Arab Minority Leadership in Lod at the Turn of the 21st Century: Macropolitics, Micropolitics, and Political Biographies

Abstract

Ethnically mixed cities are a fascinating arena where interests, political attitudes, and identities are shaped and reshaped. Scholars who analyze such cities in Israel emphasize the macro-systemic structural conditions that exist behind the political identities and strategies of local minority leaders. This research takes a different approach: it integrates macro-systemic and micro-systemic conditions at the neighborhood, family, and local social level and views it as a semi-independent system. The study also introduces the leaders’ biographies as a key factor: It examines the construction of the local Arab leaders’ (the minority) political orientation in the mixed Arab-Jewish city of Lod. The empirical analysis indicates that the source of the Arab leaders’ political orientation is unquestionably their biographies which in turn led to the reorganization and reconstruction of social and political institutions at the local level.