Why Israel’s Mizrahim face an existential battle
Mizrahi Jews protest over the abduction of infants from their families by staff at state-run medical facilities during the 1950s, Jerusalem, 2017
Orly Noy writes in Middle East Eye on 14 February 2026:
In light of former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s long-standing ties with child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein – ties that continued even after the latter’s criminal conviction – no one expected the Barak recordings revealed as part of the Epstein files to focus on virtuous topics, such as eradicating discrimination against women or child slavery.
Yet no one anticipated that what emerged from those recordings would sound almost like a plan for racial engineering in Israel.
In an audio recording that runs for more than three hours, believed to be from the mid-2010s, Barak expresses profound misgivings about Israel’s demographic future, warning of a bi-national state and, ultimately, one with an “Arab majority”.
The prospect of an Arab majority, or even just Israel’s existence within a distinctly Arab region, appears to evoke something in the veteran Labor politician beyond anxiety: it elicits contempt and revulsion.
But in fact, this is not so surprising. It was Barak who coined the phrase “a villa in the jungle” to describe Israel’s position in the Middle East, using the expression in a 1996 speech when he was foreign minister. What Barak thinks of the region is easily inferred. And if the Middle East is a jungle, then clearly not only its non-Jewish inhabitants, but also many of its ordinary Jewish inhabitants, can be deemed inferior in comparison with the villa’s owners.
Barak’s remarks in the Epstein recording are the distilled essence of this worldview. Israel’s founders and early leaders, Ashkenazi Jews from European backgrounds, he argued, were obliged to absorb Jews from Arab countries in order to “save” them.
But now, he says, it is possible to be selective and to “control the quality much more effectively, much more than the founding fathers of Israel did”. To that end, he proposes stripping the Orthodox establishment of its monopoly over conversion and enabling mass conversions – for the “right” populations. In other words, for white populations.