Immigration in the country's first decade, predominantly Mizrahi, was Israel's largest relative to the non-immigrant population (much of itself recently landed) and possibly the largest of its kind ever. Every Jewish Israeli "absorbed" more than one newcomer within the first 3-4 years of statehood, when the immigrants were more or less equally divided between Mizrahim and Holocaust-survivor Ashkenazim. All of this was done in much worse socio-economic conditions than pertain today. The campaign was so macro-managed that it overlooked the micro (the individual olim); official correspondence often described the immigrants as "material" (the same term that had been applied to Holocaust survivors).

In fact, the post-1948 immigrants were excellent human capital but meshed poorly with the country's needs. They were heavy on merchants and white-collar workers -- an ideological abomination to the Mapai hegemons. Many others were smiths (not needed) and teachers (suspected of being unable or unwilling to impart the correct secular-Zionist-Ashkenazi-culture to their charges).

Food Shortages
Although these immigrants debarked into a milieu of food shortages and housing shortages, the country's leaders did not seriously consider reinstating selectivity. Instead, the country mobilized the local elite -- the kibbutz movements -- to serve as the absorption vanguard. Fiscal and monetary policies diverted resources from security and the general standard of living to education and infrastructure. Government tentacles were everywhere in absorption and any field even remotely related to it. One such domain was population dispersion, preached to all but applied to immigrants only. In the early statehood years, when 90% of the population was urban, approximately half believed that newcomers should be forced to engage in rural settlement and agriculture. And so they were.

The relocation process was carried out in three phases. In the late 1940s, immigrants were taken to abandoned Arab localities. When these filled up, they were trucked to transit and immigrant camps initially composed of tents, later of metal shacks -- most of them in the central region. The camp population peaked in mid-1952 at a quarter of a million, one-sixth of the total Jewish population then.

Transit Camps (Ma'abarot) in the 1950s

Later that year came a new plan -- to refer the camp population to permanent housing in out-lying towns and moshavim (smallholder cooperatives). Several existing small localities were designated as "development towns" and new ones were established: 32 in all by 1962 -- 12 in the north, 13 in south, and 9 in the center of the country.

Manufacturers, lured through Zionist jawboning and financial incentives, filled the towns with labor-intensive factories, most of them in textiles. Immigrants were sent to development towns without warning, often in the dead of night and sometimes through outright lies. The moshav program was built atop a plan introduced in 1949 for both Mizrahi and Ashkenazi immigrants. The olim referred to moshavim were given no training in agriculture, no screening for suitability or compatibility, and no psychological counseling. Many of them succeeded anyway; most of the failures were concealed behind walls of subsidies and preferential treatment.

Results
The "first big Aliyah" made the country viable. It filled the periphery at a time when many foreign powers -- including some not hostile to Israel -- considered the Jerusalem Corridor, the Negev, and the western Galilee to be "occupied territories" to be "returned." By the mid-1950s, Israel was achieving growth rates that, when attained by Japan and Germany during those years, were termed an economic miracle. Inflation and unemployment rates plummeted; exports expanded vigorously. The new farmers consigned food shortages to history.

Were it not for these results, the adverse economic and social residues of "the first big aliyah" could not be discussed at all. It is a sign of Israel's immigration-based viability that the country is much preoccupied with the ill after-effects of the great influx. Four decades later, about one third of the development towns remain economic backwaters, perpetually isolated, impoverished, and engulfed in unemployment crises. Their "traditional" industries are now crumbling and closing under the onslaught of free-trade commitments and higher minimum wages. The moshavim, composed of individual farmsteads, could neither achieve scale economies in agriculture nor cooperate efficiently to industrialize. Development towns produced local elites that advanced to national prominence (such as long-time cabinet minister David Levy and incumbent Tourism Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Moshe Katsav); moshavim by and large did not.

Saddest of all are the social scars, although fewer and fewer of the affected Israelis flaunt them. The trite expression for them is "mistakes of the 1950s," a catch-all that covers the following:

· Hard-hearted and high-handed bureaucratic behavior, above and beyond the call of chaos, including pressure for partisan conformity;

· The shattering of traditional ways and shredding of internal fabrics of community and family: The struggle for the "souls" of immigrants peaked at this time. Some instructors, notably those from kibbutz movements, embraced the elite's de-Orthodoxization mentality with vigor, irreparably poisoning relations between the establishment and many Mizrahim. Mainstream society, obsessed with its cultural supremacy, preached an extreme melting-pot attitude while banishing immigrants to the national and cultural periphery, thereby catalyzing the formation of an underclass. The immigrants' religiously motivated desire to help build the country was wasted;

· One-size-fits-all treatment of Mizrahi immigrants: In part, this reflected Israel's commitment to take in all immigrants, despite its dire constraints in funds and personnel for absorption. But Mizrahim were also considered to be uniformly unskilled, if not untrainable, and were depicted as such for propaganda/fundraising purposes. Consequently they were "made" into farmers and unskilled industrial laborers -- the social groups that today earn the least and face the bleakest future. Although half the 1950s immigrants had virtually no formal schooling and only 2% had higher education, those neither destitute nor unschooled were also marginalized in keeping with the government's and society's generalizations;

· Shipping Mizrahim to the periphery: By doing this, the establishment destroyed the ideal it had created, namely, rural settlement as an activity for the elite.

By maintaining such a firm grip on all absorption processes, Mapai sowed its own eventual defeat. Its opposition on the Right, Menachem Begin's Herut (the core around with the Likud later coalesced), spent a generation building a coalition of disgruntled Mizrahim and petit bourgeois that carried it to power in 1977 and survives to the present day. Begin's policy may have been the outstanding display of patience in Israeli political history. His elevation of Mizrahim to non-token political prominence (though not power) may have helped defuse the ethnic tension that only a few years earlier had been believed to pose the great threat to national cohesion.

To repair the political damage, Labour Party Chairman Ehud Barak issued a fervent apology to the Mizrahim on September 25 for the "mistakes" enumerated above, and repeated it in Netivot, a Mizrahi-dominated development town in the Negev, on September 28. Others in his party, most prominently Shimon Peres (the only member of the 1950s bureaucratic and political elite still active on the national scene), took exception to the insinuation of sweeping historical misdeeds. Clearly, the debate continues and the scars remain.