Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 49, No. 1, 29–46, January 2013 The Reluctant Soldiers of Israel’s Settlement Project: The Ship to Village Plan in the mid-1950s Downloaded by [Avi Picard] at 12:33 14 January 2013 AVI PICARD* The immigrants didn’t understand why they were being sent to settle desolate places . . . why they were being treated like soldiers in a revolution that they hadn’t waged and had no part in, and especially why they were required to pay its price. (Israeli novelist, Eli Amir)1 In the first three-and-a-half years following Israel’s declaration of independence in 1948, the Israeli Jewish population – 650,000 in May 1948 – had been swelled by 700,000 newcomers.2 The years when these immigrants were absorbed is often perceived as the formative period when relations among the different ethnic groups in the young state were shaped. Most significantly, the treatment of immigrants from Islamic countries was markedly different from that of the immigrants and long-time residents who originated in Eastern and Central Europe. The social and political alienation felt by the immigrants from Islamic countries and their descendants,3 who would populate the lower classes of Israeli society for the next few decades, has long reverberated in the Israeli public discourse. Usually, when Israelis talk about the residue of the mass immigrant absorption, the transit camps, ma’abarot in Hebrew, symbolize the discriminatory or humiliating aspect of the absorption. The ma’abarot – settlements or neighbourhoods of cheap, temporary housing (tents or shacks) with almost no infrastructure – were first established in 1950. The poor conditions, crowding, and atmosphere left a harsh impression on Israeli society as a whole and especially on the residents of the ma’abarot and had a powerful impact on how immigrant absorption was perceived by the immigrants of the 1950s and their children.4 But because most of the ma’abarot were in central Israel, residents were able to move into housing projects in that part of the country. The immigration policy adopted in 1954–56, at the time of the aliya5 from North Africa, gave rise to a more profound socioethnic disparity. *The Department of Land of Israel Studies, Bar Ilan University, Ramat Gan, 52900, Israel. E-mail: avi.picard@biu.ac.il ISSN 0026-3206 Print/1743-7881 Online/13/010029-18 ª 2013 Taylor & Francis http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00263206.2012.743890 Downloaded by [Avi Picard] at 12:33 14 January 2013 30 A. Picard Possession of land in Israel, or ‘redemption of the soil’, to use the Zionist terminology, was one of the goals of the Zionist movement from its inception. It was a means to the eventual attainment of Jewish sovereignty in Palestine, the ancient Jewish homeland. Before Israeli independence, this task was carried out by purchasing land and establishing rural settlements. The project was limited mainly by the lack of available land for purchase for political and security reasons. There was no shortage of human resources for this task. The Jewish community in Palestine had enough people for the project of establishing settlements. The ‘pioneers’ – ideologically imbued alumni of youth movements – competed for the privilege of settling the frontier, a very prestigious mission.6 After the declaration of Israeli independence and the end of the 1948 war (War of Independence from the Israeli point of view), land for settlement was almost unlimited. The small amount of land that had been Jewish-owned before statehood increased tenfold. But despite sovereignty, settling all parts of the country was no less important than before. From the security standpoint, the presence of settlements was supposed to make it harder for enemy armies to advance in wartime and to prevent infiltration at other times. The economic consideration stemmed from the assumption that additional rural settlements would remedy the shortage of produce that had come about with independence.7 In addition to all these factors, rural settlement was spurred on by ideology. Rural settlement was perceived as the acme of the Zionist revolution. It embodied the values of productivism, collectivism, socialism (in cooperative settlements), and security (in border regions). The slogans heard at the time in this context attest to a profound faith among some of the country’s leaders in the ability of farming to transform individuals and society. Levi Eshkol, for instance, said that ‘the desolation of the land bears within it a solution to human desolation’.8 From May 1948 to the end of 1950, about 300 new settlements were founded. To understand the scope of this project it is important to note that prior to statehood, it took 66 years to build the same number of settlements.9 Independence altered the relationship between settlement needs and the availability of personnel. The national task of population dispersion required a large number of individuals and groups willing to live in remote areas. Whereas in the pre-state period there had been no shortage of candidates for rural settlement and groups had waited a long time for the opportunity to fulfil this mission, the increase in needs and opportunities after independence posed a difficult challenge. For instance, at the end of the War of Independence, the government planned to establish 120 settlements, but there were only fifty trained core groups ready to start them.10 The shortage of pioneers was not just due to the increase in the scope of settlement but also due to a change in orientation among the long-time residents and a decline in ‘pioneering spirit.’11 Youth movement alumni did not respond to the call to establish settlements. Soldiers, demobilized after the War of Independence did not sign up en masse either, although David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister and minister of defence, considered them to be a pool of personnel for rural settlement. According to a survey by the settlement officer in the IDF Manpower Department, only 8 per cent of soldiers about to be discharged were planning to join rural settlements. Even those who came from rural settlements wanted to settle in the cities after their army service.12 The willingness to sign up for national missions, which had The Reluctant Soldiers of Israel’s Settlement Project 31 Downloaded by [Avi Picard] at 12:33 14 January 2013 been a central feature in the pre-state period and had provided the personnel for settlement of rural and border areas, had to be made up by other means – especially in view of the increased needs. The establishment of new villages, moshavim, and new towns is often viewed as a plan intended to resolve the crisis caused by the absorption of mass immigration. But newcomers could easily have settled in the cities and in central Israel instead.13 The mass immigration in 1948–51, and especially its rapid pace, posed tremendous difficulty for their absorption, and the economic and health care systems.14 But from the perspective of population dispersion, immigrant absorption in the early years of the state was not just a problem but to a certain extent a solution, or at least an opportunity to carry out a plan that met political, security, and economic needs. Aryeh Sharon, then the head of the planning department in the prime minister’s office and the chief planner of population dispersion, explained: In Israel, however, with its mass immigration, the process entailed in the ‘distribution of population’ does not involve a transfer of the existing population resulting in economic and social loss, as it would in other countries. The directing of the incessant and ever-growing stream of immigration to undeveloped agricultural areas and to new urban centers is a relatively simple task.15 As willingness to embark on national tasks declined, mass immigration took its place. Although the immigrants were no more willing than old-timer Israelis to take on pioneering missions, tens of thousands of them were destitute and their dependence