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The Political Geography of Arab-Jewish Relations in the Galilee Oren Yiftachel, Aldershot, Avebury, England, (1992), Pp

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The Political Geography of Arab-Jewish Relations in the Galilee Oren Yiftachel, Aldershot, Avebury, England, (1992), Pp Planning a Mixed Region in Israel: The Political Geography of Arab-Jewish Relations in the Galilee Oren Yiftachel, Aldershot, Avebury, England, (1992), pp. 367. Reviewed by Nur Masalha The "Judaisation of Galilee" (Yehud Hagalil) is the traditional slogan used to designate Zionism's goal of establishing a large Jewish majority in Galilee, Israel's northern region. The Palestinian citizens of Israel (often described as the Israeli Arabs) are a national minority constituting about 17% of the total population. However, the continued presence of a clear Arab majority in Galilee has been a source of worry to the Israeli authorities since the mid-1950s. Despite the fact that many Palestinians fled or were expelled from Galilee in 1948, some 60% of Israel's Arab minority still live in Galilee. Because of the rhetorical and political inconvenience of the emphasis on "Judaisation", the Labour government tended in the 1970s to use euphemisms in describing its "Judaisation of Galilee" policy such as "Populating the Galilee" (Ikhloos Hagalil) and "Developing the Galilee" (Petoah Hagalil). Labour government officials spoke of the "underpopulated Galilee", to which development funds were to be allocated instead of the West Bank. The concept of "underpopulated Galilee," with a particular interpretation, has indeed become common currency in the Israeli political debate. The gist of it is that there is a large Arab population and too few Jews there. Israel's policy of Judaisation of the Galilee, needless to say, is a blatantly discriminatory policy. Imagine, for instance, the American government adopting a policy of "Christianising " New York City! In Planning a Mixed Region in Israel, Oren Yiftachel, a political geographer, uses another typical Israeli euphemism -- planning -- to describe Israel's Judaisation policies in the Galilee since the early 1970s and their impact on the political stability of the region. However, despite its euphemistic and somewhat misleading title, his study is very welcome and timely. His work, based on a doctoral dissertation submitted to the University of Western Australia and the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, in 1990, aims to explore "the sensitive issue of regional planning in the Galilee, where Arabs for long formed a decisive majority, prompting the Israeli government to try and 'Judaise' the region," and to examine "the effects Israel's policies have had on the relations between these two ethnic communities, and the political consequences of these changing relations [p. xiii]." Regional "planning" is defined by Yiftachel as "the formula- tion, implementation and administration of land use policies for the study region. It includes a combination of plans and policies produced by Israeli governmental and quasi-governmental authorities." Yiftachel's study region, Yehiam, in the upper Galilee, was selected because since 1975 various official bodies "have made a concerted effort to settle Jews in the region," which is heavily populated by Arabs, "thereby creating new spatial, social and political circumstances." After examining in the first three chapters various models of state policies and their impact on deeply divided societies and biethnic "democracies" (including Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Bel- gium, Canada, Cyprus, Northern Ireland, Switzerland, Spain and India) the author concludes Honorary Fellow in the Centre for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies University of Durham England). His works include Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of "Transfer" in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948 (1992). He is the editor of The Palestinians in Israel (1993). that consociational state policies, based on power sharing, consensus decision-making, mutual compromise and mutual cultural respect, segmented autonomy and participatory democracy, are more likely to lead to a peaceful ethnic coexistence, while state policies of control and domination of minorities tend to aggravate interethnic conflicts and promote long-term insta- bility. In its policies towards its Arab citizens Israel has traditionally adopted the latter approach; as Yiftachel observes in chapter four, Israel's policies towards the Arab minority have been marked by three major goals: political subordination, economic dependence and territorial containment. In this context, Yiftachel covers familiar ground, which has already been charted by highly regarded independent scholars such as Smooha, Rosenfeld, Zureik, Nakhleh, Rouhana, Lustick, al-Haj and Kimmerling. The author rightly draws on the works of these academics. More problematic, however, is the fact that he makes uncritical use of other accounts by Israeli academics, such as Amnon Soffer and Baruch Kipnis, who are known to bave close and dubious links with the various official and semiofficial bodies involved in the implementation of the Judaisation of Galilee plans. In chapters five to eight, Yiftachel shows how Israeli land use and settlement policies in Galilee have relentlessly attempted to increase Jewish control over land at the expense of the Arab minority. To date, Israel has enacted some thirty laws which have resulted in the transfer of land from Arab to Jew. Moreover, this transfer has always been a unidirectional process, because of tbe ban on the sale of public and national (i.e. Jewish) land enshrined in the Lands of Israel Law of 1960. By tbe early 1980s, land owned by the Israeli state totalled some 93% of Israel's area. These facts are widely known. Yiftachel's main contribution lies in his detailed discussion of tbe various plans formulated for the Galilee since the mid 1970s and the various bodies involved in their implementation. In addition to the involvement of various ministries in the "developmental/planning/ Judaisation"' policies, three semi- and quasi-governmental auth- orities have played major roles in this process: the Israeli Lands Authority, the Jewish National Fund (JNF) and the Jewish Agency (JA). The JNF and JA, although intimately linked to the Israeli state, are Zionist-Jewish "national" organisations, funded by the Jewish diaspora and not legally accountable to the citizens of Israel. The Arab citizens, needless to say, are excluded from these organisations. In the various "national" land use and population plans for Israel in general, and Galilee in particular, Yiftachel points out that "the existence of the Arab minority is not only recognised, but an underlying assumption prevails that large concentrations of Arabs constitute a threat to the Jewish character of the state; the plans of nearly all planning agencies [ministries, JNF, JA, etc.] describe Arabs as 'invaders' into state land. An underpinning assumption exists that all state land is Jewish land, and should remain or come under Jewish control." Of these plans the "mitzpim" ("look out") settlement plan is tbe best known. The plan, the first version of which was formulated in 1978 by Ra'anan Weitz, chairman of the JA's settlement department, entailed the rapid establishment of some 60 new, small and partially developed Jewish settle- ments with the aim of countering the so-called "threat" posed by the Arab citizens in Galilee to state land. These plans, the author notes, enjoyed wide consensus among the Jewish public'. More important, unlike the case with the controversial settlements in the Occupied Territories, "all 1 A 1988 survey conducted by professor Sammy Smooha of Haifa University showed that a "majority of three quarters of the Jews partly or fully endorse the outlawing of Rakah and the Progressive List for Peace, the seizing of any opportunity to encourage Arabs [citizens] to leave the country, and the expropriation of Arab lands within the Green Line for Jewish development." See Smooha, 2 Arabs and Jews in Israel. Change and Continuity in Mutual Intolerance ( 1992) 150-152 .
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