Good intentions may have motivated the biggest settlement project in Israel's history. Hundreds of thousands of new immigrants were sent to settle the belt of communities established in the emerging periphery, perhaps playing a key role in the population dispersal idea. The idea's progenitors were aware of the steep human price entailed in conquering the wastes. But they convinced themselves that the day would soon come when the second and third generations, those born in the periphery, would stride proudly into the heart of the Israeli society and make it theirs.
Other considerations also played a part. Levi Eshkol, one of the bulldozers of the new settlements, believed that the hard life there would steel the new immigrants and draw them closer to the Israeli spirit. Nor was he averse to considering the help that would be provided to kibbutzim and moshavim by a workforce eager for a livelihood.
The hope that beat in the planners' hearts was that the prodigious human effort would prove productive. They believed that the first immigrants would, with blood, sweat and tears, carve out the path for their children, who would grow up as fully-fledged new Israelis. True, the pioneering feeling that attached to the members of the moshavim and kibbutzim was denied to the "developments towns," as they were called, but the state fomented a revolution in their residents' lives. It thrust them into a new life cycle. They learned how to till the land, milk cows and do farm work. Those who did not become farmers were sent in their masses to do exhausting shift work in textile factories and other labor-intensive plants.
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No glorious future awaited them next to the rattling sewing machines. But the workers cultivated a dream that their children would not have to follow in their footsteps. Surely they would acquire education, work in modern jobs and spread their wings. That was the dream of the immigrants in Ofakim, Dimona, Kiryat Gat, Kiryat Malachi and the other frontier towns, most of whose residents had to earn their daily bread in drudgery as an appendage to the machine.
The first Israelis did not share in the dream of the periphery. There was no way they were going to be persuaded to take part in the population dispersal project. That mission was assigned to the new immigrants. Immediately after the state's establishment, 70 percent of the Jewish population was concentrated in the three big cities; nearly half the country's population lived in Tel Aviv alone. Already then this separation created a polar disparity between the center of the country and the margins. Already then the leadership was concerned that the anomaly would heighten class differences between veterans and newcomers, between center and hinterland.
In retrospect, it is clear that the periphery did not meet its cultivators' expectations. In most areas of life its residents lagged behind the center and felt as though they were living in a different, more backward country. Even though the rail lines and the new distances have shortened the distances in the country, most of Israel's economic growth originates in the center. The towns and cities of the periphery enjoy few of its fruits.
Nearly six decades after the beginning of the periphery project, the periphery is more dependent than ever on the center. The labor-intensive plants shut down one after another, to be relocated overseas in the owners' pursuit of cheap working hands. Next to no new plants were built in their place, let alone high-tech. With the exception of the Intel plant in Kiryat Gat, which came into being thanks to an unprecedented $600 million state grant, the southern periphery has been left out of the high-tech revolution that has washed over Israel. The post-high school and post-army young people from these towns look for their future elsewhere. Their flight attests to the most resounding failure of the Israeli periphery. Most of them flock to the center of the country in their quest to realize the Israeli dream.
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