More than half of Israel’s Jews descend from the countries in the Middle East and North Africa. They are key to understanding the country’s future.
By Mijal Bitton
Oct. 22, 2026 7:00 pm ET
MARK HARRIS FOR WSJ
Mijal Bitton is a sociologist who specializes in Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewish communities.
Gadi Eisenkot, the retired lieutenant general who could end Benjamin Netanyahu’s nearly two decades in power on Oct. 27, recalls being advised by a media personality to campaign on his parents’ meeting in a ma’abarah, one of the transit camps for Jewish immigrants in the 1950s. There was just one problem, Eisenkot said: his parents met on a kibbutz. The pundit was disappointed: “That’s a lousy story.”
To an American following the election, the exchange is a curiosity. 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. The state took them in even as the secular European Ashkenazi founders looked down on them.
For their descendants, known as Mizrahim and who now count more than half of Israel’s Jewish population, the word evokes rescue and humiliation in the same breath. 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.”
Gadi Eisenkot with his team during the party's campaign launch. Abir Sultan/EPA/Shutterstock
American coverage of Israel’s election frames its politics around Gaza, Iran, the conflict with the Palestinians, the fate of liberal democracy and Benjamin Netanyahu, whose coalition is widely seen as the most right-wing in the country’s history. All true.
But Israel’s electorate is a crowded ecosystem—a dozen or so parties with a realistic chance of winning seats, divided by religion and origin, each with its own constituencies and demands.
One group runs through nearly all of them: Mizrahim. They will play a significant role in deciding what has become one of Israel’s most consequential elections.
The two leading contenders are Netanyahu and Eisenkot. Netanyahu is Ashkenazi— Jerusalem-raised, American-educated, the son of a historian of the Spanish Inquisition. His Likud party has long been the political home for Mizrahim. Eisenkot, who leads the new Yashar party, is the working-class son of Moroccan immigrants.
A banner featuring Gadi Eisenkot and Benjamin Netanyahu. Jack Guez/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Polls are yo-yoing between the two. But no matter who prevails, it’s clear that the Mizrahim are no longer simply a constituency to be courted; they have become the country’s center of gravity—and key to understanding Israel.
The story the pundit wanted starts long before the camps. Jews had lived in Aleppo and Fez for over a thousand years; 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.
Moroccan Jews in a synagogue in the Jewish ghetto of Marrakesh. A group of Yemenite Jewish refugees enroute to Israel in 1949.Evans/Three Lions/Getty Images; AP
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, remote settlements far from the center.
The Rosh Haayin transit camp, established for the 25,000 Yemenite Jews transferred from Yemen to Israel. Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
A family in a shelter at the Tira transit camp Ma’abara. Teddy Brauner/Israeli Press Office
Today most Mizrahim have moved into the middle class with university educations and professional careers. Even so, as sociologist Nissim Mizrachi, from Tel Aviv University explains, Mizrahim remain overrepresented in Israel’s social periphery and underrepresented in academia and other elite institutions.
Drawing group distinctions across three generations of intermarriage between Mizrahim and Ashkenazim is treacherous, but the tendencies are consistent: Ashkenazim are more secular, more liberal and more individualist; Mizrahim are more religiously traditional, patriotic and bound to family and community.
Despite the early discrimination, most Mizrahim are, as Mizrachi put it to me, “deeply rooted in a Jewish-Israeli identity and feel unwavering loyalty to the Jewish people and the Jewish state.”
Israel’s census doesn’t record ethnicity, so how Mizrahim vote can only be extrapolated from results in areas with large Mizrahi populations. But 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.
Menachem Begin, who co-founded the Likud party, was a popular leader among the Mizrahim. Here in 1982. Associated Press
That loyalty has long puzzled analysts who take their cues from American racial politics. But it’s only a puzzle if you assume that a group with a history of discrimination will adopt progressive politics. Most Mizrahim don’t see themselves as oppressed. 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.
The question is whether Eisenkot can break that pattern. 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.
Eisenkot was raised in a rough neighborhood in Eilat, at Israel’s southern tip. Here, Eilat in the 1960s. Claude Jacoby/ullstein bild/Getty Images
An American politician with that biography would campaign around it: the poor neighborhood, the ethnic barriers, the climb. Eisenkot does the opposite. 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. He is campaigning on responsibility: fighting corruption, military or national service for all, and a state commission of inquiry into the failures of Oct. 7.
By the pundit’s standard, he is telling a lousy story.
Whether that hurts Eisenkot depends on which Mizrahim you ask. The disagreement is more interesting than the answer.
For many, 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.
The reason why Eisenkot’s background might not help is that many Mizrahim mistrust the left on institutions, religion and security, and they associate Eisenkot with the left.
Eisenkot hosts a meet-and-greet at a coffee shop. Ilia Yefimovich/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Many 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, the Court represents the last stronghold of an old Ashkenazi elite, one that can override the choices they make at the ballot box.
Eisenkot promises accountability for Oct. 7. But 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 also deepen the mistrust. These 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, they also doubt that a left-leaning government, or even one reliant on left-wing allies, can keep them safe.
To these reliably right-wing Mizrahi voters, the real contest is inside Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition, says sociologist Nissim Leon, at Bar-Ilan University. That includes Shas, the Sephardic ultraorthodox party, and Otzma Yehudit, led by Itamar Ben-Gvir, who is of Iraqi Kurdish descent, and draws disaffected young Mizrahim with an abrasive, deliberately provocative nationalism.
Supporters wave a banner featuring Netanyahu. Jack Guez/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
But to Ophir Toubul, a Mizrahi social activist and commentator, 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: 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.”
Eisenkot at an event to present the candidate list for his political party in Rosh Haayin. Amir Cohen/Reuters
Toubul 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. 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 Eisenkot’s appeal to these voters is also a protest against the status quo—a sense they have, as he put it, that “something isn’t being managed” in Netanyahu’s camp.
But the issue that may matter to them most is universal service—military or civilian—which Eisenkot has made central to his campaign.
Mizrahim have a strong pro-army culture and the ultraorthodox communities’ widespread exemptions from army service have exacerbated tensions in 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 has broken the first rule of family-based morality. Eisenkot, a general who, in Leon’s words, “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.
Regardless of which candidate becomes the next leader, Mizrahim have already won. My colleague, the journalist Matti Friedman, calls Israel a “Mizrahi nation.” In my view, this is not about the demographics, music and food that dominate popular culture.
It’s 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 this shows most clearly. Oct. 7, Leon says, made Israelis “more suspicious, more conservative.” As Haaretz’s Amos Harel wrote in Foreign Affairs, 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. 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, for instance, 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 the journalist and cultural researcher Eness Elias, who has heard survivors describe officials tearing them up.
The result, she 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—the Oct. 7 massacre reinforced a wariness indigenous to the Middle East, you might say: they will not entrust their safety to others.
This is the country Eisenkot is asking to lead. 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.
It is the son of Moroccan immigrants, not the Ashkenazi Netanyahu, who highlights keeping both. He speaks of security, yet insists on an Israel that is “Jewish, democratic, and liberal.” Eisenkot 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 will shape Israel long after this election.
An Eisenkot victory would also complicate a story often told about Israel, that it’s a European colonial outpost in the Middle East. A prime minister with Eisenkot’s biography would be hard to fit into that picture. A Netanyahu victory, carried by Mizrahi votes, would fit it no better—a point lost on most of Israel’s critics.
Netanyahu with Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. Ronen Zvulun/Reuters
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. 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.