During election campaigns in Israel, the so-called “ethnic card” is played from time to time . In both the Knesset and the Israeli government, there are loud claims by various parties that some communities have always been in the majority and others always in the minority. A research team from the Am a Zikaron Institute , which specializes in the study of Jewish family history, tested these claims and came to some interesting conclusions about the representation of different communities in Israeli governments in all the years since the establishment of the state. It turned out that communities such as the Yemeni community, German nationals and Romanians (not including the five natives of Bessarabia) each provided 11 ministers. All these communities share the fifth place in the ministerial ranking.
Iraqi-born ministers took the honorable fourth place. There are exactly 13 of them – as many as from the communities of Syria, Czech Republic, Afghanistan, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Georgia, India, Bulgaria, Turkey and Hungary combined. In the history of Israel, the number of ministers from Morocco is equal to the number of ministers from Belarus (25 each). If “Belarusians” gave the world in general, and Israeli society in particular, such politicians as Shimon Peres and the Weizmann family on the left and Yitzhak Shamir and the Rivlin family on the right, the lands of Morocco gave such leaders as the Levy family, some members of the Peretz family and almost the entire Shas party. These communities with share the third place.
In second place was Ukrainian Jewry, which gave Israel the Dayan and Rabin families and a number of other representatives of the top military echelon, who have traditionally changed from battlefields to political battles. A total of 31 ministers come from Ukraine.
Well, the first place with a large gap from all others (38 ministers), is firmly occupied by Polish Jewry (even without taking into account the Lithuanian community, which provided 8 more ministers). However, this is not surprising – until 1939, the largest Jewish community in Europe lived on the territory of modern Poland.