Mayors and dozens of residents of development towns demonstrated outside the Prime Minister’s Office on Monday to call attention to the “economic and social crises” that are affecting their lives.
Others met with Interior Minister Arye Deri, who promised to bring their problems before the regular weekly Cabinet meeting.
Mayor Shaul Amor of Migdal Ha’emek, who heads the organization of development town mayors, accused the government of neglecting the crisis.
He said one of its symptoms was the inability of more than 15 towns to pay their municipal employees’ salaries.
Another is the disclosure that development town youths and those from poverty neighborhoods comprise most of the 25 percent of Israeli young men found unfit for military service.
Deri, who represents the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, called for a new approach to the problems of development towns. He said they couldn’t be solved by saddling the towns with high interest loans every month to ease their financial burdens.
The mayors complained that they were being passed from one minister to another while nothing was being done.
In Kiryat Shmona, a development town on the Lebanon border, hundreds of residents staged a demonstration Sunday to protest “the deterioration of the education system.”
The town’s schools, from kindergarten on up, have been closed by a strike for more than a week because of inadequate funding of schools by the government.
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