Health, and your fellow travelers, it’s time you learned that saying “everyone knows” or assuming that “everyone” thinks along the same lines and has the same blinkered and narrow perspective and sources that you do may be comforting, or self assuring, but it is simply a poor substitute for reporting facts or actually looking at sources. And it is further something that you should be aware of that everybody, whether pro or anti zionist, religious or secular, has an agenda.
I know that the Teimanim came from a pre modern subsistence existence in a hostile environment to a challenging economic and social situation in post 1948 Israel where everyone’s priority was having enough to eat and defending themselves from bloodthirsty neighbors bent on revenge for their defeat. It was a shock to the system for them and they did not have the communal infrastructure in place that European refugees had when they came from the DP camps.
Undoubtedly some of them turned away from observance. And, possibly, some of those in the secular majority were pleased to see it. But you are deluding yourself if you think that the tziyonim had more interest in or resources to devote to purposely erasing the religiosity of the Teimanim than they had in feeding and clothing them, putting a roof over their head, defending them, (and everyone else) and slowly building the country, a process that took more than 20 years. It is a false narrative built on smug self importance (if it is the way WE perceive it, then it must be true, and the way everyone else perceives it). SO please, demonstrate to me in legislative or regulatory policy from the period of 1949 through 1967, in FACTS, that you are right. IF you don’t have the evidence, don’t waste everyone’s time. If you do, and can show that it was aimed specifically at the Teimanim with the specific and singular intent to destroy their observance, I will concede the point.
The truth is that the chareidi population in Israel in the first twenty to thirty years of its existence was almost a complete political and social irrelevancy, an afterthought, and generally left to its own devices, for better or worse. It was only during the ascendancy of Begin and the Likud in the seventies that politics and policy started to pay attention.
By the way, you should find out about the the sad story of Yahia Jaradi and his family from Yemen, and what happened to them, if you want to talk about shmad.