Education Quote by Moshe Sharett

The line lands with the calm, managerial certainty of early state-building rhetoric: pragmatic on the surface, quietly coercive underneath. Sharett frames Moroccan Jews as urgently desired raw material for a national project, but the welcome is conditional and instrumental. "Bring... over" makes migration sound like logistics, not lives; "build the country" casts people as labor inputs; "educated for this" supplies a technocratic justification for hierarchy.

The intent is twofold. First, it’s a recruitment pitch aimed at a young Israel that needed bodies - workers, soldiers, taxpayers - and saw mass immigration as strategic necessity. Second, it’s an internal warning: don’t romanticize what these immigrants can immediately deliver. Sharett signals the state’s need to import population while also preparing the bureaucracy and political class for "absorption" policies that would reshape newcomers to fit an Ashkenazi-designed template of modernity.

The subtext is the uncomfortable engine of the period: a civilizing mission embedded inside a rescue narrative. Moroccan Jews are addressed as Jews (inside the national family) and as Moroccans (outside the presumed standard of competence). The phrase "we cannot count on... alone" implies an ideal immigrant is already trained in the habits of the state: Hebrew, bureaucratic norms, professional skills, a certain political culture. When he says they "have not been educated for this", he’s not describing a neutral skills gap; he’s authorizing paternalism - and, historically, the unequal distribution of housing, schooling, and opportunity that would harden ethnic stratification for decades.

It works rhetorically because it turns inequality into administrative common sense: discrimination with a clipboard.