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Israelis perplexed by Labor Party's reaction to member's slurs
DAVID LANDAU
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
JERUSALEM - The outrage expressed by the Labor Party in recent days over ethnic slurs made by a senior member of their ranks may have been less than sincere. And just possibly, the criticism heaped by party colleagues on Knesset member Ori Orr - who made disparaging remarks about Moroccan Israelis in a newspaper interview - may have been meant for Orr's longtime friend and political mentor, opposition leader Ehud Barak.
For some time, there has been discontent among some Labor members regarding Barak's apparent inability to increase his popularity and exploit Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's apparent weaknesses. The dismay in Labor, moreover, appeared in many cases to focus more on the anticipated damage to the party caused by Orr's remarks than on the way he may have insulted a segment of Israeli society.
A retired major general, Orr was quoted in the Israeli daily Ha'aretz last week as saying that Moroccan Jews are the "most problematic ethnic group." He added that Moroccan Jews in Israel "have no curiosity to know what's happening" and that they interpret legitimate criticism as ethnically motivated.
Barak said it would take a long time to mend the damage Orr had caused the party. Orr, who apologized for his remarks, refused to resign from the Knesset, but the party forced Barak to strip him of all his leadership positions.
Legislator Haim Ramon, a key party figure, said he would quit the party if Orr were elected in the next primaries to Labor's Knesset list.
Barak, bruised from the Orr affair, was in the United States this week with three senior members of the Labor Party in an effort to raise his party's profile among Clinton administration officials and American legislators.
Speaking Aug. 3 to a small group of reporters, Barak left the door open for Orr to return to good graces in the Labor Party if he performed "long, hard work in those very communities" that he offended.
Israeli observers, meanwhile, note that the Labor Party's criticism of Orr was far more vehement than the reaction in the country at large - or in Sephardic communities themselves.
Even among Moroccan Israelis, the primary target of Orr's remarks, people have been taken aback at the vehemence of Labor's reaction. Indeed, the Moroccan community's own reaction, by and large, has been a contemptuous "So what?" - and certainly lacked the intensity of Labor's breast-beating.
This is not to say that Moroccan Jews in Israel do not harbor resentments over what they almost uniformly insist was the discriminatory treatment they received at the hands of the Ashkenazic establishment when their families came to Israel in the 1950s and early 1960s. But decades have elapsed since then. And while some profound social problems created by the mass immigration during the Jewish state's early years remain unsolved, Israeli society has made great strides toward ethnic cohesion.
JTA correspondent Matthew Dorf in Washington contributed to this report.
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