on public resources made it possible to move them to the remote areas.16 Due to the rapid pace of immigration in 1948–51, it was impossible to create a direct link between the immediate absorption of the immigrants and the tasks of rural settlement and population dispersion. The immigrants were sent to any available place, such as abandoned Arab houses in mixed towns and Arab towns. When these places filled up in late 1948, the immigrants were placed in transit camps (the main one being Sha’ar Ha’aliya near Haifa port). These camps, too, quickly filled up. In order to cope with the problem, it was decided to find temporary solutions that would be better than the transit camps but would still not be permanent homes. Thus the ma’abarot were established beginning in May 1950.17 The placement of the ma’abarot was generally decided on with little consideration for the population dispersion plan and without consultation with planning experts; they had to be near cities so that jobs and services would be available.18 Thus, many ma’abarot were actually established in central Israel and the ma’abarot did not substantially change the distribution of the population between centre and periphery.19 Of the 129 ma’abarot, 98 were set up next to or even within pre-existing towns. Only 31 ma’abarot (24 per cent) were established outside the bounds of existing towns.20 Most of the remote ma’abarot were established later, when it became clear that the ma’abarot, albeit temporary, were liable to last for a while and that their location would influence the future map of Israel. At this point, beginning in 1951, the ma’abarot were already meant not only to help the immigrants achieve independence and employment but also to contribute to population dispersion.21 Downloaded by [Avi Picard] at 12:33 14 January 2013 32 A. Picard The immigrants in the camps generally had no interest in going to remote ma’abarot; some of them sought to remain in the camps until housing and work were available for them in a city.22 Those sent to far-off ma’abarot or villages tended to leave them for the cities.23 The relocation of residents of ma’abarot in central Israel to permanent housing did not eliminate the ma’abarot because the empty shacks were filled by families ‘fleeing’ the villages.24 As mentioned above, during Israel’s first three years, hundreds of new rural settlements were founded. However, the settlement momentum, which peaked in 1949 and early 1950 (during which time 210 settlements were established25), was brought to a halt when most of the immigrants left the transit camps and moved to ma’abarot.26 The conditions in the ma’abarot were not as bad as in the transit camps, and the immigrants felt less pressure to move. At the same time, the hardships of the new moshavim – difficulty in earning a living, distance, and security problems – became clear. In 1950, 12,000 families were supposed to move to immigrant moshavim. In practice, only 4,086 families arrived in rural settlements.27 The Settlement Department, which had managed to establish new moshavim, was unable to find people to fill them. From March to August 1952, out of 242,000 immigrants in temporary housing, only 546 left the ma’abarot for rural settlements, while 1,500 left for housing projects in central Israel.28 Moreover, people were leaving the existing settlements. Between 1948 and 1954, 46 per cent of the families that had settled on the moshavim left them.29 A Settlement Department report on the immigrant moshavim painted a bleak picture.30 Despite the success in creating political facts by means of the immigrant settlements, the report noted the difficulties and expressed concern that the moshavim would empty out. The task of ‘productivization’ had succeeded in part: ‘Primitive tradesmen and merchants who had been repulsed by manual labor and had done all they could to avoid it became accustomed to working and joined the ranks of physical labor.’ But agricultural training and ‘social and cultural absorption’ entailed serious problems that affected the connection between the immigrants and their new location. The settlers live there under duress because they have nowhere else to live . . . They came to the moshavim because of promises but as soon as they encounter the first difficulty they want to flee to the city. It is only due to housing problems that there is not a mass dash for the city. The author of the report noted that unless the settlers became farmers they would leave, and in fact many were already leaving the border settlements for ma’abarot. In his opinion, these places could become Potemkin villages.31 Several solutions were suggested for the crisis on the immigrant moshavim. The most drastic included banning residents from leaving the moshavim without police permission, and making it hard for them to obtain ration cards, employment, and housing. At a meeting of the Settlement Department, Eshkol said: Tell the police to stop any freight car bringing migrants and tell the transport companies not to drive them to urban centres without our approval. Tell all the labour bureaus not to give work to settlers who have moved from one place to another without permission.32 Downloaded by [Avi Picard] at 12:33 14 January 2013 The Reluctant Soldiers of Israel’s Settlement Project 33 Another solution was the ‘City to Village’ campaign. Conceived of by the Histadrut executive committee, it was designed to appeal to urban labourers, natives and immigrants alike, and to persuade them to move to the periphery. In addition to the ideological motivation, the creators of the plan believed that the high rate of unemployment in the cities (because of the immigrants who had joined the labour market and the underdevelopment of industry) would motivate people to move to moshavim, where they could work in agriculture or earn a living from development work such as forestry or preparing the land. Despite a great deal of interest in the plan, its results were disappointing.33 According to a memorandum from the Jewish Agency Immigration Department in January 1954, 1,500 dwelling units on the new moshavim were empty for want of people. Young Israelis ‘are not sufficient to settle border spots and serve as a safety belt between us and the neighboring Arab countries’.34 At one point Patish, one of the moshavim in the south was left with only 16 people.35 The failure of the plans to move city-dwellers to rural areas and the scarcity of settlers coming from the pioneering movements diverted attention to the main resource that could provide settlers: North African Jewry. Until 1954, North African Jewry was a junior partner in the mass immigration. They constituted only 6.8 per cent of the immigrants.36 But as the anti-colonial fighting in North Africa escalated, migration of Jews from Morocco and Tunisia to Israel increased.37 Many saw this future immigration as an opportunity to remedy the errors of the absorption of mass immigration in 1948–51, especially the failure of population dispersion. Until the summer of 1954, the immigrants who arrived in Israel were generally sent to ma’abarot. There they internalized the attitudes and behavioural norms of their neighbours and, like them, few moved to rural settlements. In order to overcome this obstacle, Shlomo Zalman Shragai, head of the Jewish Agency Immigration Department, proposed coordinating among the various Jewish Agency departments dealing with immigrants (Immigration, Absorption, and Settlement) so the immigrants could be sent straight to the moshavim.38 Shragai called for making immigration contingent on the preparation of places for the newcomers in rural settlements. With proper planning, the newcomers could be sent directly to rural and peripheral areas. This plan, which later became known as ‘From Ship to Village’, soon became the official absorption policy. According to this new policy, prospective immigrants were selected and assigned to immigrant moshavim or development towns, small urban centres in remote areas. Therefore, immigration