Gadi Eisenkot's Yashar party has planted its flag in Sderot — a Negev development town one kilometer from Gaza, historically a Likud stronghold where the party took over 40% in 2022 versus 23% nationally. His weapon is a campaign slogan mixing Hebrew and Moroccan Arabic: "Rosh Memshala Dialna" — prime minister of our own. It is a calculated breach of Israeli political grammar, where Mizrahi identity has been instrumentalized by the right but never permitted to lead it. The arithmetic is straightforward. Roughly half of Israel's Jewish population — about 4 million people — is of Mizrahi origin, predominantly from Middle Eastern and North African backgrounds. Since Menachem Begin's 1977 Mahapach, this bloc has been Likud's electoral bedrock. Yet Likud has never had a Mizrahi leader. Eisenkot's campaign explicitly attacked this gap, running the line "Netanyahu: Let the Mizrahim give interviews" — mocking the party's pattern of relying on Mizrahi votes while sidelining Mizrahi voices. The slogan's power lies in what it refuses to hide. As journalist Daniel Ben-Simon told DW, Israelis "don't use terms like 'Dialna' with pride." Israeli state-building under the early socialist Mapai party pursued aggressive cultural assimilation — Mizrahim were expected to Europeanize, shed Arabic, and abandon North African heritage. Many were settled in Ma'abarot transit camps in underfunded periphery towns like Sderot, creating structural poverty that persists today. Eisenkot's use of Moroccan Arabic in a prime ministerial campaign is, in Ben-Simon's framing, the construction of a "new identity: an Israeli-Moroccan identity" — one that refuses the old binary of erasure or tokenization. The terrain is shifting beneath the slogan. Sderot's population has grown by roughly 5,000 since October 7, 2023 — when Hamas attacks killed more than 50 people there — reaching about 40,000. Many new arrivals are national-religious families drawn by idealism and government benefits, and they tend to vote for Bezalel Smotrich's Religious Zionism rather than Likud directly. This means Likud could lose Sderot votes even within Netanyahu's broader right-wing bloc, a fracture Eisenkot is positioned to exploit. The provocation reached its crudest form when right-wing journalist Yinon Magal, a vocal Netanyahu supporter, called Eisenkot a "monkey" on live television and accused him of being controlled by Ashkenazi elites. Netanyahu condemned the remark, but the damage was structural: it confirmed exactly the dynamic Eisenkot's campaign describes. Ben-Simon suggested Eisenkot's embrace of his roots may have been partly forced by such attacks, but argued it carries historical weight regardless. What makes this more than electoral tactics is the 20-year question. If Eisenkot wins and the Mizrahi-identity frame succeeds electorally, it could permanently unbundle Mizrahi votes from Likud by offering a competing home that validates rather than instrumentalizes ethnic identity. If it fails, it still normalizes Moroccan Arabic in mainstream Israeli political speech — a shift Ben-Simon calls irreversible. Either way, the development towns' relationship to their North African roots intensifies rather than fades. The core extraction here is not financial but representational. For decades, Likud captured Mizrahi electoral energy while concentrating leadership among Ashkenazi politicians. Eisenkot's campaign is a direct attempt to name that extraction and redirect the loyalty it depends on. Whether voters follow the slogan or the habit will determine whether Israel's deepest ethnic cleavage finally produces structural political realignment or remains, as it has been since 1977, a managed grievance.
