In November 1972, journalist Orianna Fallaci sat down to interview then Israel’s Prime Minister Golda Meir. The Italian journalist and author, one of the most original and controversial interviewers of her time, recorded this interview in her 1976 book “Interview with History”:

We in Israel have absorbed about 1,400,000 Arab Jews: from Iraq, from Yemen, from Egypt, from Syria, from North African countries like Morocco. People who when they got here were full of diseases and didn’t know how to do anything. Among the seventy thousands Jews who came here from Yemen, for example, there wasn’t a single doctor or a single nurse, and almost all of them had tuberculosis. And still we took them, and built hospitals for them , and took care of them, we educated them,  put them in clear houses, and turned them into farmers, doctors, engineers, teachers … Among the 150,000 Jews who came here from Iraq, there was only a very small group of intellectuals, and yet today their children go to the university. Of course we have problems with them – all that glitters is not gold – but the fact remains that we accepted and helped them. [-]

… I think that none of us dreamers realized in the beginning what difficulties would come up. For example, we hadn’t foreseen the problem of bringing together Jews who had grown in such different countries and remained divided from each other for so many centuries. Jews have come here from all over the world, as we wanted, yes. But each group had its own language, its own culture, and to integrate it with other groups had been much more difficult than it seemed in theory. It’s not easy to create a homogeneous nation with people so different …. There was bound to be a clash. And it gave me disappointment and grief.