The Israeli Setting
Project Renewal in Israel:
Urban Revitalization through Partnership, Chapter I
Daniel J. Elazar
In June 1977, Project Renewal, a unique urban revitalization
program, was announced by Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin.
The program was proposed as a joint endeavor, a partnership
between the Jews of the State of Israel and the diaspora. The
surprise announcement was delivered with only a few days
preparation. Diaspora leadership was only notified immediately
prior to the announcement. The speech was infused with social
vision by a prime minister exuberant in the flush of political
victory. Drawing upon a biblical reference to the pursuit of
justice, the prime minister called for the elimination of poverty
through an intensive effort to provide adequate housing for
approximately 45,000 Israeli families.
The processes of urban renewal which would take place in Israel
in the following years did not develop ex nihilo from this
moment. Rather, they drew from past programmatic bases and their
development, as Project Renewal, would reflect a variety of new
influences, both indigenous and external.
Israel's earlier efforts at improving the situation of the
nation's most disadvantaged citizens, in addition to an extensive
social welfare system, consisted of slum clearance and the
construction of densely populated public housing projects
(shikunim). Unlike public housing programs in the United States
and even the United Kingdom, programs in Israel allocated housing
on a universal basis. In American public housing programs,
except in the immediate postwar period, only the lowest income
families were eligible. In Israel, new immigrants of any
financial means received some form of public shelter. On the
other hand, urban renewal programs in the United States placed
land in the hands of private developers, with the result that
housing for the poor was demolished and replaced with upper
income housing. Urban renewal in Israel was kept under public
control and resulted in replacement housing according to a number
of enforced eligibility criteria.
Despite these contrasting orientations, the Israeli efforts in
urban renewal were based upon the same early social assumptions
as in America, namely that relocation of disadvantaged
populations in new housing developments would eliminate the roots
of poverty and social distress. Rapid physical deterioration and
social distress manifested itself, however, in the very areas
which had been constructed in the late sixties and seventies as
solutions to both inadequate housing and social disadvantage.
The growing realization that these earlier approaches did not
rectify social ills and that the implementation of a housing
solution to poverty independently of social policy would impair
attainment of even the housing goals was to have a significant
effect on the development of Project Renewal. In its formative
stages, therefore, Project Renewal was guided by the accumulated
experience and point of view of both previous Israeli domestic
experiments as well as principles which underlay urban
rehabilitation efforts in the developed countries, mainly the
United States and, to some extent, the United Kingdom.
From its inception, Project Renewal contained two singular
elements. It involved the application of an extensive urban
renewal and rehabilitation project in a new and developing
country using modern construction techniques, guided by Western
ideas of planning and implementation, and informed by a desire to
function according to democratic ideals. In addition, Project
Renewal was a joint undertaking of diaspora Jewry from the
Western countries and the government of Israel. These two
elements gave an added dimension to the rehabilitation process
and were inextricably intertwined, since the leading diaspora
communities were located in the United States and consequently
their involvement reinforced the modernizing and democratic
features which the Israelis wished to apply to their renewal
process.
Obviously, then, Israel's Project Renewal was not launched in an
urban renewal vacuum. Israel's own past experience weighed
heavily in the concepts which accompanied the program. In
addition, the awareness and interest of several Israelis
appointed to coordinate and manage the implementation of Project
Renewal in similar projects carried out in the United States
brought fresh thinking to the question of Israeli urban
revitalization. Moreover, external trends occurring worldwide
during this time, including a tendency towards political
decentralization, greater state receptivity to participatory
values, greater professionalization in municipal planning and
community development, and an emerging sensitivity to the
importance of conserving viable or historically valued physical
structures, filtered into the Israeli urban renewal environment.
Finally, the mid-twentieth century notion that poverty and social
distress are not so much a result of defective individual or
personality attributes, but rather are spawned by social
conditions for which the public must assume responsibility, was a
central tenet of Israeli social values and political culture.
With particular and vital regard to this latter concept, urban
renewal in Israel was and is intimately linked to the entire
Zionist enterprise, namely, to the reconstruction of a Jewish
state and the reshaping and constitution of the Jewish people in
its homeland. The early pioneers proclaimed, and ensuing waves
of immigrants were reminded, that to rebuild and to be rebuilt
were woven together as inextricable parts of the Zionist praxis.
