Israel has had to absorb a major…

Israel has had to absorb a major influx of immigrants, including several hundred thousand nearly destitute European Jewish survivors and a large influx of Sephardic Jews from Arab states, who feel increasingly insecure in their home countries following the Arab defeat in 1948.

As a result, the Knesset passes the Law of Return in July 1950, granting Jews immediate citizenship. (This law, however, will prove to be controversial in later years when the question of "who is a Jew?" raises other issues in the Jewish state, including those of the immigration of non-Jewish relatives, religious conversion, and, in light of the Orthodox monopoly over such matters, the issue of who is truly qualified to be a rabbi.)

Ben-Gurion's coalition is also frequently disturbed by quarrels over education and the role religion is to play in it.

Orthodox support for the government often falters over what they see to be state interference in a religious domain.

No less serious is the question of ethnicity.

The Sephardim, or Oriental Jews, are mostly from urban and traditional societies, and after arriving in Israel they encounter an Ashkenazic, or European, Zionist establishment intent on creating a new Israeli culture and settling these predominantly urban newcomers in rural and isolated villages and development towns.

The Sephardim soon grow to resent what they regard as a patronizing Ashkenazic elite (and eventually this is to hurt Labor at the ballot box).