In his seminal book, “The Urban Experience,” David Harvey argues that the process of urbanization is not neutral, but rather it is shaped by the dynamics of capital accumulation and class relations.[1] Such an approach dominated the field of urban studies, which framed the “urban question” around who controls urban development and for whose benefit urban goods are. While this argument, which focuses on class and the city, is valid, it seems that it overlooks some wider power structures, such as colonialism, nationalism, or racism, which were later located at the core of critical urban studies. Consequently, in this essay, I would like to frame Palestine-Israel as an urban question for several reasons. First, the Palestine-Israel “conflict” is often framed through macro-geopolitics, religious, or historical lenses, overlooking the micro-spaces created within the colonial power relationships, such as cities. Secondly, urbanization in Palestine-Israel is deeply politicized, polarized along different attributes such as infrastructure, housing, land, and distribution of urban goods. Finally, despite being contested, cities provide spaces of encounter between Israelis and Palestinians, and while these are operating within unequal power relations, these might be the potential spaces for change, reconciliation, and decolonization.
In this paper, I will focus on what is defined as “mixed cities”, a term that describes situations in which Jewish and Arab communities occupy the same urban jurisdiction and might suggest the integration of society, while in reality, it is controversial. For many Israeli Jews, the idea of “mixed” spaces closes their hearts, as it contradicts the very essence of Israel as first a Jewish and then a democratic state. For others, the notion of mixed spaces opens their hearts, as these are the potential spaces for normality.
Importantly, political philosophy discusses the notion of the city as a political entity and traces the very idea of democracy to the setting of an urban community, stretching back to ancient Athens, through medieval cities, and to the recent flourishing industrial cities of the West. The notion of the polis, as Hannah Arendt put it, “… is not the city-state in its physical location; it is the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together, and its true space lies between people living together for this purpose, no matter where they happen to be.”[2] This line of argument illustrates the promise of the city and its potential to provide enabling space for the dissolution of hierarchical ethnic and class boundaries. The city is where ethnic communities tend to congregate and generate intellectual, political, and economic elites, playing host to key symbolic and cultural resources. Hence, conflicts between ethnic groups and different classes regularly occur in urban areas, with major consequences for the shaping of nations and states.
I attempt to undermine the term “mixed city,” which raises images of mutual membership while ignoring questions of power and resistance. As in other cases of settler-colonialism, a clear spatial and mental division exists between Arabs and Jews within Israel, and hence the occurrence of “mixed” spaces is both exceptional and involuntary. Rather, it has resulted from a historical process during which the Palestine-Israel territory, including cities that were previously Palestinian, has been Judaized. Three main types of “mixed cities” can be identified. The first refers to cities such as Haifa, where Jews and Arabs lived under the same municipality prior to the establishment of the state of Israel. The second includes cities such as Ramla, Acre, West Jerusalem, and Jaffa that were predominantly Palestinian prior to 1948, and that became dominated by Jewish migrant after the establishment of the state. A third category refers to new “Judaizing towns” that were established post-1948 for the Jewish population, such as Carmiel and Upper Nazareth, as well as Jewish East Jerusalem, and that have accommodated, in the last few decades, Palestinian internal migration.
A central issue that frames the production of “mixed cities” is settler-colonialism. Settler-colonial society is based on a project of settling newcomers on contested “frontiers” to achieve political control over those spaces, as well as access to key resources. It is premised on the colonial legacy in which Europeans immigrated to other territories, while often categorizing the new lands as terra nullius, to be seized and used by the modern, advanced nations of the world. Settler-colonial societies may be “external” or “internal.” The former relates to the organized movement of people across borders, often into other continents, as in the period of European colonialism. The latter refers to the planned ethnicization of “internal frontiers,” in which the state manipulates the local geography to further the interests of a dominant ethnic group.
Different researchers have identified Israel with the social and spatial patterns that characterize the settler-colonial model. In such societies, several broad “ethno-class” categories tend to form over time – the “founders,” the “immigrants,” the “locals,” and most recently, also the “foreigners”. The ethno-classes are created by the geographical process of expansion and settlement, and by the associated flows of resources and development, which are determined by, and hence reflect, the power relations between ethnic groups. This creates structural stratification, where ethnic origin and class affiliation largely overlap. In such settings, the founding (or “charter”) group gains dominant political, cultural, and economic status during the critical formative period of the new state. In Israel, this group is mainly composed of Ashkenazi Jews, the “founders” of Zionism and the state. The second group is comprised of various non-Ashkenazi “immigrants,” most notably the Mizrahi ethno-class and recently also Russian and Ethiopian Jews, who have joined the “founders” in their national project of settlement, albeit from an inferior economic and cultural position. The third group, Palestinian-Arabs, resided on the land for generations prior to the arrival of most settlers. Since 1948, they have been largely excluded from the process of constructing the new nation and are generally “trapped” in their inferior ethno-class status.