Physical and spiritual renewal are one process. They are further
bound together in the Project Renewal endeavor through the recent
emergence of pluralist values stressing that the revitalization
of individual communities would serve the larger aim of communal
crystallization of a nation. Telling the story of the
construction of a society and the roots of diaspora involvement
in that story will provide a clearer background to understanding
the direction and scope of Project Renewal itself.
Urban Settlement and Community as Ideology and Reality in Israel
Contemporary Israel and the Zionist movement have drawn their
attitudes to the city from a variety of sources. They were
inspired in their pioneering efforts and choices of names and
locations for their settlements by the Bible and the history of
ancient Israel. Their approach to new town development was
influenced by the British experience and to urban renewal by the
example of the United States. In addition, there are elements in
the Israeli urban experience which parallel the organic outlook
of the Greek heritage and the impetus toward social concord which
guided Roman urban policy both during the republic and the
principate. Overall, however, the city occupied a marginal place
in Zionist ideology, which extolled the virtues of rural life.
Characteristic of the Zionist outlook was the statement of A.D.
Gordon, considered the mentor of the back-to-the-land movement in
Zionism, that "the Jewish people had been completely cut off from
nature and imprisoned within city walls these two thousand
years... It will require the greatest effort of will for such a
people to become normal again."1 Even the Marxist Zionist
theoretician, Dov Ber Borochov, writing from pre-Leninist Russia,
noted that "the basis of every society is the agricultural class"
and continued: "The entire life and fate of the Jews in the
Diaspora, long ago cut off from the land and with no agricultural
class, depends entirely on finding a society which, because it
needs the services of the Jews, will give them in return
agricultural products, cattle, or manufactured goods." Thus the
Jewish diaspora was condemned "to live only in the cities."2
The negative orientation of Zionism to the urban arena has been
noted by Erik Cohen.3 The Zionist enterprise was initially
directed to reclamation of the land through agricultural
settlement. Dispersion had uprooted the Jewish nation not only
from its homeland but from its earlier pastoral and agricultural
pursuits, remembrance of which survived in the major Jewish
religious holidays associated with seasonal aspects of husbandry
in the land of Israel, which were scrupulously observed in exile.
The essentially secular Zionist movement seized upon Jewish
history and traditions in an effort to recreate the conditions of
independence and national autonomy which the ancient Israelites
experienced. There was also strong antipathy to urban living
because it was associated with the embourgeoisement of the Jewish
people in exile. The Socialist Zionist movement, with its
visions of justice and social equality, wished to eradicate
elements of social structure which contributed to exploitation
and social dominance of one sector of society over another. A
major role for the city and its pursuits was regarded as an
impediment to a renewed egalitarian society.
To be sure, there was great pride in the establishment of the
first modern Jewish city - Tel Aviv. Writers wrote wistfully
about the prospects of Jewish garbage and even Jewish criminals.
But primacy of place was given ideologically to rural
communities, especially collective settlements such as the
kibbutzim and moshavim. Yet, despite the Zionist outlook, the
majority of Jewish immigrants opted for city life. Today, nearly
90 percent of Israel's population is located in urban areas.
Yet the power of the "national agrarian myth" maintained values
and policies which overshadowed this sector, leading to neglect
of its pioneering achievements as well as its most crucial needs.
The Social and Economic Context
When the State of Israel was proclaimed in 1948, its Jewish
population numbered 649,500. Through 1951, the new state
absorbed nearly 685,000 immigrants. This rapid and intensive
demographic growth laid the basis for development in other areas
of Israeli society. In the next two decades (1952-1969), 600,000
more Jews made their way to the country. By 1971, the total
population numbered 3,069,300. New immigrants accounted for
nearly half of the increase during this period. Only in the last
decade has immigration lost much of its demographic weight,
accounting for only 19.1 percent of growth since 1973. The
population of Israel reached four million in 1983, a five-fold
increase within a thirty-five year span.
Economic growth has been even more dramatic. Links between the
fledgling state and the diaspora worldwide enabled it to develop
capabilities far beyond its extremely limited natural resources.
