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On collective assertiveness and activism during the immigration process: a case study of Yemenite immigrants who founded Kiryat Shmona – 1949–1953

Abstract This article focuses on the ways in which over 200 families of Yemenite immigrants, who founded the city of Kiryat Shmona, the development town situated at the edge of Israel's Northern District, functioned as a group during the immigration process. This case study coincides with the trend – within research of mass immigration to Israel – that relates the historical narrative through the perspective of the immigrant and settler groups, rather than from the vantage point of the establishment in charge of their absorption. The affair could have gone down in the annals of history as a story of weakness and victimhood: hundreds of immigrants were sent off to settle in an outlying peripheral region and were compelled to integrate into an environment where the financially and political-powerful kibbutzim were preponderant. Yet the Yemenite immigrants of Kiryat Shmona turned out to be a consolidated, opinionated, fighting and stubborn force that succeeded, in trying conditions, to assert their voice, struggle for their values and identity, affect major changes within the immigration–absorption system.