Editing Town (section)

=== Israel ===
[[Modern Hebrew]] does provide a word for the concept of a town: {{lang|he-latn|Ayara}} ({{lang|he|עיירה}}), derived from {{lang|he-latn|Ir}} ({{lang|he|עיר}}), the biblical word for 'city'. However, the term {{lang|he-latn|ayara}} is normally used only to describe towns in foreign countries, i.e. urban areas of limited population, particularly when the speaker is attempting to evoke nostalgic or romantic attitudes. The term is also used to describe a [[shtetl]], a pre-[[The Holocaust|Holocaust]] Eastern European Jewish town.

Within Israel, established urban areas are always referred to as cities (with one notable exception explained below) regardless of their actual size. Israeli law does not define any nomenclature for distinction between urban areas based on size or any other factor – meaning that all urban settlements in Israel are legally referred to as "cities".

The exception to the above is the term {{lang|he-latn|Ayeret Pituakh}} ({{lang|he|עיירת פיתוח}}, lit. 'Development Town') which is applied to certain cities in Israel based on the reasons for their establishment. These cities, created during the earlier decades of Israeli independence (1950s and 1960s, generally), were designed primarily to serve as commercial and transportation hubs, connecting smaller agricultural settlements in the northern and southern regions of the country (the "Periphery") to the major urban areas of the coastal and central regions. Some of these development towns have since grown to a comparatively large size, and yet are still referred to as development towns, particularly when the speaker wishes to emphasize their (often low) socio-economic status. Nonetheless, they are rarely (if ever) referred to simply as towns; when referring to one directly, it will be called either a development town or a city, depending on context.