had to be contingent on the existence of a place ready for them in Israel. An efficient mechanism was formed for moving the immigrants, on the day they arrived in Israel, straight to a waiting house in a moshav or development town without any stops on the way. The fear was that any intermediate stops would result in refusal to go to the periphery. The geographical boundaries of the ‘Village’ referred to in the name of the policy were defined by Yehuda Braginsky, head of the Absorption Department, as follows: ‘For them we instituted what we called the train or plane from Casablanca to a moshav or development area . . . We shut the Nahariya-Gedera strip [the strip of the centre area].’39 In 1954–56, 85,000 people moved to Israel from Morocco and Tunisia, constituting 80 per cent of the immigrants in those years.40 Between 70 and 90 per cent of them were sent to fulfil the task of population dispersion on moshavim or in Downloaded by [Avi Picard] at 12:33 14 January 2013 34 A. Picard development towns. Only 2.3 per cent of the immigrants were sent to ma’abarot in central Israel. Another 10.7 per cent were taken in by relatives or absorbed privately, not through the Jewish Agency and the government.41 The ‘Ship to the Village’ policy succeeded to overcome the difficulties of the new settlements. Sending the immigrants directly to moshavim and to development towns brought a considerable increase in the number of settlers. In the first months of the new wave of immigration, August to December 1954, the immigrants filled up the 2,000 abandoned houses at the existing immigrant moshavim. As of 1955 new moshavim were founded and the North African immigrants were directed to those new settlements. When the quota of people in rural settlements was filled, the immigrants were directed to development towns. The continuing flow of immigrants, due to the on-going nationalism in Morocco, and the shortness of financial resources of the Jewish Agency, created some obstacles to the building of permanent houses. Therefore, immigrants that arrived by the end of 1955 and during 1956 were accommodated in temporary houses. The ma’abarot, which were in the process of liquidation, came back to the Israeli landscape. Still, the absorption department was very strict: new ma’abarot were not built in the central region and the immigrants continued to be sent to the periphery. In the early 1950s, one of the main problems of the immigrant moshavim and the remote ma’abarot had been the high rate of departure. The North African immigrants of the mid-1950s, almost all of whom were sent to the periphery, largely remained there. It is hard to obtain accurate data about how many of them eventually left the moshavim, but in December 1955 it was reported that fewer than 15 per cent of the settlers in the ‘From Village to Ship’ programme had left their localities – a lower rate than in the days of ‘pioneering immigration’.42 Yehuda Braginsky explained that this was not due to a pioneering spirit but because these people had nowhere else to go.43 The immigration from North Africa in 1954–56 made it possible to consolidate and expand 50 existing moshavim and to establish 45 new ones. Seven new development towns were founded with the help of ‘From Ship to Village’ immigrants and 11 development towns were expanded and consolidated.44 Giora Josephthal, Yehuda Braginky’s partner as head of the Absorption Department, pointed out that ‘of every twelve people in the Negev [the southern part of Israel] today, eleven are recent immigrants’.45 Yehuda Braginsky summed up: So far we haven’t built anything on the coastal strip; we just dismantled ma’abarot. We sealed the strip hermetically . . . You have seen the results. We moved close to 75,000 or 80,000 people to the development area and rural settlement in the space of two years, since August 1954. We thereby carried out a historic enterprise unparalleled in Israel, because the immigration of 650,000 people in the first three years of the state didn’t do as much for dispersion in Israel as the last two years. We’ve now added 80,000 people in remote areas. We’ve filled the moshavim, built the border towns, sent extensions to all sorts of places.46 To illustrate the impact of the ‘Ship to Village’ policy on the placement of immigrants in the periphery, let us compare the distribution of the people who left Downloaded by [Avi Picard] at 12:33 14 January 2013 The Reluctant Soldiers of Israel’s Settlement Project 35 ma’abarot in the same period. The immigrants of 1948–51 who were still in ma’abarot in the mid-1950s refused to move to the periphery. Of the 7,000 families who left the old ma’abarot between April 1954 and May 1955, 78 per cent settled in one of the three major cities or in the central region.47 In the autumn of 1956, when the independent government of Morocco blocked Jewish emigration, a new source of immigration developed, this time from several countries in Eastern Europe. This immigration stemmed from Communist Party secretary Władysław Gomułka’s liberalization of Polish emigration policy and from the failure of the anti-Soviet uprising in Hungary in 1956. In Romania, too, permission to emigrate was given in 1957. Thus there was an unexpected resumption of immigration from Eastern Europe after a long period in which most of the immigrants were from Islamic countries. This change led to new thinking about the absorption policy. At first it was because most of the newcomers were elderly and had to be housed in central Israel.48 But the policy continued even when many of them were families and people of working age. In the immigrant-absorption plan for 1956/57, it was decided not to insist on dispersing the newcomers. On the assumption that few Polish immigrants would go to development towns, it was decided that 50 per cent of public construction planned mainly for development areas would be diverted to central Israel.49 There were several reasons for this, but the main one was fear of emigration. There was concern that the poor living conditions in the development towns and an environment in which all their neighbours were from Islamic countries would prompt the Eastern Europeans to return to their countries of origin, leaving Israel, which had demanded that the Communist regimes permit free emigration for the Jews, with egg on its face. Braginsky explained the reason for the retreat from the policy of population dispersion: ‘We can’t send Poles to canvas huts and shacks. We’re concerned that these immigrants will start writing letters to their country of origin complaining about the conditions.’50 Ben-Gurion supported the change in absorption policy, saying: Now these are not the sort of immigrants who have no other country to move to. Nor are they immigrants who are being forced to emigrate. If the Polish Jews come and give up in despair, more Polish Jews won’t come. For us this is not just Polish Jewry, but a chance for Russian Jewry.51 This fear of emigration was not relevant to immigrants from Islamic countries at the time, as labour minister Mordechai Namir (who was also in charge of housing) explained: ‘The prospect of emigration . . . could be fatal if it affects the Jews of Poland and Hungary. The road to Arab countries is closed, but in these countries [Poland and Hungary] they may encourage emigration, as was done with Romania.’52 The fear of emigration by Eastern European Jews was not based solely on the potential harm to Israel’s image in the eyes of the Communist regimes. Many of the immigration policymakers in Israel were not enamoured of the Jews from Islamic countries and were concerned that these Jews, who accounted for 10 per cent of the Jewish people worldwide, would constitute a majority of the Israeli Jewish Downloaded by [Avi Picard] at 12:33 14 January 2013 36 A. Picard population. The mass immigration from the Middle East and North Africa created demographic anxiety among immigration officials.53 The resumption of immigration from Poland and Hungary in 1956, which made European