ABSTRACT
The slogan of the Labor Party in the 1992 election campaign was “Changing the Order of Priorities,” which focused public attention on material questions of resource allocation. But the new discourse also facilitated the opening of political space to symbolic struggles over collective identity, issues that became salient after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. The post-conflict agenda emerged in full force in the years 1993-5 on the issues of religion and state, relations between Mizrahi and Ashkenazi Jews, the civil rights of Palestinian citizens, and class struggles. All these issues had more profound political and cultural dimensions than the simplistic and naïve slogan “Changing the Order of Priorities,” which alluded to shifting the allocation of public resources from Judea, Samaria, and Gaza to within the sovereign borders of Israel in order to invest in infrastructure, education, health, and employment.