A significant factor in this phenomenon was its "human capital,"
a combination arising from the continued arrival in Israel of
educated immigrants as well as the ability of the new state to
mobilize the talents of the Jewish academic and scientific
community abroad. During the first two decades of the state, the
greater part of the diaspora contribution was financial, as
organized philanthropic campaigns grew both in the amounts
contributed and the complexity of their organizational outreach.
Contributing to Israel through the two large fundraising
campaigns of the United Israel Appeal in the United States and
Keren Hayesod in the other diaspora communities and the purchase
of Israel Bonds became a typical expression of identity and
belonging for diaspora Jewry worldwide.
Israel became an economy in "take-off," thanks to these enormous
increases in both capital and human resources. In its first
twenty-five years, it attained one of the highest rates of growth
in its Gross National Product in the world, bequeathing its
citizens a standard of living comparable to and often exceeding
levels of many European nations (see table 1.1). The government
strove to distribute equitably the newly produced wealth through
progressive taxation and other measures favored by welfare
states.
Table 1.1
Gross Domestic Product Per Capita Growth Rates
In Israel and European Countries
(in constant prices 1950-73)4
|
|
1950-73*
%
|
|
Israel
|
5.8
|
|
Austria
|
5.0
|
|
Belgium |
3.6
|
|
Denmark
|
3.4
|
|
Finland
|
4.4
|
|
France
|
4.2 |
|
West Germany |
5.1
|
|
Greece |
6.3
|
|
Ireland
|
3.2
|
|
Italy
|
4.8
|
|
Luxembourg
|
2.2
|
|
Netherlands
|
3.7
|
|
Norway
|
3.3
|
|
Portugal
|
5.3
|
|
Spain
|
5.7
|
|
Sweden
|
3.0
|
|
Switzerland
|
3.0
|
|
Turkey
|
3.5
|
|
United Kingdom
|
2.4 |
|
Yugoslavia |
4.8
|
| European Median
|
3.7
|
* Constant prices for a year between 1958-68 for European
countries, most often 1963; base year 1970 for Israel.
However, a price was paid by following a policy of social equity
during a period when capital formation and economic expansion was
required. The mass influx of population required government
intervention in population distribution to prevent skewed
patterns of settlement and to accommodate the limited absorption
capacities of specific areas of the country. In the early
fifties, the country's leaders were already forced to modify
their strategy, which favored the placing of new immigrants in
agricultural settings (kibbutzim or moshavim), and began to
embark on a policy of large scale urban settlement.
By 1965, thirty development towns had been founded or expanded
from existing small urban infrastructures to house the hundreds
of thousands of newly arrived immigrants. Many of these towns
were located in the most remote and isolated areas of the country
as part of an overall strategic design to secure Israel's borders
and populate the hinterlands. Of these towns, a large number
were later identified as distressed areas and appeared
prominently in Project Renewal in the seventies.
All urban settlement took place under emergency conditions,
dictated by the mass arrival of immigrants. As immigration
subsided and resources at the disposal of the government
increased, more time and effort was expended on town and regional
planning. The Lachish regional project in the northern Negev
area, undertaken in 1956, was the first project in the country
stressing a regional approach. A central objective of the
Lachish project was to integrate urban and rural development by
having the geographical center serve as a market and cultural
focus for the surrounding area. Other projects, borrowing
heavily from the New Towns concept in England, produced
burgeoning development town communities such as Arad (1964) and
Carmiel (1965), and more recently, Ma'ale Adumim (1983). By and
large, these later efforts at settlement have proven viable and
contrast sharply with the makeshift villages and towns set up in
the early fifties to cope with mass immigration.
The State Government Setting
As in every parliamentary system, executive powers are invested
in a cabinet, known in Israel as the government, which is
constituted by the Knesset after each election and which serves
as long as it has the confidence of that body. Israeli cabinets
are invariably coalition governments, and multiparty coalitions
at that, with one or two dominant parties, plus a number of
smaller ones. By law, only the prime minister must be a member
of the Knesset; other ministers need not be, but, in fact, the
overwhelming majority are Knesset members. As is the case in
other parliamentary systems today, while in theory the government
is responsible to the Knesset, in fact, it holds most of the
power and the influence of the Knesset tends to be secondary.
