From 23 to 25 June 2014, the xxxth Annual Conference of the Israel Studies Association was held at the D. Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (Sde-Boker, Israel). The Association for Israeli Studies (AIS), established in 1985 in the United States, brings together researchers from different countries who study various aspects of the history and current state of the State of Israel (including the history of Zionism and the Jewish community of Palestine in the pre-state period) in various areas of social and humanitarian sciences. page 159 AIS is a member of the North American Association for Near East Studies and holds special sections at conferences of the Association for International Studies and the American Political Science Association. Ben-Gurion University was founded in 1969 as part of the Negev Desert development plan proposed by Israel's first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, in the mid-1950s.Ben-Gurion considered the development of the Negev a key element of Israel's development and a path to prosperity. Currently, the university has about 20 thousand students and 4 thousand teachers and employees. The University is actively developing, and the number of students in it has almost doubled over the past 15 years. It is one of the fourth hundred best universities in the world, and in computer science and engineering - in the second. The University has three campuses: in Beersheba, Sde Boker and Eilat. The Sde Boker campus is located near Kibbutz Sde Boker, where D. Ben-Gurion lived until his death in 1973 and was buried there next to his wife Paula. The campus has a research status and is home to the Desert Research Institute. Jacob Blaustein Institute for Israeli and Zionist Studies and the David Ben-Gurion Archive. The conference was attended by more than 400 scientists. Most of them represented various Israeli universities and research centers, and there were many researchers from the United States, including Harvard, Columbia, Georgetown, UCLA, and other u ... Read more