Jews a majority of the immigrants in 1957 (for the first time in seven years), created high hopes for those who considered European Jews superior. Preferential absorption conditions were needed for this demographic change to last. Zalman Shazar, then a member of the Jewish Agency Executive and later the third president of Israel, said that ‘this immigration is essential for us . . . in order to bring in elements other than those that we have had until now. This is desirable in terms of the country’s demography as well’.54 Nahum Goldmann, chairman of the Jewish Agency Executive, noted the blessing that the country would obtain from an influx of Eastern European Jews: ‘If indeed half a million Jews from Eastern Europe enter, the entire face of the country will change. We will again be able to be what we dreamed of being.’55 Braginsky, in a critical analysis of the change in absorption policy (a change in which he had played a part), explained why the Jewish Agency had abandoned its population dispersion policy. [In] the two years of immigration from North Africa . . . they sent 85 per cent all over the country [i.e., not to the coastal strip] . . . This was an example of planned settlement . . . This is how we have to build up the country . . . This was the way and it should not be regretted. What happened now [with the immigration from Eastern Europe] involved several issues. First, a certain sentiment for this immigration. All those sitting around this table are Russians or Poles, all ‘white’. There was profound sentiment for the Polish immigration, the last ones left who had been unable to immigrate until now. Afterwards we heard that some of them are academics, professionals, people to whom the world would be open. They didn’t want to send them to places where edot ha-mizrah live. There were various excuses. We said to ourselves: These Jews are not like the previous ones. In addition to identifying with the Eastern Europeans, the immigrants from Poland had friends and family who could intercede on their behalf with the absorption personnel.56 Hardly any of the North African immigrants had such connections. The immigrants’ assertiveness was one of the reasons for the change in the absorption policy. Braginsky put it as follows: In those years when we took in . . . Jews from North Africa, they were like putty in our hands. We took them from the ship and sent them straight to rural settlements. We didn’t ask them what they wanted, and it worked out well. The experience with the 100,000 Jews who went to rural settlements was a success . . . We filled vacancies in rural settlements. The immigration now is new human material that we can’t do with as we wish. It won’t be simple and easy.57 Fear of social and ethnic tension was another reason not to send Eastern European immigrants to the periphery.58 The Eastern European Jews benefited from positive discrimination not only in terms of their place of residence but also in the type of housing provided. Even those The Reluctant Soldiers of Israel’s Settlement Project 37 Downloaded by [Avi Picard] at 12:33 14 January 2013 sent to the periphery were generally given better-quality housing than the North Africans. Sometimes the discrimination was even more blatant. Jews who had arrived from North Africa toward the end of the wave of immigration from there were placed in temporary housing in development towns. They were given government jobs, mostly building housing for immigrants. The original idea was that they would build the permanent homes in which they themselves would later live. When immigration from Eastern Europe increased and it was decided that the Europeans could not be housed in shacks, the housing projects that had been completed were filled by Eastern European immigrants, while the North African immigrants remained in the shacks.59 The differential absorption of Eastern European immigrants in terms of both housing conditions and the places to which they were sent led to ethnic tension and protests. For instance, Ha’aretz reported: Dozens of refugee immigrants from Hungary and immigrants from other countries who arrived recently in Nahariya [in the north of the country] were immediately placed in immigrant housing projects without being housed first in ma’abarot. This caused agitation and a lot of grumbling among the residents of the ma’abarot, most of whom are from North Africa and Muslim countries.60 The head of the Absorption Department did not deny this. It is as if we deprived the edot ha-mizrah by taking their homes and giving them to the Eastern European immigrants . . . I want the Executive to know: we took 400 apartments that were intended for the earlier immigrants from North Africa, who were about to move into the housing project, and gave them on credit to new immigrants because there was an inundation of new immigration . . . We had to do it. We are already starting to pay for this discrimination . . . We didn’t publicize it, but because there is a wave of complaints against the Executive and the Absorption Department, because I, too, am under pressure in my party from people from the edot ha-mizrah . . . I want us to know that we sinned in this because we had no choice. I don’t have to explain to the Executive why we did it. It was done for political and humanitarian reasons vis-à-vis the Poles . . . We did what we did deliberately. I hope we pay off these debts in the very near future.61 Ben-Gurion justified the policy: ‘It’s true, there’s discrimination. It’s unavoidable discrimination.’62 Despite the preferential housing conditions, the Polish immigrants who were sent to development towns had adjustment difficulties and the Absorption Department put a great deal of effort and considerable resources into moving them from place to place.63 The contribution of the North African Jews to population dispersion was substantial. In 1961 less than a fifth of the country’s population lived in the northern and southern districts. The percentage of North Africans there was disproportionately large (48 per cent). In contrast, their share in the Tel Aviv district (3 per cent) was much smaller than their share of the population (18.5 per cent).64 38 A. Picard Downloaded by [Avi Picard] at 12:33 14 January 2013 The percentage of North African immigrants in the periphery continued to increase in the 1960s and 1970s, when the last wave of immigration from Morocco, Operation Yakhin (1961–64), was also absorbed in development towns. According to data from 1986, 38.1 per cent of North African immigrants lived in peripheral development towns, compared with 13.8 per cent of immigrants from Asia and 8 per cent of those from Europe.65 An Absorption Department report gave a brief description of the process undergone by the North African immigrants from the day they signed up to move to Israel until they reached their permanent homes on a moshav or in a development town: The selection team operates abroad, and a sub-team then determines the placement of each immigrant and makes technical arrangements while the ship is under way. When they arrive in Israel, the people go on shore in groups based on the places to which they are being sent. At the port they receive a light meal and are put in a vehicle that is waiting for them with escorts to take them to their permanent place of settlement. When they arrive on the moshav, representatives of the Settlement and Absorption departments are waiting for them and direct them to ready houses . . . When the family enters the house it finds a bed, a mattress, and two blankets per person. Elementary furniture and kitchen utensils have also been prepared by the unit . . . food packages for eight days for each person . . . an advance on future salary of 30 pounds per family.66 This brief description includes several stages, each of which involved significant bureaucracy. The process of sending the North African immigrants to the periphery began, as stated, in their countries of origin. Whereas in the past the immigration emissaries had been