning its brown-skinned infants.

The state not only committed this atrocity—it compounded the trauma through denial, deception, and institutional silence. No one has ever been held accountable.

Today, the descendants of those disappeared children live with unanswered questions and unresolved grief, forced to reconcile their identity within a state that never saw them as equal.

The Israeli Rabbinate, dominated by Ashkenazi authorities, further alienated non-European Jews by challenging their religious practices.

Ethiopian Jews, for instance, faced questions about the legitimacy of their Judaism, and efforts were made to "correct" their religious observances.

Similarly, the traditions of Mizrahi, Sephardi, and other Jewish groups were sidelined in favor of an Ashkenazi interpretation of Jewish law under the Talmud.

Despite systemic marginalization, non-European Jewish communities resisted their erasure through cultural and political movements.

The Israeli Black Panthers, founded by Mizrahi activists, protested against discrimination and demanded social and economic equality. Artistic expressions also became powerful tools of resistance, with writers, musicians, and filmmakers highlighting the beauty of their heritage and challenging the dominance of Ashkenazi culture.

*Political Artwork from the Israeli Black Panthers, founded by Mizrahim*

Ethnic Representation in Governance: A Nationalist Zionist Majority

Non-European Jewish communities have long faced underrepresentation in Israel's government and political leadership, a reflection of the state's Eurocentric roots.

For decades, Ashkenazim have dominated key political and administrative roles, shaping a government that prioritizes Western ideals over the diversity of its population.

Over time, incremental changes have increased the presence of Mizrahi and Sephardi individuals in political leadership, particularly within the Likud party.

Today, the Likud party—Israel’s dominant political force—is supported by a substantial base of Sephardi and Mizrahi voters, with roughly 58% of its voter base identifying as Sephardi or Mizrahi.

However, the party’s leadership remains predominantly Ashkenazi, and Israel has yet to see a Mizrahi prime minister.

Regardless of ethnicity, the modern-day Likud party reflects a nationalist Zionist majority, with figures like Itamar Ben Givr and Bezalel Smothrich, religious zealots with terrorist ties, emphasizing policies that maintain its vision of Israel as a Jewish state often at through genocidal means.

ethiopian jews arrive israeli immigration operation solomon — *Ethiopian Jewish Immigrants arrive as part of Operation Solomon (Photo: Albert Natan)*

To be sure, the apparatus of exclusion extends far beyond parliamentary seats or party affiliations.

In everyday life, state power reveals itself through surveillance, discrimination, and pedagogy that conditions entire populations to internalize suspicion. These mechanisms operate across policing, education, immigration, and media—all of which function as conduits for reinforcing Eurocentric dominance.

In a disturbingly candid admission, Israeli Police Commissioner Roni Alsheich once told The Jerusalem Post that it was “natural” for police to racially profile Arabs and other minorities, because “all over the world it is proven that migrants are more involved in crime.”

The implication was a tacit justification for state-sanctioned suspicion of the Arab body, and by extension, a cultural and institutional call to erase anything unaligned with the preferred Euro-Zionist identity.

Such profiling isn’t incidental. It’s reflective of a much larger, historically rooted project that seeks to flatten ethnic variance within Jewish communities and subjugate non-Jewish populations altogether. From the early state practice of discouraging Mizrahi Jews from speaking Arabic to the present-day educational segregation that all but erases Palestinian history, the goal has remained consistent: assimilation by coercion, or exclusion by design.

These policies—archaic relics of a distant past that they are—get repeated, reinforced, and normalized. They’re coded into law enforcement logic, education policy, immigration structure, and media framing.

Breaking the Mandate: Decolonizing Identity, Rejecting Erasure

What began as a calculated attempt to create a homogenous society through forced assimilation has metastasized into a generational trauma still felt across Mizrahi, Sephardi, and Palestinian communities.

State-mandated Eurocentrism didn’t just suppress cultural identity—it criminalized it. It rewrote history in real time, buried native languages, and normalized institutional suspicion of the very populations it claimed to save.

Yet the project of erasure has not gone uncontested.

Across Occupied Palestine and the broader region, descendants of the displaced and the disregarded are pushing back. They are excavating memory from beneath state myth, confronting Zionism’s architecture of dominance with oral histories, revived traditions, and new cultural resistance.

These efforts mirror decolonial movements in the U.S., Canada, and elsewhere—where Indigenous peoples are rejecting state definitions of who they are, how they speak, and what their futures will look like.

What happens next is the collective effort to dismantle the structures that demanded its disappearance in the first place. It is a struggle against surveillance as pedagogy, against profiling as policy, against assimilation as the cost of survival.

The path forward doesn’t begin with symbolic representation or token reforms. It begins with naming the system, confronting its violence, and rejecting its premise.

Zionism, as practiced through the mechanisms of the Israeli state, depends on the erasure of those who do not conform—Palestinians, Arabs, Mizrahim, dissenting Jews.

Liberation is not metaphoric. It’s not some conceptual daydream. It is the dismantling of state power that embeds exclusion into law, and the refusal to be reshaped in the image of empire.

The task ahead is neither abstract nor distant: it is the work of solidarity, intersectionality, and collective resistance. Not quiet reform, but refusal. Not gradual change, but rupture.

Because silence, in the face of this machinery, is complicity. And if the world still refuses to hear the screams of the erased, then those screams must grow louder—until the structure that made them necessary begins to crack.

European Zionism and Forced Assimilation of Arab Jews in Palestine