In 1949, my aunt Hamama immigrated to Israel from Yemen and gave birth to a beautiful baby boy. When she returned to the immigrant camp from the hospital, the nurse who had accompanied her in the ambulance took the baby from her arms and told my aunt to step down. When she turned her back, the ambulance and her baby disappeared, never to be seen again. This is one of hundreds of stories known collectively in Israel as “The Yemenite Babies Affair.” During the mass immigration to Israel of the 1950’s, hundreds if not thousands of babies disappeared from immigrant absorption camps throughout Israel. Since then, the affair has surfaced several times, in each case causing a public outcry that was quickly suppressed and forgotten. Despite accusations that these babies were kidnapped and adopted by European Jews or sold to Jewish families abroad, the state of Israel failed to properly investigate the matter. The government’s subsequent silence on the story was total. This paper uses a cultural studies approach to examine issues of race, ideology, and representation (Hall; 89, 97; Said; 78; Shohat; 89) as manifested in the mainstream media discourse of this affair. The case study is especially interesting because it involves questions of representation of minority groups and women, where the national state, in the name of unity, ignores differences in order to create what Benedict Anderson (1996) calls “imagined community”. As argued by such diverse scholars as Swirski (1986), Shohat (1989) and Chetrit (2003), Zionist leaders of the Israeli nation state have used a ‘melting pot’ philosophy to construct a notion of unity, but at the time, freely expressed racist opinions about Mizrahi Jews and pushed them into the margins. The paper focuses on media coverage of the Yemenite Babies Affair, as this case study raises two important issues concerning the public sphere. The first is the contradiction between Zionism as practice and an ideology, and the second is the role of the media in constructing Zionist discourse, especially with regard to the conflict between the state and the minority group of Arab-Jews. I argue that the Arabness of the Yemenite immigrants and other Oriental Jews, along with the overall rejection of the immediate Arab environment, turned them into the ultimate “others” in Israeli society, thus leading to the massive silencing and whitewashing of this story by the government and the media.