wary of describing the difficulties in Israel, glossed over the reality, and distributed promises, in 1954–56 the reverse was the case. Demand to immigrate was very high, and the supply, limited by planned absorption, was small. This increased the ‘price’ of immigration, or the magnitude of the commitment made by the immigrants in exchange for moving to Israel. The absorption workers understood that the pressure and uncertainty made it possible to extract from potential immigrants commitments that they would be unlikely to agree to once they were in Israel. Josephthal therefore explained that it was necessary to make sure that they agreed to go to the remote settlements while still in their country of origin. The immigrants accepted this demand since they wanted to move to Israel and the settlement commitment was presented as a condition for that.67 The idea that the immigrants were being sent to the periphery was emphasized again and again. Immigration emissaries were asked to publicize the rule that all immigrants had to go to the periphery and that no assistance would be given to those who settled in cities.68 Despite the signatures and the explanations, Giora Josephthal assumed that this commitment could not be treated as an act of free will and should not be viewed as awareness of the significance of moving to the periphery: ‘They sign that they’ll go wherever they are sent, but there is something comical about this . . . They have no idea what they are declaring . . . This is Prussian bureaucracy vis-à-vis primitive Downloaded by [Avi Picard] at 12:33 14 January 2013 The Reluctant Soldiers of Israel’s Settlement Project 39 people.’69 The misunderstanding may have been partly due to communication problems. A commitment document from the immigration office in Tunisia that the immigrants were supposed to sign was in Hebrew and French, but many of the immigrants from the rural sector spoke only Arabic.70 After the selection teams approved a family for immigration, the family was invited to an immigration camp in Morocco or Tunisia. They waited there for anything from a few days to a few months and were then sent to an immigration camp in Marseilles, and from there, a few days later, to Israel. On the ship to Israel there was another selection team whose function was generally to preserve the initial assignment. In some cases the shipboard selection team changed decisions. Sometimes the immigrants included Jews who had moved to Israel previously, gone back to Morocco, and decided to return to Israel. These returnees were regarded as experts on Israel, and the immigrants on the ship consulted with them after being assigned to a destination. A journalist on one ship described it as follows: Every returning immigrant pretends to be a big expert on problems in Israel. A naı̈ve immigrant who is about to go to Beersheva [in southern Israel] will ask the ‘expert’: ‘Are you familiar with the place? What’s it like there?’ Then he hears a distressing ‘explanation’, runs to the selection team, and wants someplace else. In light of this, the members of the selection team warned the returnees ‘not to teach the immigrants Israeli geography’.71 When they reached the port, it became necessary for the absorption officials to have some control over where the immigrants were being sent and to prevent them from making the decision themselves. The stage of entering the country was kept as brief as possible to avoid objections to going to the periphery. The new arrivals were prevented from having any contact with family members in Israel, so that the latter would not influence them to insist on living in the central region.72 Nevertheless, there were cases in which at this stage immigrants tried to refuse to go to the periphery. One child who identified very strongly with the land and the state described arriving in the new country and being sent to a moshav as follows: ‘Recalcitrant immigrants refused to board the waiting vehicles. They mentioned various towns where their relatives were . . . An old man explained that we are in Israel, and its soil is holy everywhere.’73 The speed with which the process was carried out was part of the secret of its success. In presenting this success to the Jewish Agency Executive, Josephthal described the process: He boards a ship, where a sorting is done and he is given a slip of paper. When he disembarks, a bus is waiting for him and he is given all sorts of pieces of paper. He can’t escape the bureaucracy of slips of paper, instructions, and sorting meetings. And one day he finds a house with furniture and cooking utensils. And as a result of this organization, as Braginsky once said to me, after a few months the person asks: How did I end up in this desert? They have no idea what was done with them.74 On another occasion he stressed that the success was due to ignoring the immigrants’ demands.75 40 A. Picard Downloaded by [Avi Picard] at 12:33 14 January 2013 The Achilles heel of the plan was the fear that due to the hardship of absorption and the pressure from prospective immigrants to be allowed to come, the immigrants would be sent to transit stations in the central region, such as the Sha’ar Ha’aliya camp (gate of immigration) or ma’abarot. As stated, immigrants who were unwilling to move to the periphery were still there at the time. The heads of the system were concerned that the atmosphere of ‘degeneration’ in the camps would influence the recent immigrants to refuse to go to moshavim and development towns despite their commitments. The opposition to transit camps in the centre remained in effect even when it became clear that the Moroccan government intended to ban emigration to Israel, and that a large number of Jews would have to be brought over before the gates closed. In June 1956, two weeks before the last legal convoy left Morocco, Yehuda Braginsky explained why he was opposed to flying the North African immigrants over: As long as the immigrant is on a ship, I hold him in my hand; when he is at Sha’ar Ha’aliya he holds me in his hand. Then he comes and complains: My relative lives in Sha’ar Ha’aliya. How come I have to go to the Negev? . . . I don’t think it’s time to stop the planned immigration.76 It is important to note that even though the immigrants were given no choice as to where they were sent, this was not active compulsion. Except in one case of active resistance to going to a moshav (see below) the immigrants’ behaviour was passive. The next destination, after the port, was another weak point in the process: the initial arrival on the moshav or in the town. In many cases immigrants refused, upon arrival at their destination, to get out of the vehicle that had brought them there.77 The absorption institutions contended with this issue in various ways. In some cases the vehicles arrived at the settlement after dark. In other cases they arrived on Friday. Because the immigrants were generally traditional Jews and did not want to desecrate the Sabbath, they agreed to get off the trucks. In some cases, the vehicles (generally very uncomfortable trucks) remained in place until the immigrants agreed to get off. Thirst, hunger, and the need to stretch eventually led them to do so.78 In other cases, immigrants were removed forcibly, as with the first settlers of moshav Otzem in the Lakhish region. Because they refused to get off, the bed of the truck was lifted and the immigrants slid off.79 The only case of active resistance occurred in June 1955. A group of immigrants arrived from the town of Dimnat, in the foothills of the Atlas Mountains in Morocco, demanded that they be placed in moshavim in the central region. Upon arrival in Israel, the group members protested to the Absorption Department representatives who greeted them that the information they had been given in Morocco was inaccurate and that they were not willing to move to the Lakhish region (in the south of Israel, near the Jordanian border) because ‘there are snakes and there’s no water’.80 The immigrants remained in