Real estate firm could lose state tenders over racist ad

The Israel Land Authority is considering disqualifying a real estate company from government tenders for violating discrimination laws after it aired a commercial that ridiculed Israelis of Middle Eastern or North African descent.

Produced by the Be’emunah group, the online ad sparked public outrage for appearing to promise potential homeowners an exclusively Ashkenazi life with “good neighbors” at the Carmei Gat housing project.

Ashkenazi Jews are descended from European Jewry and for years were considered Israel’s ruling elite, while Mizrahi, or Middle Eastern, Jews have long complained of discrimination at their hands.

On Tuesday, Housing Minister Yoav Galant requested Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein to examine what legal action his ministry could take against the company since ILA granted the land for the project in the central city of Kiryat Gat.

Galant called the video distasteful and racist.

“It appears the purpose of this group is to deliberately exclude an entire population group, to keep them from purchasing an apartment in the project,” he said in his letter to Weinstein.

The ILA said the matter would be reviewed to see if Be’emunah violated Israeli laws prohibiting discriminatory marketing campaigns.

The ad portrays a Caucasian, middle-class family sitting down to celebrate the holiday of Hanukkah, when two yokel neighbors barge in asking to borrow sugar and then invite themselves to stay for the candle lighting, which they take to be a barbecue.

The neighbors are identified as “Abergil,” a common name of Jews from Morocco, and are portrayed as rude, crass and uncultured.

The video, which succeeds in packing an impressive amount of racial slurs into less than 90 seconds, then segues to a voice-over ensuring prospective homeowners that unlike the ones in the ad, “good neighbors” await them at Carmei Gat.

Be’emunah quickly apologized for the ad, and withdrew it, and said “the hurtful message in the video is not our way and is against our values.”

“The clip was removed immediately by order of the company management, and a process of soul-searching and clarification began in order to understand how the clip was approved,” the company said in a statement.

In a particularly unfortunate coincidence, the ad was uploaded as Israel commemorated the persecution of Jews from Arab countries and from Iran, a national memorial day legislated in 2013.

The memorial day — during which the staggering number of Jews who fled eastern countries is emphasized as being equivalent to the number of Palestinian refugees who escaped during Israel’s War of Independence — was legislated as part of the country’s collective, years-long soul-searching over decades of systematic discrimination by the ruling Ashkenazi elite against Jews who were treated as second-class citizens.