Mainstream Israeli parties were themselves ethnically based, unlike Mizrahi ones.

Evidence

The panelists fail to respond to Hayim’s observation, based on years of experience with the consonance of ethnic and political fissuring in Beersheva, that the established Zionist political parties were themselves ethnically based; the moderate socialist party Mapai being Russian, the right-wing Herut party being Polish, and the Progressives, German. Moreover, there is no acknowledgment of the Yishuv’s long history of ethnic parties, such as the Sephardic and Yemenites lists in the Representative Assembly during the Mandate period. Instead, the oriental political activist is singled out as unique, destabilizing, and dangerous. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 716

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the general pattern of dominant groups projecting their own group-based organization onto minorities as pathological — echoes of how ‘ethnic voting’ is coded as deviant in US political discourse.