Magazine

Decades of planning policy have given Palestinian rural communities the density of cities – without their benefits

This story begins at the start of the 20th century, with the Zionist decision to create a ‘national home’ for Jewish people in Palestine. The Zionist movement began to buy land and promote Jewish immigration to Palestine, with the goal of achieving a Jewish majority there. The geographic and demographic dimensions of the landscape were to be transformed by small Jewish colonies and agricultural settlements, populated by urban Zionists, attracting waves of ideological immigrants. The goals of Jewish domination and a Jewish majority were unofficial policy before 1948; after this, they became formal and official.

Needless to say, while Israeli spatial planning policies aimed at increasing the Jewish presence, they also aimed at decreasing that of the Palestinians. So Israeli governments confiscated land from the Palestinians who remained after the war, changing the landscape and Judaising the space. Between 1948 and 1966, the Israeli government prohibited the return of Palestinians to their homes, limited their movements, concentrated them in small areas, and encouraged their economic dependence. The Bedouins in the Negeve, for example, were concentrated in an area known as the Syage Region in 1948. Later, in 1964, it was decided to put them in seven new urban localities such as Tel-Shava, Rahat. Meanwhile, the Jewish population was dispersed to the peripheral regions of Negeve, Galilee and Jerusalem, where most Palestians live, a policy of ‘ethnic occupation’.

Community belonging

In 1957, the government started the process of preparing outline plans for Palestinian villages to limit their expansion, effectively introducing a policy of urbanising the rural communities. In Palestine, the Palestinians had formerly lived in a diversity of about 963 towns and villages. Palestinians had the freedom to choose where to live. The urbanisation process there, prior to the creation of the state of Israel, was in line with that seen in other Middle Eastern countries. Cities such as Haifa, Jaffa and Jerusalem absorbed immigrants from the country, while the tendency of villages was to increase naturally with their populations. Israeli researchers have tended to describe this process as a kind of ‘detained urbanisation,’ ‘latent urbanisation,’ or ‘misshapen urbanisation.’

However, while large villages such as Um-Elfahem, Skhnen, and Tamra have grown in size (like the small town Nazareth, absorbing people from demolished villages nearby), and have changed their municipal status to municipality, their social and physical structure, cultural behavior and infrastructure remain similar to that of a village. In addition, most residents present themselves as villagers, and want to continue to live in a village structure, with its sense of community belonging.

Promoting migration

Israeli land policies have involved a refusal to recognise Palestinian settlements, and so today over 80,000 people live in unrecognised villages, most of them in the Negeve. The housing in these villages is labelled ‘illegal’, and so has no basic amenities. Government policy encourages workers to abandon agricultural work, yet it is hard for Palestinians to move to towns where there is a Jewish majority. Effectively, growing numbers of Palestinians are concentrated in a small number of villages, a policy of enforced urbanisation.

The Sharon plan, 1951, states that population growth among the Palestinians is expected to decrease, while economically they will no longer rely on agriculture. The other national plan for the geographic distribution of the population in Israel expected large emigration from Palestinian villages, and from the periphery to the urban centre of the country. The implicit policy was to reduce the numbers of Palestinians living on the periphery, and to weaken their relation to land by promoting migration to towns.

Restrictive planning

This national policy is reflected in restrictive local planning. The outline plans for every recognised village were largely conceived as a means of accelerating the urbanisation process. The explicit goal of local plans was to improve the standard of living for Palestinians by imposing modern urban planning on the traditional communities. The implicit aim is to reduce Palestinian territory. In urban localities, the government can concentrate people, reduce the cost of developing and maintaining infrastructure, and provide a housing solution for more people.

A quick analysis of a number of such plans shows a reliance on ‘fill-in’ building, an overwhelming preponderance of housing development, limited floor-plan size and a rise to four floors. Public spaces are rare, and most planned areas are private. The different village plans are strikingly uniform. Actually, it seems as if an original plan was made, then copied from village to village with little adaptation.

In actuality, the gap between the official plans and reality is large. Migration from the villages to central cities has not happened. The government has not allocated resources to implement its plans for a modern urban infrastructure. Many Palestinians have housed themselves, as is infact traditional, but often building illegally because planning permits are hard to get. In many cases, therefore, housing is primitive.

The environmental fallacy

Over the last decade, the government has allocated money to help alleviate the housing problems of Palestinians. Again, this policy had an underlying commitment to increasing the urbanisation of Palestinian communities, by planning for highrise buildings on small plots – a style which does not fit the social and cultural habits of the Palestinians, nor their tradition of building their own houses. This urbanisation process was also applied to the villages recognised in the mid-1990s: Kamane, Hosines and Ein Hud.

Meanwhile, the state of Israel justifies its policy by arguing that it suffers from a land shortage, and must therefore be careful in land use allocation. By concentrating people, the government says it can save land. The unreality of this claim is highlighted by the fact that most Jewish settlements are villages (see table). The number of Jewish centres increased from 771 in 1961 to 1078 in 2000, while Palestinian ones increased from 109 to 124 in the same period. The process of adding a Jewish settlement is to build a new one, while adding a Palestinian one involves recognising an existing one. In addition, 45 Palestinian villages are still not recognised.