Most of the real powers of the Knesset are invested in its
committees, which perform an oversight function relative to the
government and its ministries.
Israel has a judiciary whose independence is jealously guarded
and conscientiously maintained by all branches of government.
The judiciary is capped by a Supreme Court which has extended its
powers to include many of those usually associated with a
constitutional court.
The executive branch is organized into ministries whose number
varies from government to government, although most of the basic
ministries have had a continuous life since the establishment of
the state.
Israel is a government-permeated society. Government
expenditures generate a large volume of the total economic
activity of the country and functionally, its operating arms --
the ministries -- are involved in almost every facet of Israeli
society. The state ministries command budgets and bureaucracies
that are large by western democratic standards.
For example, the Ministry of Construction and Housing operates
with a great deal of autonomy, handling almost all problems of
housing on its own. The ministry carries out the detailed
planning of residential quarters in towns and settlements,
programs the construction of housing and public buildings, sets
their budgets, issues tenders and selects contractors, and
decides upon the criteria for subsidies and housing allocations.
A population committee which affects decisions on the population
mix in newly constructed areas is also located in this ministry.
Although much of its activity must be coordinated with agencies
involved in physical construction, its extensive budget and
pervasive hold on the housing market give the ministry
considerable power and influence.5
Formally, the ministries are located at the apex of a highly
centralized state. In reality, in many ministries, centralist
tendencies are modified by the multiplicity of actors and
agencies on various levels of government interacting in the
particular sphere of the ministry's jurisdiction. The
multiplicity of political control, the fact that the state
ministries are controlled by the various political parties that
make up the government, further softens centralist tendencies by
making them more responsive to external demands and interests.
At the same time, such multiparty control in a consociational
form of democracy makes it difficult to formulate and implement a
unified social welfare policy.6 Political control in the
ministries is reflected on both the ministerial and
administrative levels. Not only the minister but the
director-general is a political appointee. The present political
distribution of the ministries concerned with social welfare in
Israel's current national unity government is a good example.
The Ministry of Construction and Housing is controlled by the
Likud, the major right-wing party. The Ministry of Education and
Culture is controlled by the left-of-center Alignment. Control
of the Ministry of Labor and Social Welfare and the Ministry of
Health are similarly shared by these two parties, and the
Ministry of Interior is controlled by an ultra-Orthodox religious
party.
The Local Government Setting
There are 163 municipalities in Israel, 38 cities, and 125 local
councils (the equivalent of towns), representing a combined
constituency of over three and a half million inhabitants or
approximately 85 percent of the population. Cities range in
population between 15,000 and 430,000, while the populations of
local councils varies from 5,000 to over 15,000 inhabitants.
Israel, it should be noted, is an overwhelmingly urban society;
nearly 90 percent of the population live in essentially urban
environments.
Israel is well-known as a highly centralized state, a function of
its founders' adoption of continental European notions of statism
as a natural attribute of political sovereignty. Yet, Israel is
centralized in form but not in substance, since the state was
itself built out of a compound of local settlements which
represented the focus of the Zionist enterprise prior to 1948.
This was not only true of the agricultural sector where the
kibbutzim and moshavim were the major instruments of the
settlement of the land, but also in the cities where the Jews
built autonomous institutions in neighborhoods within mixed
cities or entire municipalities where possible. These local
bodies were the principal centers of governing power under the
British Mandate and, although much of their authority was
transferred to the state after it was established, the tradition
of local liberties remains strong.
Those traditions are reinforced by a highly egalitarian political
culture in which the giving and taking of orders is far from the
norm. Thus it is difficult even for those ministries empowered
to do so to act hierarchically towards local government. Rather,
they must negotiate with their local counterparts to achieve
their goals.
Organizationally, there is very little difference between cities
and local councils. In both cases, mayors are elected by direct
popular election while councils are elected through the same
proportional representation system as is used for the Knesset.
The mayors sit as members of the city council and, by selecting
vice-mayors, in effect form coalition governments which
constitute the local executive branch in a manner similar to that
of the central government.
