The word that blew up Israel's election, and the divide behind it

A week before Israel votes on 27 October, Yinon Magal, the Channel 14 presenter who is among Benjamin Netanyahu's most loyal media allies, called Gadi Eisenkot a monkey on his Saturday night show. He said it three times, with the claim that Ashkenazi elites were pulling the strings. Eisenkot, the former chief of staff running to replace Netanyahu, has Moroccan roots.

The remark put the right on the defensive for the first time in the campaign. It also reopened the oldest divide inside Israeli Jewish society, between Jews whose families came from Christian Europe and Jews whose families came from the Islamic world. Unholy's subscribers heard Matti Friedman and Yonit Levi examine that divide in a bonus conversation earlier this year. This episode brings the conversation to the whole audience, with Jonathan Freedland and Yonit setting out the news at the top.

What Magal said, and what happened next

Jonathan read the quote in full.

"He is a monkey, says Magal. He is a monkey, repeating it. Behind him, all the Ashkenazi elites control him."

Magal's defence, delivered in an Instagram video from his car, was that in Hebrew the word can also mean a puppet or straw man, so he meant that Eisenkot is a front for Ashkenazi operators working behind the scenes. Yonit did not think that helped, and she pointed out the politics: Likud's base is heavily Mizrahi, and the prospect of a first prime minister with Moroccan roots appeals to some of those voters too.

"to actually insult him in such a racist way is of course a political mistake"

By her account, the two politicians who rushed to Magal's defence were themselves of Mizrahi origin, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Aryeh Deri. Netanyahu condemned the remark while pointing at what the other side says about Likud voters. Jonathan's reading was that the campaign had turned.

"It strikes me as a really interesting moment in the campaign. Almost, it seems to me, the first time in the campaign that the right are on the defensive."

The divide outsiders miss

Friedman's starting point is that people looking at Israel from outside see one divide, between Jews and Arabs, and miss the ones that occupy Israelis more.

"there are very important divides among Israelis. And these divides, I think, preoccupy Israelis more, perhaps, than the great geopolitical questions."

He arrived from Canada at 17 with a European idea of Israel: Herzl, the kibbutz, the Holocaust, Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir. A few years later he was a soldier in South Lebanon, fighting Shia Muslims he had never heard of, alongside Arabic-speaking Christian allies and fellow soldiers from Yemen, Tunisia, Morocco and Iran.

"I had to admit to myself that I was in a story that I did not understand."

Much of his writing since, he said, has been an attempt to explain that gap to himself. Part of the reason it goes unexplained is who does the explaining. Most of the people who interpret Israel for the English-speaking world are immigrants from North America.

"The North American Jewish community is more than 90% Ashkenazi or 90% of European, mostly East European extraction. While the Israeli Jewish community is more than 50% Mizrahim."

Both he and Yonit are Ashkenazi, as they said on air, and Friedman called the labels terrible generalisations before using them anyway. Without them, he argued, there is no way to have the conversation.

A state built for Jews who were already dead

The state founded in 1948 was built almost entirely by Jews from Europe, mostly Eastern Europe, and the mainstream Zionist movement was barely aware of the million Jews native to the Islamic world. Herzl imagined a refuge for the Jews of Europe.

"The problem is that by the time the state is founded, the Jews of Europe have been murdered."

What came instead was a wave of immigration the founders had not planned for, speaking Arabic, Kurdish, Persian and Turkish, from communities older than Islam itself. The Jews of Aleppo were there a thousand years before the seventh century.

"Baghdad in the 1940s is one third Jewish."

Downtown Cairo still has a district called the Jewish Quarter, with no Jews left in it.

"That world is almost entirely destroyed, not in a way that's as bloody and awful as the way the European Jewish world was destroyed, but it is erased."

The clash with the founders' vision, a secular socialist republic on the Mediterranean, set up much of Israel's political life. A quarter of a million Jews from Morocco alone arrived into it.

"they're not into this workers revolution business and they're definitely not into being secular."

Menachem Begin's forerunner to Likud treated the newcomers with respect, Friedman said, while the establishment mocked them in films that now make Israelis cringe and kept their music off mainstream radio until the late 1990s. The voting pattern that followed holds to this day.

"the voting base of Likud is still, to a very significant extent, Jews whose grandparents, great grandparents, came here from places like Morocco or Tunisia."

