Settle and Rule: The Evolution of the Israeli National Project

Abstract

Settling in Palestine is an integral part of the national revival of the Jewish nation, which eventually led to the establishment of the state of Israel. This paper defines the Practical Zionism territorial strategy as a Settle and Rule mechanism that evolved through four periods of development, from the pre-state era to the post-state era: first, the agricultural settlements of the 1920s and 1930s (cultivate and rule); second, the 1950s' industrial towns (industrialize and rule); third, the suburbs of the 1980s (suburbanize and rule) and; and fourth, the recent corporate-led development (financialize and rule). This paper argues that the national settlement mission transformed according to the changes in the modes of production and the interests of the ruling hegemony. Therefore, it focuses on four different national plans for the frontier area of the Galilee and analyses the layout of the proposed new settlements and the architecture of the housing units. The [Bio]Politics of the Built EnvironmentThe built environment is the human-made space in which we all conduct our everyday life. Being a social and cultural artifact, it reproduces the relations of production of the social context in which it was made. These relations are dictated by the leading political, cultural, social, and economic hegemony, which according to Antonio Gramsci, controls

The Americanisation of Israeli housing practices

“…These new settlements consisted of detached houses that were accessible only by privately owned car. 45 The story of Kochav Yair is similar, but also rather different from previous settlements in the area. It was initially promoted by an ideological settling group of veterans of the right-wing Herut-Beitar movement.…”

“…6 With the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, the geopolitical role of the development of new settlements was retained. 7 The young state established a series of new towns and villages in frontier zones that were meant to secure the country's new borders, and reinforce its control over the area. Moreover, as Meron Benvenisti, Walid Khalidi, Saree Makdisi, Oren Yiftachel, and many other scholars have argued, new settlements were built over former Palestinian villages, which were abandoned during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.…”

The metropolitanization of Israel's settlement policy: The colonization of the West Bank as a strategy of spatial restructuring

“…In the last few years, however, scholars have started to considerably broaden their analysis of ISP, focusing on the dynamics of the production of space (Schwake, 2021a, Schwake, 2020a, Schwake, 2021bShoked, 2020;Abreek-Zubiedat & Nitzan-Shiftan, 2021;Rokem & Allegra, 2016;Yacobi & Pullan, 2014) on the heterogeneity of settlers population (Allegra, 2017;Dalsheim, 2011;Harel, 2017;Hirschhorn, 2017), including studies on the haredi settler community (Rubin, 2015;Cahaner, 2017;Shoked, 2019); on the political economy of settlements' proliferation (Allweil, 2020;Maggor, 2015;Schwake 2020c;Schwake 2021c) and the labour relations with the Palestinians employed in the settlement's economy (Farsakh, 2005;Paz-Fuchs & Ronen, 2017;Vickery, 2017;Siegman, 2018); on the environmental and infrastructural dimension of colonization (Braverman, 2021); and on the process of banalization of Jewish presence in the West Bank Weiss, 2017), including deliberate settlers' strategies in this respect (Grosglik, Handel, & Monterescu, 2021;Handel, Rand, & Allegra, 2015;Isaac, 2018;McGonigle, 2019;Monterescu & Handel, 2020).…”

“…The same shift took place in Israel in the same period (Schwake, 2020c(Schwake, , 2020b. Since the mid-1970s, Israeli planners abandoned the principle of population dispersal in support of an approach that emphasized the concentration of economic activities in a limited number of core areas, and the provision of the infrastructures needed to lay the ground for market-oriented development.…”

Supply-side territoriality: reshaping a geopolitical project according to economic means

“…Following the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, these efforts focused on settling the newly formed borders, depopulated Palestinian towns and predominantly Arab areas that constituted the new 'internal frontiers' (Yiftachel, 1996, p. 493). Territoriality, therefore, became an integral part of the state's mode of production and an essential component in the development of the local economy and its industry (Schwake, 2018(Schwake, , 2020a. With the privatization of the local economy during the 1970s, Israeli territoriality was merged with the state's new market-oriented agenda.…”