Who Gets to Use the Crowd
Mimouna celebrations in Jerusalem moved from Musrara to Sacher Park as the gatherings grew too large for the neighborhood, and politicians began taking advantage of the crowds to campaign for their parties. What started as a cultural celebration rooted in Moroccan Jewish life ended up becoming another stage where political operators worked the room and tried to turn public gathering into electoral theater.
The celebrations were described as part of Moroccan Jewish culture that eventually became a national festival. In Musrara, everyone brought something from home to contribute to the feast, and most of the merrymakers wore Moroccan national dress. The scene was built from ordinary people sharing food and culture, not from the polished machinery of officialdom.
From Neighborhood Feast to Managed Spectacle
Within a relatively short time, there was not enough room in Musrara to accommodate all those who flocked to the area, so the main Mimouna celebration moved to Sacher Park. There, the gathering became redolent with the aroma of family barbecues and drew large crowds. The shift from a neighborhood event to a larger public space shows how a grassroots celebration can outgrow the confines of a single district, only to become visible enough for politicians to swarm around it.
The article said politicians then started taking advantage of the huge crowds to campaign for their various parties. That detail sits at the center of the whole scene: a public celebration filled with food, dress, and community becomes useful to those who already have access to party machinery and public platforms. The crowd gathers to celebrate; the political class arrives to harvest attention.
Culture, Discrimination, and the People at the Bottom
Shaul Ben Simhon, who was fighting discrimination, said, "We didn’t come to Israel to be Moroccans. We came to share our culture." The line lands with force because it frames the celebration not as a costume party for outsiders, but as a claim to dignity and recognition from a community dealing with discrimination. Ben Simhon was identified as a fellow Moroccan who was mostly a suit-and-tie man, unlike the Black Panthers, who wore jeans and polo shirts.
The article said Ben Simhon was an energetic figure in the Ashdod Workers’ Committee and chairman of local and national organizations of North African Jews and of people of Moroccan background. It also said he had connections in high places and was able to arrange for the Black Panthers to meet with Jerusalem mayor Teddy Kollek and with prime minister Golda Meir. That is how the apparatus works: access, titles, and connections determine who gets heard, while everyone else waits outside the doors.
The Black Panthers were arrested, and Ben Simhon bailed them out of prison. The meeting with Kollek went fairly well, but the one with Meir was a disaster. When introducing them and their followers to Golda, Ben Simhon said they were good boys, to which Golda allegedly responded, "They’re not nice people." Word quickly spread that Golda had declared that the Black Panthers were not nice people, and this was regarded as a slur against the whole of Israel’s Moroccan community.
Golda later published that she had responded to Ben Simhon’s contention that the Black Panthers were good boys by saying, "They’re not nice people if they throw Molotov cocktails," and that the quote attributed to her had been taken out of context. The article leaves the exchange hanging there, with the language of state respectability on one side and a community already fighting discrimination on the other. In the end, the celebration, the arrests, the prison bail, and the campaign stop all sit in the same frame: ordinary people making culture together while power circles around them, looking for leverage.