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On 28 June 1981, two days before the elections to the готн 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 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...