Thus, the State of Israel as a whole is a mosaic compounded of
central and local authorities functioning together, each with its
appropriate competences, powers and tasks.7 The appropriate
constitutional model for understanding state-local relations,
then, is not hierarchical, nor is it even central-peripheral in
the sense that the local authorities are defined as peripheral to
the central organs of the state. Rather, it is a compound
structure. The state provides the framework for this mosaic and
its organs are responsible for its framing functions. Within
that framework the local authorities and their organs are equally
responsible for their respective functions.
This is not to say that the state does not or should not exercise
authority over local governments under the law in a wide variety
of fields, including an ultimate authority under the constitution
for the specific way in which local government is constituted.
But, as one observer has noted in referring to public enterprise
in general in Israel, "there are more organizations with
government participation than can be supervised or controlled in
routine fashion by finance or other ministries."8 This
situation provides the space in which new norms of public
activity and public administration, which bend and extend the
formal constitutional framework, may evolve. In turn, the
augmented powers reinforce local and parochial interests,
providing a counterweight to the potential dominance of the
central authorities.
Such arrangements are most common in the fields of education and
welfare, the two staples of the local public delivery system in
Israel, accounting for over 40 percent of local council
expenditures. Elementary and secondary school education is
provided by a partnership between state and local authorities.
Israel does not have independent school boards. Instead, city
councils handle whatever tasks are devolved upon them with regard
to school matters, usually through a vice-mayor for education and
an education committee of the local council. The Ministry of
Education and Culture funds all the operating costs of the
regular elementary education program, the junior high schools,
and a few of the high schools, as well as being responsible for
the certification and employment of teachers.
Despite this apparently highly centralized structure, Israeli
education is, in fact, rather decentralized. The local
authorities are responsible for providing and maintaining school
buildings and equipment (including textbooks, based upon ministry
lists), and for the registration and enrollment of students for
virtually all ancillary and enrichment programs, beginning with
prekindergarten education. They also have direct control over
almost all high schools in the country. Thus, the local
departments of education are in a position to direct local
educational affairs and, since the ancillary and enrichment
serves are becoming an ever larger part of every school's
program, their influence is expanding.
Welfare is formally a cooperative state-local service in which
the localities operate welfare programs funded in whole or in
part by the Ministry of Labor and Social Welfare. Although the
majority of Israel's welfare budget for income insurance and
services to special population groups is funded by the central
government, local authorities have taken on increasing
responsibility, authority and activity in welfare services. The
operation of social welfare programs is similar to that of
grant-in-aid programs in other countries. The localities have
responsibility for determining eligibility under criteria
promulgated by the Ministry of Labor and Social Welfare. They
create the packages of welfare benefits to be provided to any
individual or family on the basis of the various programs as
defined by law, and they furnish the social services needed to
assist the family in rehabilitation or adjustment to its
condition.
Our perspective, then, is that state powers are pervasive in the
Israeli polity, but do not exhibit a classic, hierarchical
pattern. While there are factors which contribute to a
pronounced dependency of the local upon the central arena, there
are also divisions of powers which provide the local arena with
its own legitimate public space of operations. Moreover, the
local arena creates its own de facto space for maneuvering, by
virtue of the nature of the rules of the political game which
stress informal over formal arrangements, and also by virtue of
weak sanction enforcement in those instances where violations of
the formal rules do occur.
The local authorities are forced to act in this fashion because
they serve as the fulcrum between the state's penetration into
the local arena and the citizens' demand for more and better
goods and services. It was into this dynamic that Project
Renewal was thrust with the objective of squaring the circle by
mediating and resolving the contradictory tendencies of nation
building and social betterment goals.
The Jewish Agency9
What is unique about the Israeli case is the heavy involvement of
diaspora Jewry on a voluntary but organized basis through the
Jewish Agency for Israel. The Jewish Agency has been in
existence since 1929 as one principal arm of world Jewry for the
rebuilding of a Jewish national home in the land of Israel. It
is a unique instrumentality, established by international public
law under the provisions of the League of Nations Mandate for
Palestine and has no parallel in the world, thus reflecting the
uniqueness of the Israeli situation and the Jewish people.
Nevertheless, as an organization which mobilizes voluntary effort
from outside of Israel, it can be compared with other such bodies
that provide outside assistance to local revitalization efforts.
The Jewish Agency is one of several "national institutions"
functioning within the state's territory. These institutions are
so named because they are considered to belong to the entire
Jewish people (in Zionist terminology, nation), and not to the
State of Israel alone.