With reference to the model of settler-colonial society, Oren Yiftachel developed the concept of “ethnocracy” as a distinct colonial-type regime established to enhance the expansion and control of a dominant ethno-national group in multi-ethnic territories.[3] In such regimes, he suggests, ethnicity rather than citizenship forms the main criterion for distributing power and resources. As a result, such regimes typically display highly uneven levels of ethnic segregation as well as a process of polarizing ethnic politics. Ethnocratic regimes combine a degree of political openness and formal democratic representation with political structures that facilitate the seizure of contested territory by a dominant ethno-nation. During this process, the dominant group appropriates the state apparatus and marginalizes peripheral ethnic and national minorities.
Mixed cities in Palestine-Israel often reflect the wider ethnocratic conflicts. Urban politics usually revolves around struggles for space, economic resources, and political power, most commonly along ethno-national lines. However, mixed cities never fully replicate the dynamics of the wider conflict, mainly because the urban arena is governed by a combination of powers, regulations, and forces that are different from those prevailing in non-urban regions, including, for example, housing and “everyday infrastructure:”. The planning and implementation of frontier settlement is considered one of the highest achievements of the state of Israel, and, in some respects, the entire country became a frontier. Significantly, the idea of “the frontier” was also alive in Israel’s mixed cities, especially in the planning discourse, which commonly spoke about “the necessity” to build Jewish housing on, or immediately adjacent to, Arab urban neighborhoods.[4] In the plans of most mixed cities, specific goals appear around “keeping the Jewish character” and combating the “danger” of an increasing Arab population, which might create a “demographic threat” to the city.
This rationale received stark physical expression in mixed urban areas such as Akko, Haifa, Jaffa, Ramla, and Lod, where high-density Jewish neighborhoods were rapidly constructed around the small Arab enclaves that were left in what were previously Palestinian cities. The treatment of urban Arab neighborhoods as “internal frontiers” into which Jewish presence should expand turned all mixed Arab-Jewish cities in Israel into “urban ethnocracies.”[5] Arab presence was thus delegitimized and constantly portrayed as a “danger,” causing deep patterns of planning discrimination.
While ethnocracy was a relevant framework for understanding the urban dynamics in mixed cities, this is no longer the case. During the past two decades, urban processes have focused on demographic control, as well as intensifying militarization and a growing use of state violence, which transformed mixed cities (especially Jerusalem) from an ethnocracy into an urban apartheid. In our current market-driven, neo-liberal era, urban apartheid should be taken as a distinct regime based on urban trends such as privatization of space, gentrification, urban design, infrastructure development, and touristic planning. These practices substitute for explicit apartheid legislation (of a sort introduced in the South African case), bringing to the fore new participants in the apartheidization of the city, such as real estate developers and various interest groups.
My argument stems from the fact that contested urbanism has been studied along two separate lines, which are often understood as contradicting each other and studied separately: one is the ethno-national contested city, and the other is the neoliberal city. In the former, which dominates the discourse, the first generation of literature on the “Jerusalem conflict”, for instance, focused on the city being “divided,” as a “top-down” subject of Israeli colonial aspirations. This literature analyzed the power of the state from the perspective of its legislative, planning, and military mechanisms. Others offer a more nuanced understanding of urban processes, presenting Jerusalem as an arena of highly charged power relations, a contested space that is continuously produced and reproduced by “bottom-up” protest, global forces, and a wide spectrum of political institutions (NGOs, religious organizations, professionals).
Some of the processes discussed in the literature can be seen as even more radicalized: over the last few years, groups of Jewish settlers have colonized new houses in mixed cities within Israel, as well as in Jerusalem’s Palestinian neighborhoods such as Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan. Israeli military forces and Palestinian protestors alike were involved in escalating tension and clashes around mixed cities. But the logic behind the increased “security” measures fails to solve the conflict, facilitating, instead, the process of apartheidization.
The transition from an ethnocratic regime into urban apartheid can be demonstrated by the way in which the Palestinian Ghetto (the product of urban ethnocratic policies) has been turned into a frontier. James Ron proposes that a frontier is a territory that is not integrated into the realm of influence of a state’s legal apparatus, thus enabling an exercise of “illegal” power.[6] A Ghetto, on the other hand, despite being a space of exclusion, is still under the influence of the controlling state law. Ron considers 1992 Bosnia to be an example of a frontier, where violent actions included ethnic cleansing. He considers the Occupied Territories in the 1990s to have been a ghetto in relation to Israel and claims that despite the outbreak of the First Intifada in late 1987, the rough measures taken by Israel did not amount to expulsion or demographic engineering. I would suggest that this is no longer the case, for the Palestinian Ghetto in Jerusalem, and even in mixed cities within the Green Line, are undergoing a rapid frontierization (despite of their geographical location in the core of the territory), characterized by escalation in state violence, and the attempt to empty large Palestinian neighborhoods of their inhabitants and to solidify the separation between Jewish and Palestinian populations.
