Political Change in Israel: The Case of a New Town

Abstract

This study examines the social and political changes which took place during the development of a new town in Israel's Negev desert.' It explores the expanding sets of sociopolitical relationships in this town as well as the interdependence between these local relationships and the external environment of national Israeli culture, law, and, particularly, political institutions. The latter significantly determine the direction in which the local sociopolitical relationships develop. There are two main themes in this study. First, there are extreme differences between the strong centralized national political parties and the much weaker local political groups with regard to access to and control over resources. Thus the latter, in their quest for resources and support, are almost inevitably forced into some sort of affiliation with or subservience to the national parties. It follows that one can trace the transformation of these political relationships from informal local factions to formal local branches of the national political parties. The disproportionate monopolization of resources by the central government is not unique to Israel, and is particularly characteristic of de-