The subject came up recently when I attended the inauguration of the newest branch of the Hadassah Medical Organization in the southern city of Netivot. I found visitors from abroad looking at me quizzically whenever I used the term “periphery.”
Despite our tiny size compared to America – we are, after all, just the size and shape of New Jersey, the fourth-smallest US state – here in Israel we speak so often of “outlying areas,” that in Hebrew we use the Hebraicized version of the word: periferia.
The theory of “center versus periphery,” or “core versus periphery,” actually goes back 75 years and was related to economics. It was originally a description of inequality of power in trade relations between First World and Third World countries.
This was called the Singer-Prebisch theory. (Sir Hans Wolfgang Singer was a German-born British Jew.) The concept was later expanded to include the difference between the fiscal advantages of urban over rural areas.
In Israel, the use of the terms has expanded to merkaz v’periferia (“center and periphery”) to describe the disparity in income, education, and even health services between haves and ‘haves-less,’ most often the discrepancy between the Tel Aviv metropolitan area/Gush Dan and outlying development and border towns.
It’s also used to contrast disadvantaged areas within cities with affluent neighborhoods, although the former may be “inner” cities.
In such a small country as ours, we might not expect these economic and now sociological categories to apply. Netivot, for example, is just 100 km. from Tel Aviv.
Israel's south and northern border considered disadvantaged
Nonetheless, Israeli planners consider towns in Israel’s South – and now especially on the northern border – “distance disadvantaged.”
Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) defines a peripheral area as one that is distant from “opportunities, activities, or assets.”
The statistics bureau actually builds an index to rank localities from most peripheral to most central, using factors like size, distance from the Tel Aviv hub, and accessibility by public transportation.
On a 10-point socioeconomic scale based on income, education, employment, and housing, Netivot is ranked only four.
The Dan region has far greater job opportunities, as well as offering economic advancement through informal connections and networks – the chance meetings, internships, and professional communities that thrive in greater Tel Aviv.
The average monthly salary in Netivot is roughly 30% lower than the national average. When Netivot was founded in 1957, it was called Azata because of its proximity – seven kilometers – from Gaza (Aza in Hebrew).
The city was soon renamed with an enduring spirit of optimism, from the oft-sung biblical proverb: “Her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace.” “Paths” in Hebrew are netivot.
The city started as a ma’abara, a transit camp to house immigrants mainly from Morocco and Tunisia, who lived in tin shacks and tents on the sand and scrubland.
Their homes were scorching in the Negev summer, and muddy in the winter. Nevertheless, Netivot grew from a ma’abara to a development town and was finally declared a city in 2000.
Today, rows of modern, attractive apartment buildings attest to a city experiencing a remarkable growth spurt, making it one of the fastest-growing cities in the country, with an estimated 47,000 residents and predictions of it doubling in the coming years.
Young families, priced out of the center, can find affordable apartments at a fraction of what they would pay in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, or Haifa. According to Netivot’s heralded and long-serving mayor, Yehiel Zohar, more than 30,000 housing units are under construction.
This plan is in line with a study in 2021 by the Jerusalem-based Taub Center for Social Policy Studies.
It found that a previous trend of people moving out of Israel’s South was reversing, with more Israelis moving to the South than away from it – despite decades of rocket fire from Gaza.
Population size, of course, isn’t the only factor in turning periphery into center.
In 2021, the Schwartz/Reisman Science Education Center – Western Negev was opened by the Weizmann Institute of Science, including a science high school emphasizing advanced physics, chemistry, and biology.
Some 700 students from Netivot and the surrounding Negev area – more than half of them girls – are studying there.
Around the same time, the Hadassah Medical Organization, with the support of the Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust, began construction of its 2,000-square-meter medical facility.
Mayor Zohar has called the opening of the facility “a transformative milestone for the city and for the entire Western Negev,” bringing medical care, leading specialists, and innovative technologies, “exactly like those available in the center of the country.”
The inauguration drew many of Israel’s renowned medical experts, who were ebullient about bridging the center-periphery gap and who pledged to regularly travel to Netivot to see patients.
“It’s our affirmation of Zionism,” said one of the professors. “And it feels good.”
As the city boosts science and medicine, let us not forget Netivot’s warranted reputation as a hub of mysticism and Kabbalah.
The most celebrated Netivot resident was Moroccan-born Rabbi Yisrael Abuhatzeira (1889–1984), popularly called the Baba Sali (Arabic for “praying elder”).
Abuhatzeira, the precocious grandson of Moroccan Jewry’s towering figure Rabbi Yaakov Abuhatzeira, was a scholar and purported miracle worker.
His grave and the large complex of institutions that have grown out of his humble home and synagogue have become a pilgrimage site. In January 2026, an estimated 100,000 visitors arrived for the hilula, the anniversary of his death.
Interestingly, although they never met, the Baba Sali and the Lubavitcher Rebbe maintained a close relationship. On October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorists failed to penetrate Netivot’s defenses.
If you seek an explanation on the Internet under “miracles of Netivot on October 7,” you’ll find a point-by-point description of the successful response of the city’s extraordinary civil defense volunteers.
But you’ll also find a cluster of curious legends in which Hamas terrorists are stopped at the gate by “an old religious man who looked just like the Baba Sali.”
Others claim that the city earned heavenly protection because of the residency of a different rabbi, Yoram Michael Abergel (1957–2015), founder of the Kol Rina educational network.
Still others point to the town’s famed spiritual diagnosticians. Netivot is home to Kabbalist Rabbi Yaakov Israel Ifargan, 59, known as “the X-ray” (HaRentgen) for his reputed healing and prognostic powers. His sister, spiritual adviser Rabbanit Bruria Ifargan-Zvulun, is called “the CT,” and his half brother, Rabbi Hayim Amran-Ifargan, is known as “the MRI.”
As the new Hadassah Medical Organization branch in Netivot has installed an actual MRI scanner, part of the advanced imaging services bringing modern diagnostics closer to Western Negev residents, the city now has multiple ways to look beneath the surface.
It can boast a rare and empowering combination of learning and lore. Like the intense magnetism of an MRI, Netivot itself is developing its own powerful pull, drawing the city closer to Israel’s center.
The writer is the Israel director of public relations at Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America. Her latest book is A Daughter of Many Mothers, with Holocaust survivor and premier English-language witness Rena Quint.