Content area
Full text
ABSTRACT
Two personalities, more than any other, represent the history of Israeli spatial planning: Arieh and Ariel Sharon. Both have had an enormous impact on the political, military and legal geographies of Israel/Palestine. Despite notable political differences, the two men led Israeli planning to promote a similar spatial strategy throughout the last sixty years, encapsulated by the acronym SEEC (Settlement/Security, Expansion, Ethnicization, Control/Commercialization). This strategy has provided a meta-planning framework for the contested Judaization of Israel/Palestine. The paper uses Gramscian, (post)colonial and Lefebvrian approaches to conceptualize planning as a mediator between hegemonic and oppressed forces in a ceaseless societal process of space production. It argues that the SEEC strategy was not merely a guide for spatial policies, or an important element in the project of Jewish liberation, but a critical foundation of a new regime, reshaping both space and society and determining key elements of citizenship, such as property, mobility, rights and power. Hence, the Sharonian planning strategy has constituted a central pillar in Israel's ethnocratic regime, by granting professional legitimacy to the planned geography of "separate and unequal." This has become part of the infrastructure of a process of "creeping apartheid" now evident in Israel/Palestine.
Introduction
I came here innocently to live in a communal, homogenous and, yes, Jewish settlement. I didn't seek to push anyone away, but rather to live my life with people like me. It is surely clear to you that if one Arab moves in, others will follow, and we will lose our community, our purpose in coming to this wonderful place. ... I am sorry to say. . .we cannot at this stage accept Arabs in our settlement (Pnina, resident of Rakefet, in response to a petition against the exclusion of Arab applicants to join the locality in the settlement, 2010).'
Where can I live? In my crumbling village (that the world calls a ghetto or slum) which lost most of its land and remains "unrecognized"? In a different crumbling Arab village? In small cities with no plots of land? With the Jews? In closed kibbutzim? In Arad, Beer Sheva or Dimona, where there are no Arab schools, nor even a mosque? I'm a third-class citizen, as if in jail [zai ahli, zai weladi] - like my parents...