The roughly 4 million Israelis of Mizrahi origin, Jews largely from Middle Eastern and North African backgrounds, represent approximately half of the country’s Jewish population and a decisive electoral force.
For decades, that bloc has anchored Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud, which captured more than 40% of votes in the Moroccan-Jewish city of Sderot in 2022, nearly double its 23% national share.
Now, liberal Yashar party leader Gadi Eisenkot is mounting a direct challenge to that loyalty, deploying his own Moroccan heritage as the central weapon of his campaign against the incumbent prime minister.
Yashar’s campaign posters carry the slogan “Rosh Memshala Dialna,” blending the Hebrew phrase for prime minister with the Moroccan Arabic words for “of our own,” a combination designed to speak directly to voters who have long felt politically underserved.
The choice of Sderot, a city in the Negev desert roughly 75 kilometers south of Tel Aviv and just a kilometer from the Gaza border, as a focal point of that outreach is not accidental.
Sderot has become one of Israel’s most recognizable symbols of Moroccan-Jewish culture, finding expression in its music, cinema and political allegiances, even as it remains one of the country’s underfunded development towns.
The historical roots of that underfunding run deep: after Israel’s founding, the ruling Mapai party, whose leadership was predominantly Ashkenazi, directed many Jewish immigrants from Arab-speaking countries into Ma’abarot, remote transit camps with minimal infrastructure that later became neglected development towns.
That exclusion eventually produced a political realignment, when Mizrahi frustration fueled the Mahapach, or upheaval, that brought Menachem Begin and Likud to power for the first time after the party was founded in 1973, yet Likud has never installed a Mizrahi leader in the decades since.
Eisenkot’s campaign has pressed that contradiction directly, with one slogan pointedly reading “Netanyahu: Let the Mizrahim give interviews,” accusing Likud of marginalizing its own Mizrahi politicians even as it depends on their votes.
The campaign’s embrace of Moroccan identity was sharpened further when right-wing journalist Yinon Magal, described as one of Netanyahu’s most vocal supporters, called Eisenkot a “monkey” on live television and alleged he was being manipulated by elitist Ashkenazim.
Netanyahu, who is of European origin, condemned the remark, but the incident drew fresh attention to the ethnic fault lines running through the election.
Morocco-born award-winning journalist and former parliamentarian Daniel Ben-Simon told DW that Magal’s attack may have accelerated Eisenkot’s identity strategy, but argued the move carries significance well beyond tactical calculation.
“People don’t use terms like ‘Dialna’ with pride,” Ben-Simon said, noting that Israeli society had long pressured North African Jews to shed their Arab cultural identities rather than assert them publicly.
Ben-Simon framed Eisenkot’s posture as a broader act of cultural reclamation, arguing that “by using such a term, you’re creating a new identity: an Israeli-Moroccan identity,” and adding that “Eisenkot is the first to allow this double identity to be expressed and still feel at home.”
Sderot’s political landscape has also been complicated by demographic shifts following the Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023, which killed more than 50 people in the city and left it among the hardest-hit communities.
In the three years since, the city’s population has grown by approximately 5,000 residents to reach 40,000, with an influx of young families drawn by both idealism and government incentives, many of them aligned with the national-religious community that tends to support Bezalel Smotrich’s far-right Religious Zionism party.
That trend could actually erode Likud’s own vote share in Sderot even within the broader Netanyahu coalition, adding another layer of uncertainty to the city’s electoral outcome.
Whatever the final results, Ben-Simon believes an Eisenkot victory would carry implications stretching far beyond a single election cycle, predicting that “the connection cities like Sderot have to their Moroccan roots would grow stronger as a result of an Eisenkot win.”