Table 1: Distribution of cities, towns, and villages in Israel among different populations and the state.

	State of Israel	Jewish	Palestinian
All places	1193 (100%)	1078(90%)	128(10%)
Urban	219(18.3%)	131(12.2%)	91(71.1%)
Rural	979(81.7%)	947(87.8%)	33*(28.9%)

*This not include the estimated 45 unrecognised villages

Source: Central Bureau of Statistics, 2001, Statistical Abstract of Israel, no 52. Table 2.9 page 2-26.

Dual policy

Today, looking at most Palestinian communities, we find similarities in physical and manpower structure, the economic base and social and community behaviour. They share the same structure because they passed through the same process. Most have doubled their population more than five times in the last 50 years, while residential areas have doubled theirs more than 12 times. This population growth came not from immigration, but from local growth, and has led to expanding housing areas, including fill-in development, so creating a greater housing density coupled with a marked lack of public areas – including, even, roads.

In Israel, the national, regional and local spatial planning policy has a dual nature, related to ethnic belonging. For Palestinians, the policy means a reduction in territory, an increase in density and population concentration, and the loss of villages – urbanisation, in other words, but without an increase in urban possibilities. And although planning policy changed somewhat in the 1990s, there is still a long way to go before it can genuinely meet the needs of Israel’s Palestinians.

Bibliography

Abo Sitts, S. (2000), Confiscation of Palestinian Refugees Propriety and the Denial of Access to Private Propriety, submitted to the social, Economic and Cultural Rights Committee, UN October 2000..

Alexander, E. R, Alterman, R. & Law Yone, H. (1993)” Evaluating Plan

Implementation: the National Statutory Planning System in Israel”, Progress in Planning, 20, 97-192.

Central Bureau of Statistics, 2001, Statistical Abstract of Israel, no 52. Table 2.9 page

2-26.

Falah, G. (1989), Israeli Judaization Policy in Galilee and its impact on

Local Arab Urbanization, Political Geography Quarterly, 8, 229-253.

Falah, G. (1992), Land Fragmentation and Spatial Control in Nazareth Metropolitan Area, Professional Geographer, vol. 44 pp. 30 - 44.

Falah, G. (1996), The 1948 Israeli: - Palestinian War and Its Aftermath: The Transformation and De-Signification of Palestine's Cultural Landscape, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 86 (2), pp. 256 - 285.

Gertel, S. and Law Yone, H. (1991), Participation Ideologies in Israeli planning, Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy, 9, 173-188.

Golan, A. (1995), “The Transfer to Jewish Control of Abandoned Arab Lands during the War of Independence, “Israel – The First Decade of Independence", ed.S.I. Troen, and N. Lucas. Albany : State University Of New York Press,. 403-440.

Jeruis, S. (1966), The Arabs In Israel, Haifa, ElEtehad (in Arabic).

Khamaisi, R., (1990), Planning and Housing among the Arabs in Israel,

Internatonal Center for Peace in the Middle East, Tel-Aviv.

Khamaisi, R., (2000), Where the Town Hidden, Pnem, vol, 13, pp.53-62 ,(Hebrew).

Kimmerling, B. (1982), Zionism and Territory, Berkeley, University of California.

Kipnis, B. (1987), Geopolitical Ideologies and Regional Strategies in Israel,

Tijdchrift Voor Economishe en Social Geography, 78,.125-138.

Kipnis, B. (1976), Trends among the minorities population in the Galilee and their

planning implication, City and Region, vol. 3, no. 3, pp. 54- 68.

Hill, M. (1980), Urban and Regional Planing in Israel”, in: Bilski, R. (ed)

Can Planning Replace Politics? The Israeli Experience, Martinus

Highoff, The Hague, 259-282.

Lustick, I. (1980), Arabs in the Jewish State, University of Texas press, Austin.

Masalha, N., 1997, Maximum Land and Minimum Arabs: Israel Transfer and

Palestinians. 1949-1996, IPS, Beirut.

Mear-Brodnes, M., (1968), Social Aspect in planning in the Arabs sector, the

regulative planning and the process of self-housing, Center for City and Region resersh, Technion, Haifa.

Sharon, A. (1951), Physical Planning in Israel, Internal Minister, Jerusalem.

Yiftachel, O. (1992), Planning a Mixed Region in Israel: The Political Geography of Arab-Jewish Relations in the Galilee, Averbury, Aldershot.

Yiftachel, O. (1997), “Israeli Society and Jewish-Palestinian Reconciliation: ‘Ethnocracy’ and its Territorial Contradictions, “Middle East Journal, 51(4):505-519.

Zureik, E.(1978), The Palestinians in Israel : A Study in Internal Colonialism, PKP, London.

back to Magazine home page

back to FAST homepage