The World: Middle East: Israel's Other War

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SINCE the Middle East cease-fire went into force last August, Israel has enjoyed a rare interregnum of peace. Thus it came as a shock to Israelis when Premier Golda Meir recently warned them to brace for quite another kind of war, "an internal war that would be rooted in social problems and would be more frightening than any war on the borders." Israel's Premier was alerting her 3,000,000 citizens to domestic crises that have been deliberately set aside during the 23 years since independence, while Israel concentrated on securing its borders. Now, with the cease-fire ten months old and holding, the first skirmishes are being fought in the internal war that Golda prophesied.

Much of the difficulty grows out of the fact that Israel is not really one Jewish nation but an uncertain amalgam of Ashkenazic (European) and Sephardic (Oriental) Jews. The Sephardim (literally "Spaniards," though most are from North Africa or Asia) represent almost 65% of the Jewish population. The generally better-educated Ashkenazim ("Germans," in Old Hebrew), many of them descendants of the Polish and Russian Jews who founded Israel, rule the country. The Sephardim feel discriminated against because of their cultural shortcomings. Only 3% of all top government officials and 20% of the Knesset, or Parliament, are Sephardim. In the 18-man Cabinet, only Iraqi-born Police Minister Shlomo Hillel is from an Arab-speaking country. Fully 60% of Sephardic children drop out of high school; at the college level, 95% of the student population are Ashkenazim.

Such statistics invite a protest movement, and it fell to a long-haired, slim, intense youth named Saadya Marciano, 20, to organize it. Born in Marseille while his wandering father was in transit from Morocco to Israel, Saadya is one of nine children and a product of a Jerusalem slum called Musrara. He entered the army at 18, spent nearly half his seven months of service in jail, and was finally discharged as unfit. Since then, unable to get a job because of his service record, he has spent his time idling with other Arab-speaking Sephardic youths in Musrara, and he has been picked up by police on suspicion of various crimes.

"One night," Saadya told TIME Correspondent Marlin Levin last week, "we were sitting around in the room of my friend Charley Biton when we decided to form an organization. I suggested the name Black Panthers. We asked the police for a permit to demonstrate against lousy housing conditions. The police helped us a lot: they locked us up when we said we were going to demonstrate without a permit."

The demonstration was held anyway earlier this spring and, though police soon broke it up, Israelis were jolted by the sight of Jew fighting Jew. Since the first protest, the Panthers ("Madison Avenue couldn't have picked a better name," says Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kollek) claim that they have signed up 9,000 members.

Three Fronts. The Panthers have helped spark a long-overdue debate in Israel on the problems that bloom with peace. It was Police Minister Hillel, the Iraqi Jew who made good, who defined the danger most clearly. In Tel Aviv recently, he told a Labor Party rally: "Israel is faced with a struggle on three equally important fronts—security, economic and social. It cannot afford to lose any one of them."