This paper examines the political thought of left-leaning Middle Eastern Jewish (or Mizrahi) intellectuals in the 1950s and 1960s. Underlying the examination is the contention that there is a serious need to revisit and perhaps reconstruct the historical understanding of early Mizrahi political thought in Israel. Seeking to rectify what Palestine-born Eliyahu Eliachar termed as the ‘original sin of Zionism’, Iraqi-born intellectuals like Latif Dori and Gideon Giladi posited that the State of Israel needed to unequivocally identify and engage with its neighboring countries, both in cultural and socio-political terms. While most of the native Arabic-speaking intellectuals discussed believed in the necessity of a Jewish State, they struggled with its expansionist and Westernization projects; which they viewed as colonialist in nature and, by definition, exclusionary against Palestinian citizens and Mizrahi immigrants. This paper is based on research conducted in journals catering to the Mizrahi community and written in Arabic, Hebrew, and English. Specifically, the paper reviews the political stances espoused in Dori’s weekly piece ‘On the Margins’; Giladi’s writings in the socialist journal Al-Mirsad; and Eliachar’s English-language journal Israel’s Oriental Problem. The paper begins with the contention that the political marginalization of Mizrahim in Israel fostered a shared sense of Oriental identity opposed to the European nature of Zionist thought. In turn, Mizrahi intellectuals promoted an alternative form of Zionism. Unlike European Zionism, this alternative was culturally and politically rooted in the Middle East and sought a non-exploitative relationship with the indigenous peoples of Israel/Palestine and the Arab World. The Middle Eastern Zionism promoted by the figures discussed held an anti-colonial stance and encouraged the equal participation of the Palestinian and Mizrahi communities within the political, labor, and social sectors of Israeli society. The paper concludes with a reflection on how this alternative Middle Eastern Zionism formed the ideological basis for a Mizrahi Civil Rights Struggle in Israel.