The Jewish Agency is the largest national institution and the
only one involved in Project Renewal. As noted above, the Jewish
Agency came into existence during the early period of the British
Mandate in Palestine. It was regarded by the British authorities
as the organizational address for implementing the 1917 Balfour
Declaration's favorable disposition to the establishment of a
national home for the Jewish people. In 1922, the League of
Nations gave Great Britain the Mandate for Palestine. As part of
the Mandate, it was stated that, to implement the Balfour
declaration, there should be established "an appropriate Jewish
agency."10
The ensuing years saw a major attempt to build a Jewish Agency
from two components, the so-called non-Zionist or philanthropic
sectors and the Zionist or political sector. In 1929, a
partnership was achieved with representation from distinguished
non-Zionist Jewish leaders, such as lawyer Louis Marshall,
scientist Albert Einstein, and industrialist Felix Warburg. The
alliance never fully came into existence, and over the years the
Zionist elements continued to control and speak for the Jewish
Agency.
From 1929, until the establishment of the State of Israel in May
1948, the Jewish Agency was the principal instrument of world
Jewry's organized involvement in the upbuilding of the Jewish
national home in Palestine. It was also directly responsible for
the health, welfare, and educational institutions serving the
Yishuv, the existing Jewish population in Palestine.
In 1952, the official role of the Jewish Agency was defined by
the Knesset in the Law of Status, which made the Jewish Agency
responsible for the "ingathering of the exiles" and for their
absorption in Israel. The body was still dominated by the
Zionist (i.e., political) elements. In 1971, a reconstitution
agreement brought the non-Zionists back into the picture. Under
the agreement, the non-Zionists in the Jewish Agency are
designated by the central fundraising organizations for Israel,
these being the community bodies which have the broadest base of
representation in the various diaspora Jewish communities. In
the United States, the designating body is the United Israel
Appeal (UIA); in other countries of the diaspora, the designating
bodies are the fundraising organizations affiliated with the
Keren Hayesod. The Israeli population is represented through the
World Zionist Organization via a political key system which
reflects voting patterns in the Israeli elections for the
Knesset.
In sum, the Jewish Agency functions as a central instrument,
consciously designed to forge a stronger partnership between
diaspora Jewry and the Israeli people. Organizationally, it is
composed of both diaspora and Israeli representation. It thus
reflects the communal liaisons and varying interests of the
parties involved.
Organizational Structure
The Jewish Agency consists of a constituent body called an
assembly, a board of governors, and an executive which is
responsible for the day-to-day operations of the Agency. Both
the Assembly (398 members) and the Board of Governors (74
members) have representation equally divided between the WZO and
fundraising bodies affiliated with the Keren Hayesod and the
United Israel Appeal (UIA). The Executive currently consists of
nineteen members. The chairman of the Board of Governors comes
by agreement from the diaspora, whereas the chairman of the
Executive is an Israeli who is also chairman of the WZO
Executive. The selection of the Executive chairman is influenced
by political party alignments in the Knesset.
The Jewish Agency has a civil service staff of approximately four
thousand. Since U.S. Internal Revenue Service regulations demand
that an American body retain control of philanthropic funds
expended abroad, the UIA has responsibility for these tax-exempt
philanthropic funds until they are spent. While the UIA has a
contract naming the Jewish Agency as its agent for this purpose,
active participation in the Agency's governance, plus continuous
monitoring and reporting are required. The UIA cannot legally
relinquish responsibility and control. Its representatives on
the Agency's governing bodies are accountable to the United
States government and to American Jewish contributors. Funds
channeled to the Jewish Agency from Keren Hayesod countries are
regulated by the laws of the respective countries other than the
United States.
Jewish Agency Activities
In the thirty-eight years since the establishment of the state,
the Jewish Agency has expended approximately $7.2 billion,
two-thirds of which has come from world Jewry through the
campaigns of the United Jewish Appeal (UJA) and Keren Hayesod.
The rest has come from German reparations, participation of the
Israeli government, borrowing and collection of debts.
Since the proclamation of Israel's statehood, the Jewish Agency
has assisted in the absorption of more than 1,700,000 immigrants.