In parallel to the top-down politics, a more nuanced understanding of the urban dynamics at play can be gained by looking at a set of inversions, such as Palestinians moving to dwell in neighborhoods that were planned as Jewish colonies in Jerusalem or those moving to Jewish neighborhoods in Lod or Upper Nazareth.[7] Palestinian residents of these neighborhoods live there for banal – or “apolitical” – reasons, for instance, to improve their living standards. Yet at the same time, their movement is part of the territorial struggle for control and belonging. Palestinians who move from East Jerusalem to the city’s Jewish settlement neighborhoods, such as French Hill and Pisgat Zeev, are still urban denizens. The elements of the regime operating under the logic of the private market enable free movement, but they also coalesce with the juridical infrastructure that maintains the city’s Palestinian population in a status quo of inherent inequality.
To a certain extent, our discussion also draws from recent critical interventions in conceptualizing the post-colonial moment and the meaning of decolonization. Mixed cities are a messy project that operates on various scales that both contrast and intersect. To think of encounters in the apartheid city is to consider how the minute, everyday moments upon which the separation regime and the mechanisms of governance in the city are predicated can be ruptured and reaffirmed. What emancipatory powers can we identify in the apartheid city? It is a hard question. To what degree does the movement of Palestinians into Jewish districts truly enable mobility and rupture the settler colonial reality on the ground? At the very least, it emphasizes the importance of evaluating the unintended consequences of the neo-liberal ideology that dominates the urban transformation of the city and the scalar dimensions with which we evaluate the shape and form of apartheid today.
Here stand the very characteristics of the mixed-apartheid city (rather than national or regional scales); There is a constant tension between the desires of the Israeli state to fully control space, and the ongoing, increased presence of Palestinian inhabitants in everyday life within these territories. Such tension, stemming from the very nature of the urban (such as density, shared infrastructure, involuntary encounters in public space), is expressed in individuals’ aspirations to improve housing conditions, secure employment, use urban services, or even to consume goods.
There is, indeed, a paradox of colonial urbanism in Palestine-Israel. The forceful effect of the banalisation of occupation in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, and even within the Green Line, was orchestrated by Israeli law, planning, and state regulations that privilege Jewish citizens.[8] But the question is whether these processes are reversible. Can we imagine a future bi-national/shared cities by Israelis and Palestinians, Jews and Arabs, based on equal terms, administered by a decentralized, urban federal-type, democratic regime? Finally, why don’t we start the process of opening our hearts towards reconciliation or peace in urban settings where the everyday life of Israelis and Palestinians, despite being rooted in a colonial context, is intermingled?
A good political will on both sides is essential, enabling the decolonisation of space and governance, power sharing and reconciliation which will be based on the three principals: (i) The demarcation of a shared metropolis (in the case of Jerusalem) or shared municipalities (within the green line) under joint Israeli and PalestinianJewish and Arab sovereignty, and the formation of institutions that will enable these urban territories to function; (ii) The creation of a decentralized system of sub-municipalities or sun-districts to manage the daily urban life in the neighborhoods which make up these urban territories; and (iii) The definition of a small area around shared heritage sites (such as the Old City in Jerusalem) to be managed by shared councils (to be also responsible on the holy sites within these cities) to be composed of both local and international religious representatives.
Notes
- Harvey, D. 1989. The Urban Experience. Hopkins Press. ↑
- Arendt, H. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago University Press. 30–31. ↑
- Yiftachel, O. 2006. Ethnocracy: Land and Identity Politics in Israel/Palestine. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ↑
- Yacobi, H. 2009. The Jewish-Arab City: Spatio-Politics in a Mixed Community. Routledge, London ↑
- Yacobi 2009. ↑
- Ron, J. 2003. Frontiers and Ghettoes – State Violence in Serbia and Israel. University of California Press. ↑
- Shtern M., and Yacobi, H. 2018. “The Urban Geopolitics of Neighboring: Conflict, Encounter and Class in Jerusalem’s Settlement/Neighborhood.” Urban Geography. 1-21; Schwake, G., and Yacobi, H. 2023. “Decolonization, gentrification, and the settler-colonial city: Reappropriation and new forms of urban exclusion in Israel.” Environment and Planning C: Politics and space. https://doi.org/10.1177/23996544231208198 (opens in a new tab) ↑
- Yacobi, H., and Pullan, W., 2014. “The geopolitics of neighborhood: Jerusalem’s colonial space revisited.” Geopolitics 1-26. ↑
