History
On July 9, 1959, police confronted a Wadi Salib resident, Yaakov Elkarif, who was drunk and disturbing the peace. When he began behaving wildly and hurling empty bottles at the policemen sent to arrest him, he was shot and seriously wounded. Residents surrounded the police vehicle and dragged an officer out of it. He was released only after shots were fired in the air.
The next morning, several hundred Wadi Salib residents marched to Hadar HaCarmel, smashing shopwindows and setting cars on fire. Back in Wadi Salib, the anger targeted the clubhouses of Mapai and the Histadrut (the Israeli congress of trade unions). The police tried to disperse the demonstrators by force, leaving 13 policemen and 2 demonstrators wounded. 34 demonstrators were arrested.
On July 11, riots broke out in other places in Israel, particularly in large communities of North African immigrants, like Tiberias, Beersheba and Migdal HaEmek. It was claimed the riots were not completely spontaneous, and that a local movement, Likud Yotsei Tsfon-Africa (Union of North-African Immigrants) was involved in planning some of them. David Ben-Haroush, one of the movement's founders, was sent to prison. Ben-Haroush participated in the following elections while in jail, running on the Union's list, though it failed to cross the electoral threshold. The riots were reported internationally, prompting the King of Morocco to express concern for the plight of Israel's North African immigrants.
The Wadi Salib riots still resonate in Israeli society as a symptom of the social malaise in the early years of the state that led to clashes between Mizrahi and Ashkenazi Jews.
In 1979, Amos Gitai produced a film on the subject - Me'oraot Wadi Salib. The Wadi Salib riots have been discussed in many scholarly articles
Read more about this topic: Wadi Salib Riots
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