Over five hundred agricultural settlements were established with
some 150,000 settlers. Some 350,000 housing units were built.
More than 150,000 children and youth were enabled to enter the
mainstream of Israeli life through the programs of Youth Aliya.
The Six Day War marked a significant change not only in the
dimensions of the Jewish Agency budget, but also in the nature of
the Agency's activities. In 1967, the defense burden required
such a large proportion of Israel's resources that the Agency had
to assume a much larger share of its social and communal
responsibilities, notably those directed at completing the task
of absorbing the hundreds of thousands of earlier immigrants who
had lagged behind as Israeli society moved forward.
Specifically, this meant a much greater role for the Agency in
helping to close the social gap in Israel - in housing,
education, and improving the quality of life. In 1972, Jewish
Agency community work was expanded with the establishment of its
housing management company, Amigur. Subsequently, other
community-oriented programs were added, such as special programs
for disadvantaged youth, the community leadership training
program conducted in conjunction with the Bureau of Sephardi
Affairs, and a number of other special projects.
In most of its responsibilities, the Jewish Agency was primarily
concerned with disadvantaged sectors of the Israeli population.
The majority of immigrants came from lands of distress. Youth
Aliya, which originally cared for orphaned children or children
who did not arrive in Israel at the same time as their parents,
is today devoting its resources to disadvantaged native-born
Israeli youth. The Rural Settlement Department was directly
involved in helping immigrants settle in collective agricultural
enterprises. All of these efforts were regarded as assistance in
overcoming the initial difficulties of adapting to a new land and
a new culture. They were not conceived of as dealing with
endemic poverty or cultural deprivation as such. The problem of
generational poverty and a "social gap" began to be addressed
only when the second generation, offspring of immigrants, began
to manifest the same socioeconomic characteristics of distress
as their parents' generation.
Though the Jewish Agency is primarily a service organization,
active Agency participation in the Israeli public service
delivery system is not free of political concerns. There is a
desire on the part of the Agency to cement relations with
diaspora leadership. The Agency is the official voice of the
diaspora in Israeli public affairs. It is a major Israeli power
center which straddles the space between the diaspora and the
government of Israel. As a primary organization in Israeli
life, it is perennially engaged in battle with the Israeli
government on matters pertaining to social, economic and
educational development.
Sometimes the battle is waged in defending its right to exist.11
As a quasi-public, voluntary institution sharing many, often
overlapping, functional jurisdictions with government, it has
often been accused of being a redundant organization. At the
same time, its importance is widely recognized in certain spheres
of Israeli life such as boarding school education for the
disadvantaged, settlement and the absorption of immigrants, due
in part to its budgetary clout and its autonomy and diversity.
The Agency has sought new areas of endeavor as the importance of
these functions decline.
Project Renewal marks the Agency's full-scale entrance into the
urban arena, an arena which had been the preeminent domain of the
central government. In addition, one should not overlook the
political power structure in the Jewish Agency which has been
essentially formed by the existing (past and present) political
coalitions and rivalries which govern public life in Israel.
Finally, while Project Renewal, by stressing a partnership, opens
up new vistas for Jewish Agency activities, it also provides an
opening for the government to deal more directly with the
diaspora. For the Jewish Agency, its exclusive prerogative in
this area has now been potentially diluted.
The Israel setting, then, presents us with a number of
partnerships. Whether they are organized in the democratic
centralist mold as suggested by Horowitz, consociational linkages
as analyzed by Paltiel, or compounded organizational entities as
argued by Elazar, they all entail some form of interlocking
order. The consensual framework in which this takes place gives
the linkages the structure of a partnership, rather than, let us
say, an alliance, which suggests a more restricted base of
association. In addition to common goals and interests,
partnership embraces joint rights and connotes a more intimate
common engagement. This is the spirit in which various actors
joined the project. Some, such as the diaspora, regarded the
partnership as a test of the nature of their relationship with
the Jewish Agency and Israel. Others, such as residents and the
local authority representatives, felt caught in the transition
from client or agent status to that of active and initiating
participant. The story of Project Renewal is as much a record of
changing the social environment as it is that of changing the
nature of organizational relationships among key institutional
actors in Israel.
