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CHAPTER 6 Israel at forty is not geared to meet the needs of. and to cope with the problems posed by. [social] divisions. The myopic. outdated Zionist vision of a society with one culture. one language. one nation. and one lifestyle denies the present reality of a society divided along ethnic. religious , national and citizenship lines. -Sammy Smooha Beyond the Melting Pot Pluralism By the 1970s a new generation of sociologists had come of age. Graduating from American and other Western universities rather than from The Hebrew University, they could exercise their own normative judgments and determine their own theoretical preferences. Also coming ofage was a new generation of Israelis of Mizrahi origins, a "second generation," who were either born in Israel or brought there at a very early age. Moreover , and of great importance, in the 1970s persons of Mizrahi descent became the majority ofIsrael'sJewish population. While in 1948 Mizrahi Jews formed less than a quarter of the Israeli Jewish population, in the early 1970s they passed the 50-percent mark. This numerical fact in and of itself augmented the perception that they deserved a share and influence in Israel in proportion to their ratio in the population. Such frustrations exploded in the Black Panthers protest movement, which in those days activated youth in the poor Mizrahi neighborhoods of the big cities, especiallyJerusalem (see D. Bernstein 1984). The period that passed since the arrival of the large wave of immigration in the 1950s and the public concern with issues of "integration" prompted sociologists to question whether earlier prognoses and expectations of the modernization school, and, more broadly, of the official ethos of "absorbtion ofimmigrants," were fulfilled two decades later. Since the picture that emerged was a far cry from the forecasts of the 1950s the old paradigm was beginning to be questioned. Some ofits broad assumptions about social systems in general and about the nature ofIsraeli society 97 9H Chapter (i in particular were challenged, and in the process a new notion of pluralism emerged. VVhereas the functionalist school depicted society as an adjustable system and anticipated rapid assimilation without conflict (and its revised version anticipated a slower assimilation despite a conlined conflict), in the pluralist perspective the notion of society as a system and as a homogeneous community was dropped altogether in lieu of a notion of society as a composite of distinct and divergent social groups. "Absorption" was IlO more thought of as an entry into a nation, but rather probed in terms of intergroup power relations. nIl' "S('(olld [ITllft": Till' Rl'mgllilioYl 0/ (he "Soria/ /)isjJmi(J" At the most elementary level sociologists drew a quantitative socioeconomic balance sheet. NUlllerous empirical studies focused on data con- (,(Tning three questions. First, is ethnic origin a f~lctor in the stratilication system, or, plainly speaking, is there an ethnic inequality? Second, iftlwre is an ethnic inequality, what arc its dimensions and magnitudes? And third, if there is an ethnic inequality, what is its trend over time: docs it rise, diminish, or remain stable? The ethnic categories in usc were basically two: MizrahiIfl ("Orien tals"), persons of Asian and Ali'ican (mostly North Ali'ican) origins, and AshkflUlzim (after As/zhl'll([z, an old Hebrew name fl)}" Germany,) persons of European and American origins. Practically, the divide was drawn between .Jews of European, mainly Eastern European , origins, the group of old timers which was preponderant in the Yishuv, and.Jews of Moslem countries, the immigrants of the 1950s (Israeli Arabs were considered a difkrent nation, rather than ethnicity, hence not included in ordinary studies of socioeconomic disparities among the population). At the early stage the discourse did not focus upon the relations between ethnic groups but only upon dilli>rnups between them. Moreover , the reference was usually to the state of"!,'do( HaiVIizrarh" (the Mizrahi communities) in Israel, whereas the "Israel" in question was not identified as an ethnic entity at all. These discoursiye peculiarities would later be charged by critics as biased in bvor of the Ash/{('1l(lzilll, and as framing the problematics through the eyes of this dominant group. All in all the studies established the figures for what was already widely perceived by the general public: that there is a "social gap" between the two broadly defined ethnic groups and that despite the official egalitarian rhetoric this gap has not been closed over the years. From the mid1960s to the early 1970s "the disparity" (HaP(lw) was one of the jiH'Cll...

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