the port for more than 24 hours. The efforts at persuasion were unsuccessful. And the police were called in. Pressure was exerted on the immigrants to get into the vehicles that would take them to Lakhish. Eventually the immigrants reached their destination. The coercion had succeeded. The Jewish Agency Executive was concerned that the immigrants’ refusal to leave might become a permanent pattern. They were especially worried that the resistance to Downloaded by [Avi Picard] at 12:33 14 January 2013 The Reluctant Soldiers of Israel’s Settlement Project 41 going to peripheral localities would become known in North Africa and they would have to contend with it again and again. This fear was not exaggerated. Immigrants encountered by an Israeli journalist in Marseilles, the transit station for North African immigrants, made it clear that they wanted to go to Sha’ar Ha’aliya and not straight from the ship to a village.81 Many of the members of the Jewish Agency Executive thought it would be a mistake to maintain the policy of active compulsion systematically, since this would portray rural settlement as a disaster. One member, Meir Grossman, said that the Jewish Agency should not force immigrants to go to rural settlements. However, immigrants who would not go where the state and the Jewish Agency sent them would not receive housing, employment, and financial support from the state. ‘They’ll starve to death or go to rural settlements.’82 In the end the affair died down. The immigrants who came after the Dimnat affair did not resist being taken away, and the Absorption Department did not have to resort to police force again. The immigrants’ viewpoint is hardly reflected at all in documents from those times. We can find echoes of their feelings in the remarks of absorption workers, but these feelings were really only expressed many years later, mainly in belles-lettres and oral narratives.83 From these stories we get a sense of helplessness and the feeling that the absorption authorities had cheated them by hiding the fact that they were being sent to the periphery, to a place that was not only remote but also to a large extent desolate. Often these accounts were treated as exaggerations. They were seen as anachronistic – attributing the difficulties of the present to the stories of the past – and as reflections of a cry-baby attitude. But the contemporary statements by the heads of the Absorption Department presented here support the assumption that an attempt was made to create helplessness, and in many cases people in the system deceived the immigrants regarding their final destination. The helplessness and lack of control and choice made these immigrants feel very alienated from the system. Unlike the immigrants who were affiliated with pioneering youth movements, the North Africans lacked the prestige that went along with settling the periphery – prestige that to a certain extent compensated for the harsh conditions. About the alienation felt by the immigrants in rural settlements, Ben-Gurion said: Those sent to rural settlements, especially today when they are sent to rural settlements straight from the ship, do not have the same feeling as someone from a rich family, from an affluent family from Tel Aviv or somewhere else who goes to a rural settlement. That guy has a different feeling; he has a Zionist education. But the Jew who comes from Morocco and is sent to some remote village feels that he was sent.84 After arriving on the moshavim or in the towns, many of the immigrants began to realize the hard situation in which they found themselves and the marginal status of their new place of residence in Israel. Josephthal noted that many of them had no desire to stay where they had been sent. ‘Tomorrow we’ll run away’, they told him.85 But in practice, leaving was not a realistic option. Because the immigrants were dependent on the state and the Jewish Agency for housing and due to the rigidity applied to the distribution of public housing in central Israel, very few of them abandoned the moshavim and development towns in the first few years. 42 A. Picard Downloaded by [Avi Picard] at 12:33 14 January 2013 In a survey conducted in the 1970s, most of the Moroccan immigrants reported that they had not had the opportunity to choose the town where they would live when they arrived in the country.86 In the 1990s, more than 40 years after their arrival, most residents of the development towns said they lived there because they had been taken there at the time of their immigration and still regretted it.87 The absorption bureaucracy in the ‘From Ship to Village’ operation managed to place the immigrants in the periphery even though most of them did not choose to go there and did not believe in the ideology of settling there.88 The immigrants’ dependence on the establishment, the rapidity and efficiency with which they were brought to their places of residence, and the lack of alternatives made them extremely passive. ‘From Ship to Village’, the absorption policy implemented at the time of the mass immigration from North Africa in 1954–56, gave the immigrants the task of settling the geographical periphery of Israel. They did not volunteer for this task. A well-oiled mechanism of emissaries and officials arranged the direct transfer of the immigrants from their countries of origin to the places to which they were assigned. This mechanism and their lack of means made it very difficult for them to leave those places. The population dispersion of the 1950s resulted in regional disparities in Israel that lasted for many years. Areas settled mainly by North African immigrants had a low level of economic well-being for many years to come. The improvement in economic well-being that occurred over the years throughout the country did not change the ratio between centre and periphery, and the regional disparities remained.89 To a large extent, the disadvantages experienced by the people placed in the periphery in the 1950s and 1960s influenced the achievements of their descendants even in the first decade of the twenty-first century.90 Consequently, the Jews of North Africa were condemned to be not only the country’s geographic periphery but also its socioeconomic periphery. Was this a deliberate exclusion? Were the North African Jews steered to moshavim and remote development towns solely for the sake of the population dispersion policy, or was an attempt being made to shunt them to the fringes of society, to obstruct their chances of social mobility, and to distance them from decision-making centres? Ostensibly, the fact that a different group of immigrants who arrived around the same time, the Eastern European Jews, were exempt from this task is incontrovertible evidence. But we have to view the matter not only from an anachronistic perspective but in light of the scale of values that characterized Israeli society during that period. The Zionist ethos viewed the geographic periphery, and especially rural settlements, in extremely positive terms, and the residents of border localities had high social status. Living there was the ultimate fulfilment of pioneering Zionism. It was no punishment. The periphery was the settlement frontier and the frontier had high prestige and a positive image. A high-calibre population lived there. The urban central region was perceived negatively, as something exilic and lacking in glory. The border regions were the sociological centre – the determinant of norms and values. The city was the periphery.91 The immigrants who moved to central Israel – even those from Eastern Europe, but even more so those from Iraq – were a disappointment to the host society. In contrast, going to the periphery involved substantial prestige. Many of the policymakers were highly impressed with the The Reluctant Soldiers of Israel’s Settlement Project 43 success of sending most of the Moroccan and Tunisian Jews to the periphery. The Absorption Department summed up this period of time as follows: Downloaded by [Avi Picard] at 