Project Renewal's Approach
In Project Renewal in Israel, the community action approach
attempted to bring target population aspirations into accord with
the demands of society at large. It addressed social apathy and
alienation as a falling apart of social bonds and its
"corrective" interventions consisted of seeking out or promoting
local leadership and stressing the importance of mutual support
and programming in the neighborhood context. Here the notion of
human social solidarity is perceived and assumed as the crucial
element - that ties of affection and common identity can restore
disaggregate units to their wholesome, original, collective
selves.
Community restoration also took the form of encouraging a forging
of institutional interests in the local arena. Thus, resource
exchange of funding, information, prestige, legitimacy, and power
would be cultivated through a locally representative agency whose
task was to coordinate a community focus among divergently-
oriented service delivery and funding bodies. This approach to
urban revitalization and conservation was most prominent in the
Model Cities program, where interest coordination was conceived
as the key to project realization. It was an underlying, perhaps
unconsciously held, strategy in the structure of Project Renewal
in the local arena.
The term best-suited to describe this strategy of interest
coordination is partnership. Openly applied to the
diaspora-Israel linkage, it embraced numerous arrangements
ranging from city hall and central government coordination to a
new partnership of the target population with administrators of
the project. Project Renewal was a new way of carrying out
revitalization. The various commitments of representative
sectors to work together appear not so much in public
pronouncements as they do through the effective functioning of
novel and established organizational mechanisms. However, one
early document does point to the two-pronged strategy of
restructured organization and re-formed community. A central
objective of the new program was the coordination of disparate
efforts "into a manageable and coherent human and social service
system" in order to bring about a "comprehensive social program
of community reconstruction."12 Thus, the various partnerships
would operate in the service of social transformation.
Interestingly enough, some organizations and public bodies such
as the Community Center Corporation and the Ministry of Labor and
Social Welfare made significant accomodations in their
programming in order to enter into tandem partnerships.
Notes
1. A.D. Gordon, "People and Labor," in The Zionist Idea, edited
by A. Hertzberg (New York: Atheneum, 1972), 372.
2. B. Borochov, "On Questions of Zionist Theory," in Sources of
Contemporary Jewish Thought, 2nd ed., edited by D. Hardan
(Jerusalem: Haomanim Press, 1971), 42, 47, (Hebrew).
3. E. Cohen, The City in Zionist Ideology (Jerusalem: Hebrew
University of Jerusalem, Institute of Urban and Regional Studies,
1970).
4. M.C. Spechler, "Israel's Economic Achievements After 30 Years:
Contemporary Perspectives," in Israel: A Developing Society,
edited by A. Arian (Assen, the Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1980),
395.
5. N. Carmon, M. Hill, et al., Neighborhood Rehabilitation in
Israel, Research Report No. 1 (Haifa: Technion, Neaman Institute,
1979).
6. J. Paltiel, The Israel Coalition System, Government and
Opposition, no. 4 (Autumn 1975), 397-414.
7. D.J. Elazar, "The Compound Structure of Public Service
Delivery Systems in Israel," in Comparing Urban Public Service
Delivery Systems, edited by V. Ostrom and F.P. Bish, (Beverly
Hills: Sage Publications, 1971), 44-82.
8. I. Sharkansky, Public Enterprise in the Urban Setting with
Particular Attention to the Case of Israel (Jerusalem: Jerusalem
Institute for Federal Studies, 1978), 32.
9. For the only extensive treatment of the Jewish Agency, see
D.J. Elazar and A.M. Dortort, editors, Understanding the Jewish
Agency: A Handbook, rev. ed. (Jerusalem: Jerusalem Center for
Public Affairs, 1985). For an historical account from an
insider, see Z. Chinitz, A Common Agenda: The Reconstitution of
the Jewish Agency for Israel (Jerusalem: Jerusalem Center for
Public Affairs, 1985).
10. See the Mandate for Palestine, Article 4, in J.M. Moore,
editor, The Arab-Israeli Conflict, vol. 3, Documents (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974), 76.
11. For example, E. Jaffe, editor, Givers and Spenders: The
Politics of Charity in Israel (Jerusalem: Ariel Publishing House,
1985).
12. New Social Programs in Israel, 1978-82 (Jerusalem: Office of
the Deputy Prime Minister, 1978).
