David Levy, Moroccan-born ex-foreign minister of Israel, dies
JERUSALEM — David Levy, an Israeli politician born in Morocco who fought tirelessly against deep-seated racism against Jews from North Africa and went on to serve as foreign minister and hold other senior governmental posts, has died. He was 86.
Levy moved to Israel at age 20 from Morocco to Beit Shean, an isolated town in the country’s north. He first worked in construction and got his start in politics as a representative of the construction union.
He served in the Knesset, or parliament, from 1969 to 2006, holding the posts of foreign minister, deputy prime minister and housing and construction minister at various times. At the height of his career, he was a rival in the Likud party to Israel’s current prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Israel’s early leaders, mostly of European, or Ashkenazi, descent took a paternalistic attitude toward Jewish immigrants from Arabic-speaking countries in the Middle East and North Africa. Many of these immigrants, known as Mizrahi Jews, were sent to shantytown transit camps and largely sidelined.
Levy galvanized the disenfranchised Mizrahi community to help the right-wing Likud sweep to power under Menachem Begin, wresting control from the left-wing parties for the first time since the country’s founding.
During his tenure as foreign minister, starting in 1990, Levy renewed relations with many countries, including China and what was then the Soviet Union. He was the foreign minister during the Madrid Conference in 1991, which helped launch the Israeli-palestinian peace process, though he did not attend.
“From the transit camp to the White House in Washington, to the State Duma in Moscow and on to the Elysee
Palace in France,” Levy told Haaretz. “In all these places, the maabara was with me as were those eyes who I felt were accompanying me. My great achievement is that I paved the way for many more and created a reality in which people began to believe in themselves, in their potential to dare and succeed,” he said.
Levy is considered one of the country’s most effective housing ministers for pushing a series of major housing developments that helped modernize the “maabara,” the word for the shantytown camps that housed Mizrahi Jews in the early decades of the state.