12:33 14 January 2013 The immigration of the North African tribe to Israel was a great blessing for the country and its development . . . These were the same Jews who in the years of the mass immigration, just a few years ago, had been slandered, and had elicited revulsion and fear in the Yishuv; even the absorption workers were not free of certain feelings and suspicions regarding them. Thanks to this immigration, the Israeli population increased and spread over empty regions in which there were previously no Jews. The Negev became a largely Jewish region. The Jewish population density within the country’s borders increased and grew.92 The praise of the North African immigrants reflected the establishment’s favourable opinion of settlement in the periphery. This was the case in the early 1960s as well, although sometimes it was a matter of rhetoric that the policymakers may not have really believed. In a promotional film produced by the Jewish Agency in 1962, during the next wave of immigration from North Africa, the narrator described the prestige associated with settling the frontier. In one scene, new arrivals from North Africa are sitting on a bus to the southern town Dimona and complaining about how remote the place is. The narrator explains to the viewers the correct scale of values: ‘It isn’t worth telling them this now. They don’t know that they are basically . . . pioneers, that they will settle the Negev. They don’t believe that ten years from now they’ll be proud of it.’93 But after the establishment of the state, this ethos – which had played an important part in shaping the geography of Jewish settlement in Mandatory Palestine and during the War of Independence – became mostly rhetoric. Despite the success of Zionism and the ability of the settlement frontier to determine the borders and protect the centre of the country, the prestige of the geographical periphery declined, although its importance did not. As fewer and fewer people signed on for national missions and moved to the frontier, low-prestige groups went there – not out of choice or a belief in the importance of living on the frontier but because they were dependent on resources provided by the state and the Jewish Agency and were dominated by an efficient mechanism. The establishment’s attitude toward the periphery as a desirable frontier region was mainly lip service. In terms of the investment of resources, peripheral localities were not given preferential treatment. The country’s periphery, which had been a frontier of ‘pioneers’, became a periphery of weak people.94 Consequently, it once again became a periphery from a sociological standpoint as well – a place far from centres of influence and decision-making. The desire of certain prestigious groups such as Eastern European immigrants not to move to the periphery was received with understanding. The social price that the North African immigrants paid in being sent to the periphery was not the product of deliberate exclusion but the product of inconsistency in the presence of conflicting objectives. The peripheral localities were filled almost exclusively by recent immigrants, especially from North Africa. The Israeli periphery became identified to a significant extent with immigrants from Islamic countries. Geographical segregation developed along ethnic lines. Thus, 44 A. Picard without making any deliberate attempt, the population dispersion policy worked against the policy of the melting pot. Downloaded by [Avi Picard] at 12:33 14 January 2013 Notes 1. E. Amir, ‘Ha-seliha veha-toda’ [Forgiveness and thanks], Alpayim, Vol.16 (1998), p.186. 2. See E. Stock, Chosen Instrument: The Jewish Agency in the First Decade of the State of Israel (Jerusalem: Herzl Press, 1988), p.261. 3. Also known as Mizrahim. Mizrahi (literally ‘eastern’), plural Mizrahim, is the Hebrew term for Jews from the Middle East and North Africa. 4. See, e.g., D. Hacohen, Immigrants in Turmoil (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2003), pp.150–61. 5. Aliya (literally, ‘ascent’) is the Hebrew term for immigration by Jews to Israel. 6. G. Lipshitz, Country on the Move: Migration to and within Israel, 1948–1995 (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publisher, 1998), p.39. It is important to note, however, that this task was limited in scope. Despite the image, during the British Mandate 82 per cent of the Jewish population was urban. See Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics, Population and Housing Census 1961, publication no. 7 (Jerusalem, 1962), Table 34, data regarding the Nov. 1948 population registration. 7. Lipshitz, Country on the Move, p.44. 8. D. Hacohen, Ha-gar’in veha-reihayim: hityashvut ha-olim ba-Negev be-asor ha-rishon la-medina [Grain and the Millstone: The Settlement of Immigrants in the Negev in the First Decade of the State] (Tel Aviv: Am-Oved, 1998), p.71. 9. A. Bein, A’liya ve-hityashvut bemedinat Israel [Immigration and Settlements in the State of Israel] (Tel Aviv: Am-Oved, 1982), pp.262–73. 10. A. Golan, ‘Ha-hityashvut be-asor ha-rishon’ [Settlement in the First Decade], in H. Yablonka and Z. Zameret (eds.), He-asor ha-rishon [The First Decade] (Jerusalem: Yad Ben Zvi, 1997), p.89. 11. D. Horowitz and M. Lissak, Trouble in Utopia: The Overburdened Polity of Israel (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1989), pp.112–13. 12. See settlement officer to Minister of Defense, 6 Aug. 1948, Archives of the IDF and Defense System, 108-6122/49. 13. See Lipshitz, Country on the Move, pp.15–17. 14. On the difficulties of absorbing the mass immigration, see Hacohen, Immigrants in Turmoil, pp.95–161. 15. A. Sharon, Physical Planning in Israel (Tel Aviv: Government Printing Press, 1951), p.4 (English version). 16. Lipshitz, Country on the Move, p.44. 17. M. Kachenski, ‘Ha-ma’abarot’ [The ma’abarot], in M. Naor (ed.), Olim u-ma’abarot, 1948–1952 [Immigrants and Ma’abarot, 1948–1952] (Jerusalem: Yad Ben Zvi, 1986), p.74. 18. Hacohen, Immigrants in Turmoil, pp.155–60. 19. Lipshitz, Country on the Move, pp.46–7. 20. D. Giladi and A. Golan, Yisrael be-asor ha-rishon – ha-ma’arakh ha-ironi u-ferisat ha-ukhlusiya [Israel in the First Decade: The Urban System and Population Distribution], unit 4 (Tel Aviv: Open University, 2001), p.106. 21. Jewish Agency for Israel, 11 shenot kelita [11 Years of Absorption] (Tel Aviv: Jewish Agency Press, 1959), p.56. 22. Hacohen, Immigrants in Turmoil, p.156. 23. A. Kemp, ‘Nedidat amim o ha-be’era ha-gedola: shelita medinatit ve-hitnagdut ba-sefar ha-yisraeli’ [Migration of Nations or the Great Conflagration: Political Control and Resistance on the Israeli Frontier], in H. Hever, Y. Shenhav and P. Motzafi-Haller (eds.), Mizrahim be-yisrael: iyyun bikorti mehudash [Mizrahim in Israel: A Critical Observation into Israel’s Ethnicity] (Tel Aviv: Van-Leer institute, 2002), p.55. 24. G. Josephthal, Jewish Agency Executive, 13 July 1954, Central Zionist Archive (CZA), S100/94. 25. H. Porat, ‘Hebetim geografim-yishuvi’im be-et hakamat moshavei ha-olim ba-negev, 1948–1952’ [Geographical-Settlement Aspects at the Time of the Establishment of the Immigrant Moshavim in the Negev, 1948–1952], in D. Ofer (ed.), Bein olim le-vatikim: yisrael ba-aliya ha-gedola, 1948–1953 [Israel in the Great Wave of Immigration, 1948–1953] (Jerusalem: Yad Ben Zvi,1996), p.228. 26. Report by the Jewish Agency Executive to the Zionist Executive, March 1952–Aug. 1952, pp.47–8; report by the Jewish Agency Executive to the Zionist Executive, April 1954–May 1955, p.61. Downloaded by [Avi Picard] at 12:33 14 January 2013 The Reluctant Soldiers of Israel’s Settlement Project 45 27. Josephthal to Eliav in the Settlement Department, 5 Nov. 1950, CZA, S15/9604. 28. Report by the Jewish Agency Executive to the Zionist Executive, March 1952–Aug. 1952. 29. D. Weintraub, Immigration and Social Change: Agricultural Settlements of New Immigrants in Israel (Jerusalem: Israel Universities Press; New York: Humanities Press, 1971), Table 4; for a detailed discussion, see Kemp, ‘Nedidat amim’. 