The highly organized state structure created by…

The highly organized state structure created by Ben-Gurion and the old guard Mapai leadership had served the Yishuv well in the pre-state era, but is ill prepared for the massive influx of non-European refugees that have flooded into the new state in its first years of existence.

Between 1948 and 1952, about three hundred thousand Sephardic immigrants have come to Israel.

Aside from one hundred and twenty thousand highly educated Iraqi Jews and ten thousand Egyptian Jews, the majority of new immigrants (fifty-five thousaand Turkish Jews, forty thousand Iranian Jews, fifty-five thousand Yemeni Jews, and thousands more from Jewish enclaves in Afghanistan, the Caucasus, and Cochin in southwest India) are poorly educated, impoverished, and culturally very different from the country's dominant European culture.

They are religious Jews who have worked primarily in petty trade, while the ruling Ashkenazim of the Labor Party are secular socialists.

As a result, the Ashkenazim-dominated kibbutz movement spurns them, and Mapai leadership as a whole views the new immigrants as "raw material" for their socialist program.