Spies, not victims

When Friedman came to write about this, he refused to write a story of victimhood, which he finds both boring and un-Zionist.

"Zionism took a group of victims and told them not to think of themselves as victims. And that is more than anything else, the reason for the success of the state of Israel."

He went in through the spies instead. An Arabic-speaking Jew in early Israel was unlikely to become a professor or run a company, but one corner of the society prized exactly what the rest disdained: intelligence. The Arab Section of the Palmach, a handful of young men mostly from Syria, became the seed of what grew into the Mossad, and the subject of his book Spies of No Country.

"What does the founding of the state of Israel look without Ashkenazim?"

The irony he kept returning to is that these recruits wanted to be sabras and pioneers and were turned away for looking and sounding too Arab, until the intelligence services made the same quality their ticket in.

"they want to be sabras, they want to be pioneers, but they're too Arab."

The price of admission was to go back to living as the people they had fled. About a dozen of them began the 1948 war. Around half survived.

Begin, Netanyahu and the Jews with no hyphen

Yonit raised the paradox that runs through Israeli politics: the two politicians who best understood this divide, and best used it, were both Ashkenazi. Begin in 1977, and Netanyahu throughout his career.

"It's a little bit like Donald Trump being the voice of the common man, right? They don't know, or maybe they didn't feel a lot of the discrimination, but they knew how to speak to it"

Friedman's explanation draws on the sociologist Nissim Mizrachi, whom he credits with the idea that Western observers get this wrong by treating Mizrahim as Israel's version of a non-white minority.

"Mizrahim in Israel are not a minority. And they're what he describes as Jews with no hyphen."

That electorate, he argued, does not need a leader whose grandparents came from Tunisia. It needs one who is fully inside the Jewish story and clear-eyed about living as a minority in the Islamic world.

"doesn't have that kind of European delusion about the efficacy of peace agreements."

The Labor Party that founded the country never got this, in his telling, and paid for it: a party that was running the country when he arrived in the 1990s and now holds single-digit seats in the Knesset. The first people to warn about the Palestinian refugee problem, in 1948, were those same Arabic-speaking spies, filing reports their European commanders did not take seriously.

In the outro, Yonit called it the Israeli paradox and said it is why the Eisenkot candidacy is such an interesting one.

"the two politicians who thus far managed to tap into that Mizrachi sentiment were of course deeply Ashkenazi."

Casablanca is west of London

Friedman's last word on the labels was that they do not describe geography at all.

"the city of Casablanca, which is really a classic Eastern city is actually to the West of London."

The line runs between grandparents who lived among Christians and grandparents who lived among Muslims. So if you are from

"Vilna or if you're from Vancouver, you are Ashkenazi."

And Mizrahi, he suggested, is less a Middle Eastern identity than an Israeli one, forged by arriving in the 1950s and 1960s and being marginalised in a country that was supposed to embrace you. A Syrian Jew in Manchester or a Persian Jew in Los Angeles may not think of themselves as Mizrahi at all, because, in his phrase, they did not go through the Israeli ethnic grinder.

No deli in Israel

The gap is easiest to see at the table. American Jews arrive for the first time and go looking for Jewish food.

"There's no Jewish food. Like there's no deli in Israel."

Bagels, he said, are American and reached Israel perhaps 15 years ago. What Israelis call Jewish food is couscous and hummus, the food of the Levant and North Africa, with European elements mixed in. It is a small marker of something larger.

"It doesn't feel Jewish. It feels foreign."

In 2026, Friedman argued, Israel is easier to understand for a liberal Muslim from Beirut than for an American Jew from New York, because Judaism here works the way Middle Eastern religion works. There was never a Reform Judaism in the Islamic world, just as there is no Reform Islam.

"you can't opt out of your Jewish identity and just be American"

Hence the Mizrahi pop star who puts on a kippah and tallit for a religious segment mid-concert, has tattoos, and sang the anthem of Tel Aviv Pride. In Middle Eastern Judaism, he said, it fits.

Eisenkot's card

Jonathan closed with the candidate at the centre of the week's news. Eisenkot has a credential the other side would have played to the maximum, and he barely uses it. If he loses, Jonathan is filing that under the reasons why.

"a failure to just exploit what was a huge credential"

Yonit's reply was that he is already drafting both columns, why Eisenkot lost and why Eisenkot won. He did not deny it. The full episode is on YouTube, Apple Podcasts and Spotify.