30. C. Bar-Ilan, ‘On the Situation in Immigrant Settlements’, secret memorandum, 30 July 1951, CZA, S15/9604. 31. Potemkin was a Russian general who conquered the Crimean Peninsula. In order to impress Catherine the Great, who visited in 1787 and wanted to see the fruits of the Russian conquest, Potemkin established a series of pseudo-villages along her route. ‘Potemkin village’ became a term for a village with houses but no people. 32. See Kemp, ‘Nedidat amim’, p.55. 33. Hacohen, Ha-gar’in veha-reihayim, p.141. 34. Immigration Department memo, 25 Jan. 1954, Coordination Institution, Ben-Gurion Archives. 35. Hacohen, Ha-gar’in veha-reihayim, p.192. 36. U. Schmelz, ‘Ha-aliya ha-hamonit me-asia umi-tsefon afrika’ [Mass Immigration from Asia and North Africa], Pe’amim, Vol.39 (1989), p.18. 37. M.M. Laskier, North African Jewry in the Twentieth Century (New York: New York University Press, 1994), p.123. 38. Minutes, Jewish Agency Executive, 12 April 1954, CZA, S100/92. 39. Coordination Institution, 10 Dec. 1956, CZA, S100/513. 40. Jewish Agency, 11 shenot kelita, p.109. 41. State of Israel, Shenaton ha-memshala 5717 [Israel Government Year-Book 5717] (1956–57), p.284. 42. Report on activity of the Jewish Agency Executive, April 1951–December 1955, submitted to the 24th Zionist Congress in Nisan 5716 (March or April 1956), pp.118–19. Later the percentage of North African immigrants leaving the moshavim increased greatly. See, e.g., D. Weintraub and M. Lissak, ‘The Absorption of North African Immigrants in Agricultural Settlement in Israel’, Jewish Journal of Sociology, Vol.3 (1961), p.38, Table 3. 43. Coordination Institution, 10 Dec. 1956, CZA, S100/513. 44. State of Israel, Shenaton ha-memshala 5717, p.284. 45. 24th Zionist Congress (April–May, 1956), shorthand report, Jerusalem, 1956/57, p.144. 46. Braginsky at a meeting of the Jewish Agency Executive, 11 Feb. 1957, CZA, S100/111. 47. Report by the Jewish Agency Executive to the Zionist Executive, April 1954–May 1955, CZA, 9M, p.63. 48. See minutes of the Jewish Agency Executive, 16 July 1956, CZA, S100/108; Jewish Agency, 11 shenot kelita, p.155. 49. Jewish Agency Executive, 11 Feb. 1957, CZA, S100/111. 50. Yehuda Braginsky at a meeting of the Coordination Institution, 10 Dec. 1956, CZA, S100/513. 51. Minutes of a Government meeting, 11 March 1957, 7th Government, Vol.28, p.50. 52. Coordination Institution, 10 Dec. 1956, CZA, S100/513. 53. Y. Tsur, ‘Carnival Fears: Moroccan Immigrants and the Ethnic Problem in the Young State of Israel’, Journal of Israeli History, Vol.18 (1997), pp.93–6. 54. Coordination Institution, 10 Dec. 1956, CZA, S100/513. 55. Jewish Agency Executive, 7 March 1957, evening meeting, p.14, CZA, S100/112. 56. Braginsky at a meeting of the Jewish Agency Executive, 8 July 1957, p.12, CZA, S100/114. 57. Jewish Agency Executive, 7 March 1957, morning meeting, CZA, S100/112. 58. Braginsky at a meeting of the Jewish Agency Executive, 24 Dec. 1956, CZA, S100/111. 59. David Tanne, director of the Labor Ministry Housing Department, minutes of the Jewish Agency Executive, 24 Dec. 1956, CZA, S100/110; Braginsky, minutes of the Jewish Agency Executive, 8 July 1957, p.17, CZA, S100/114. 60. ‘Rogez bein shokhnei ma’abarot be-nahariya biglal shikunam ha-miyadi shel olei eiropa’ [Anger among Residents of Ma’abarot in Nahariya over Immediate Housing for European Immigrants], Ha’aretz, 30 Dec.1956. 61. Jewish Agency Executive, 11 Feb. 1957, CZA, S100/111. 62. Meeting of the Coordination Institution, 11 March 1957, State Archives, Prime Minister’s Office, Government files, 3029/14. Downloaded by [Avi Picard] at 12:33 14 January 2013 46 A. Picard 63. Report by the Jewish Agency Executive to the Zionist Executive, January 1958–March 1959, p.28. See also Jewish Agency, 11 shenot kelita, pp.180–83. 64. Central Bureau of Statistics, Population and Housing Census 1961, publication no. 8 (Jerusalem, 1962), pp.110–13, Table 22. 65. N. Lewin-Epstein, Y. Elmelech and M. Semyonov, ‘Ethnic Inequality in Home Ownership and the Value of Housing: The Case of Immigrants in Israel’, Social Forces, Vol.75/4 (June 1997), p.1448, Table 2. 66. Report by the Jewish Agency Executive to the Zionist Executive, April 1954–May 1955, CZA, M9, p.61. 67. Coordination Institution, 7 Feb. 1955, State Archives, Prime Minister’s Office, Government files, 5388/534. 68. Shragai to Immigration Department in Paris, 29 July 1954, CZA, S42/253. 69. Jewish Agency Executive, 6 June 1955, CZA, S100/98. 70. Appendix to a letter from the selection team to the head of the Settlement Department, 23 Jan. 1955, CZA, S15,151/8459. 71. Pinchas Jaroman, ‘Casablanca-Marseilles-Haifa’, Devar Hashavua, 5 July 1956, p.14. 72. Gavison to Jewish Agency Executive, 14 Nov. 1954, CZA, S42/228; ‘Olei maroko: yoshivunu ba’ir o yahazireinu limkomoteinu’ [Moroccan Immigrants: Settle Us in the City or Send Us Back], Ha’aretz, 31 May 1955. 73. Uziel Hazan, Armand: novela maroka’it [Armand: A Moroccan Novella] (Tel Aviv: Sifriyat Poalim, 1981), p.190. 74. Minutes of Jewish Agency Executive, 18 Jan. 1955, CZA, S100/97. 75. Minutes of Jewish Agency Executive, 31 May 1955, CZA, S100/98. 76. Minutes of Jewish Agency Executive, 4 June 1956, CZA, S100/108. 77. Jewish Agency, 11 shenot kelita, p.101. 78. Testimony of Charlie Biton, one of the first settlers in Dimona, from the website of the first residents of Negev development towns (http:/www.edu-negev.gov.il/first). 79. Lova Eliav, interview, 10 June 2002, Sede Boker. 80. Josephthal at a meeting of the Jewish Agency Executive, 6 June 1955. CZA, S100/98. 81. Raphael Bashan, ‘‘‘Mered’’ ha-olim be-heifa – hukhan be-maroko’ [Immigrant ‘Rebellion’ in Haifa Prepared in Morocco], Maariv, 17 June 1955. 82. Jewish Agency Executive, 6 June 1955. CZA, S100/98. 83. For an example of belles-lettres, see Hazan, Armand, pp.191–2. For oral narratives, see E. SchelyNewman, ‘Finding One’s Place: Locale Narratives in an Israeli Moshav’, Quarterly Journal of Speech, Vol.83, No.4 (1997), pp.401–15. 84. Ben-Gurion at a Government meeting, 6 March 1955, 5th Government, Vol.19, p.24. 85. Jewish Agency Executive, 18 Jan. 1955. 86. M. Inbar and C. Adler, Ethnic Integration in Israel (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1977), pp.79–80. The survey findings show that compared with the control group of Romanian immigrants, even educated Moroccan immigrants were allowed little choice of place of residence. 87. O. Yiftachel and E. Tzfadia, Mediniyut ve-zehut be-arei ha-pituah: hashpa’at ha-tikhnun veha-pituah al yots’ei tsefon afrika, 1952–1998 [Policy and Identity in the Development Towns: The Case of NorthAfrican Immigrants, 1952–1998] (Beersheva: Ben Gurion University Press, 1999), pp.39–40. 88. See, e.g., S. Krakover, ‘Spatial Dispersal Policy and Mass Immigration’, in S. Ilan Troen and Klaus J. Bade (eds.), Returning Home (Beersheva: The Hubert H. Humphrey Institute for Social Ecology, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, 1994), p.102. 89. Lipshitz, Country on the Move, pp.66–73. 90. I. Adler, N. Lewin-Epstein and Y. Shavit, ‘Ethnic Stratification and Place of Residence in Israel: A Truism Revisited’, Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, Vol.23 (2005), pp.160–62. 91. I. Graicer and A. Gonen, ‘I’tzuv ha-mapa ha-yeshuvit shel ha-medina be-reshita’ [Formulating the Map of the Yishuv at the Beginning of the State], in M. Lissak (ed.), Toldot ha-yeshuv ha-yehudi be-eretz Israel meaz ha-aliya ha-rishona – Medinat Israel ha-asor ha-rishon [The History of the Jewish Community in Eretz Israel since 1882 – Israel, The First Decade] (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 2009), p.345; on the sociological distinction between centre and periphery, see S. Hasson, ‘Frontier and Periphery as Symbolic Landscapes’, Ecumene: A Journal of Environment, Culture, Meaning, Vol.3, No.2 (1996), pp.146–66. 92. Jewish Agency, 11 shenot kelita, p.139. 93. ‘The First Days’, Spielberg Archives, VT DA0755. 94. Graicer and Gonen, ‘I’tzuv ha-mapa’, pp.345–6.