Israel's Liberal Party (Miflaget ha-Liberali) is formed…

Israel's Liberal Party (Miflaget ha-Liberali) is formed in 1961 in the merger of the General Zionist Party (active from 1948 to 1961) and the smaller Progressive Party.

Israel's demography, once overwhelmingly Ashkenazic, has changed.

Between 1948 and 1957 some five hundred and sixty-seven thousand Jews have been expelled from Arab states, nearly all of whom have resettled in Israel.

In the late 1950s, a new flood of four hundred thousand Israel following Israel's Sinai Campaign.

By the end of the first decade, about four-fifths of the Sephardic population live in the large towns, mostly development towns, and cities where they have become workers in an economy dominated by Ashkenazim.

The total addition to Israel's population during the first twelve years of statehood is about one million two hundred thousand million, and at least two-thirds of the newcomers are of Sephardic extraction.

By 1961, the Sephardic portion of the Jewish population is about forty-five percent, or approximately eight hundred thousand people.