Ari Afilalo, a law professor
specializing on trade who has co-authored ‘The New Global Trading
Order: The Evolving State and the Future of Trade’ with Dennis
Patterson, a book published by the Cambridge University Press. He
has for many years nurtured an interest in the social and economic
integration of Sephardic Jews in Israel and their patterns of
political allegiance.
As a senior writing his thesis at
Harvard in 1988, Ari Afilalo studied in depth the causes of the
overwhelming Sephardic support for Menahem Begin and his Likud Party,
who won for the first time in 1977 the Israeli elections after
decades of Labor dominance. Ari Afilalo had previously studied at
the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and he was able to access at
Harvard archives containing a rich collection of materials pertaining
to Sephardic voting.
Ari debunked
at the time the commonly held view that Sephardic voters, hailing
from Arab countries where they had faced a politically turbulent if
culturally rich history, were attracted to the more hawkish policy of
the Likud. He instead traced the voting patterns to the initial
clashes between the Labor establishment “anti-Levantinization”
policies and the Sephardic immigrants, and the more traditional
outlook of Prime Minister Begin, as distinguished from the secular
Labor leaders.
Today, Ari Afilalo examines social,
economic and political issues affecting the children and
grand-children of the 1977 Sephardic first Likud wave.
