Only tangentially related, but during the height of the Covid crisis I remember Taiwan's response was particularly efficient. The vice president of Taiwan from 2016-2020 was Chen Chien-jen (陳建仁) - a man with a DOCTORATE in epidemiology.
The last time the United States had a presidential figure with any kind of STEM background was probably Jimmy Carter (bachelors of science and served as a navy nuclear engineer) - nearly 50 years ago.
The mainland Chinese response to Covid was very similar to the Taiwanese response, but the media perception of the two was completely different.
Israelis like Geulah Cohen, Moshe Barzani, Eliyahu Hakim, Shimon Tzabar, Eliyahu Bet-Zuri, Mordechai Alkahi, Avshalom Haviv, Meir Nakar, Eliezer Kashani, and Shmuel Tankus were all prominent Mizrahi leaders and commanders in Lehi, Irgun, and the Haganah.
Kurdish, Iraqi, Levantine, and Turkish Jews had been a prominent demographic in what became Israel well before 1948 due to it's former Ottoman status along with communal incidents in Kurdistan, Iraq, Syria, and Turkiye well before 1948.
In addition, in the late 19th and early 20th century, most of the Ashkenazi who arrived in the Levant at the time aligned with "Ottomanization" [0] or assimilating into Ottoman Turkish culture and dropping any trappings of European culture, hence David Ben Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi becoming students at the Dârülfünûn-ı Şâhâne in Istanbul and assimilating into Turkish culture during their formative years.
The Labor Zionist movement tended to be primarily Ashkenazi, but they were not alone in founding Israel. Mizrahis were overrepresented in the Irgun and Lehi, both of who's political wings became the Likud.
[0] - https://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/16111/13/16111%20TALBOT_Jew...
Almost every important Israeli politician in the founding years was Ashkenazi (and to this day, every prime minister has been Ashkenazi, surprisingly enough). Yes, you can name various individual members of the pre-state militias / terrorist groups who were not Ashenazi, but they were a tiny minority in a movement dominated by people from Central / Eastern Europe.