Once the butt of numerous jokes, David Levy has emerged as the Great Sephardic Hope in his quest to be prime minister. The Sephardi Revolution Sixty percent of Israel's population is now Sephardi, and many are looking to David Levy to become the Jewish state's first "non European" prime minister. HELEN DAVIS Special to The Jewish News J erusalem — Israel took a small but perceptible step towards a major political revolution recently when David Levy was elected to the Num- ber Two spot in the hard-line Herut Party. Levy, who commands a substantial ethnic following among Israel's Sephardi population — Jews who originated in North African and Arab states — is now a bit closer to his goal of succeeding 73-year-old Yitzhak Shamir as party leader and, quite possibly, as prime minister. "When the time comes I will compete publicly for the leadership," he says. "It is a legitimate desire and I do not have to apologise for that. I have the will and the ability." The hour of triumph for Israel's majori- ty "non-European" Jews appears to be rapidly approaching. Levy's fierce determination to become prime minister on an unabashed ethnic ticket might alarm Israel's Ashkenazi (European) establishment as well as those who oppose his hawkish positions, par- ticularly on Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank and Gaza. Born in Morocco, David Levy arrived in Israel in the early Fifties. By 19, he was married and expecting his first child. It was a time of intense hardship and high unemployment, particularly for the 600,000 "Oriental" Jews, few of whom were 22. Friday, April 17, 1987 THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS equipped with the modern skills demand- ed by the new state. Levy, unemployed and humiliated by his pregnant wife having to go out to do menial domestic work, snapped. When he was once more turned away by the local labour exchange, he took the place apart. The result was a 12-day prison sentence — an experience which transformed the rough, tough Levy into a cunning political animal. "At a certain stage, I stopped crying," he says. "I stopped feeling sorry for myself and began to think of ways to change my condition and that of those who shared the same fate as my own family. "I understood that turning desks upside down in an employment office was not the way. I had to find a path that would lead me to a position of influence from which I could change things. I understood in- tuitively that I had to learn the rules of the game." He plunged into local politics and rose quickly to a leading position in the Histadrut Labour Federation, which brought him to national prominence. In 1977, when Menachem Begin broke the Labour Party's stranglehold on power and became the first Likud prime minister, David Levy received a big break. He was appointed minister of immigra- tion and instantly became a symbol in the eyes of the elitest, Ashkenazi-dominated Labour Party of the lack of intelligence, ex- perience and culture in the victorious Likud bloc, which is itself a coalition of the dominant Herut and Liberal parties. The result was an avalanche of David Levy jokes, which pilloried the new minister, portrayed him as an inept dunderhead and hinted at his North African origins. Sample: "Have you heard the latest David Levy joke?" a taxi driver asks his fare. "I am David Levy," came the reply. "Then I'll tell it very slowly." Nobody is telling jokes about David Levy anymore. In the past ten years, he has shown himself to be an astute politi- cian with a highly developed sense of sur- vival, a keen understanding of the mood of his constituency and a finely tuned ear for the concerns of the right-wing grass roots. His major rival in the Herut leadership stakes is the formidable Ariel Sharon, whose ambitions are no less grand, but — for the moment, at least — well sheathed. There will almost certainly be blood on the floor when the moment of succession arrives, probably at the end of the current government, and the two men join battle for the leadership of their party. If Levy does indeed succeed, he will break the traditional mold of Israeli socie- ty, which was created in the secular,