« Instead of a new – Israeli – identity, the difficult integration experienced by some Moroccan Jews has helped forge a Moroccan identity »
Haaretz, 10 July 2021

Quickly dubbed Marokaï sikine, the “Moroccans with knives”, due to incidents committed by young Israelis of Moroccan origin, Moroccans in Israel would see this label stick to their heads for years to come. Disadvantaged by poor reception conditions and discrimination, the Moroccan Jewish community in Israel only saw the light at the end of the social tunnel in the late 1970s, at the cost of social and political struggles as well as a great deal of militant and cultural work.

With the 1977 victory of the right-wing Likud party over the Labor party, which had ruled the country continuously since 1948, Moroccan Israelis began to emerge from long decades of marginalization by the Ashkenazi establishment 1. Moroccans began to make their demands heard in the late 1950s, before founding the Black Panther movement in the early 1970s. The choice of the name Black Panthers, as in the United States, reflected and denounced the social marginalization and racism affecting Moroccan Jews, as Reuven Abergel and Claris Harbon2 expressed and explained in the Israeli media until very recently (…).

While Moroccan Jews began emigrating to Israel as early as the late 1940s, around the time of the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, the pace quickened in the wake of Morocco’s declaration of independence in 1956. The process continued after the death of Mohamed V in February 1961, the accession of Hassan II and the emergence of political tensions with Morocco’s socialist and nationalist opposition.

Over the period 1956-1968, more than 100,000 Jews left Morocco clandestinely and semi-clandestinely, then officially but still discreetly (…).