They came from Europe, North Africa, and Asia -- nearly one million of them between 1949 and 1961. They came from the former Soviet Union (FSU) in the 1990s -- more than 700,000 to date.

Prof. Nissim Garti Immigrated in 1953 From Plovdiv, Bulgaria

Simultaneous with these mass movements, and in the interim years as well, they trickled in from almost everywhere. Between May 1948 and the end of 1997, Israel took in more than 2.6 million immigrants.

Israelis describe them as having come in "waves." Given that Israel had a total Jewish population of 4.7 million at the end of 1997, the nonimmigrants are more wavebreakers than "hosts." Have they broken under the impact? No. Have they been displaced? Yes, often.

Andrei Brodov Immigrated in 1996 From Khazan, CSU

Each wave transformed the population. The pre-Zionist First Aliyah of the 1880s displaced the old Sephardi elite. The early Zionist pioneering Second Aliyah (1905-1914), with their devotion to physical toil, went further and relegated the "Old Yishuv" to the fringes of history (at least for as long as the early Zionist pioneers and their ideological heirs wrote the history).

The three waves of aliyah in the 1920s and 1930s, with their large admixture of European bourgeoisie, dashed the pioneering elite's hopes of remaking the population, and all Jewry, in its image. Holocaust survivors, arriving shortly before and after independence, forced the host society to accept nonselectivity as an irrevocable principle. The post-Independence Mizrahi aliyah put an end to Ashkenazi demographic hegemony. The "Russian" immigration of the current decade has postponed the demographic reckonings that may yet redraw the country's borders.