When the policy of discrimination fails

Last Yom Kippur, the city of Acre was an exploding tinderbox. Riots sparked by nationalism shook the seaside city and property was damaged throughout.

Over in the Upper Nazareth, reports have been streaming in of racist incidents against Arabs. Moving onto Carmiel, a tender for the sale of 300 apartments in the city was canceled, because most of the people signing up were Arabs.

Afula, Maalot and Be'er Sheva are all contending with the trend of Arabs moving into cities. The trend calls for a rethinking of the issues facing mixed cities in Israel, a complex and explosive problem that the planning authorities have utterly failed to handle.

For years, the planning authorities had tried to balance the growing Arab populations in Israel's cities, with growing populations of Jews. This was done by building new neighborhoods for security personnel, for example.

These new neighborhoods, which aimed to bring in established Jewish populations, were the remnant of an anachronistic policy that aimed to preserve the Jewish identity of the cities. What policymakers never did was contend with the real problem - the absence of long-term planning for the Arab sector.

"There is no acknowledgement of the fact that the mixed cities are actually mixed, and shared," says Rassam Khamaisi, professor of geography at the University of Haifa and president of the Israel Geographical Association. The underlying concept is to make these cities "more Jewish," as though the Arab communities were mere appendages, he elaborates.

The entry of Arab populations to upper Nazareth is not a threat: It falls into the category of middle-class mobility, he says. Despite the number of people who have moved into the city, there's still an argument about whether to give that population a primary school, Khamaisi adds.

The process of urbanization brings Arab populations nearer to central Israel, but national planning policy doesn't offer solutions for their housing, Khamaisi says. The upshot is distress and tension.

Haim Yacobi, an architect from the Politics and Government faculty at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, has written about Israel's mixed cities - his book will be coming out shortly (in Hebrew). In his view, the problem begins with the definition of a city as "mixed."

"My research focused on mixed cities inside the Green Line, mainly on processes in Lod from the time of the [British] mandate until the 2000s," Yacobi says. "The emphasis was on planning and its influence on ethnic relations in the city. One of the claims is that the term 'mixed cities' was awkward, because in fact all cities are mixed - it's always a heterogenic space, not homogenous. In Israel, the issue of mixed cities is interesting, because the political and Zionist concept is that space is homogenous, and through Judaification of space, there was an attempt to create homogenous spaces."

Arab populations suffer from this discrimination at both the urban level and the national level, says Khamaisi. "The Jewish population objects to the drift of Arab populations into Jewish areas, but the Arab population is growing and there are no solutions for it. The reality is that space is mixed, but planning doesn't afford the Arab population opportunities to develop."

Arab towns in Israel's rural space suffer from a shortage of areas for future growth and development. Take Sakhnin, which borders on the Misgav regional council: It has difficulty obtaining permits to increase its area, to handle the natural growth of its population.

Nimrod Luz, cultural geographer and lecturer at the Western Galilee College and at the Max Stern Academic College of Emek Yezreel, studied the struggle over land between Misgav and Sakhnin as a test case of the planning dialog between the majority and minority in Israel.

"In 2004-2005, the Interior Ministry set up an inquiry that looked at the border between the city of Sakhnin and the Misgav regional council," he says. "The committee's conclusions included the transfer of 1,700 dunams from Misgav to Sakhnin." But nothing has been done since the conclusions were delivered in 2005, he says.

The result would seem to be illegal construction. In a study appearing in the emergency report following riots in October 2000, Luz wrote: "Protracted discrimination over the years is constantly gnawing at the basis of legitimization of the ruling authorities in Israel in the eyes of the Arab population, and contributes to a norm of law-breaking with respect to planning and construction.

"Land is the main lever for a town's development and growth," Luz continued. "The existence or absence of land available for planning directly affects the quality of life and lifestyle of residents, and their ability to realize their ambitions in social, economic and personal areas."

One understands that when a city such as Sakhnin doesn't receive lands for development, a moment inevitably comes when the population has to find other housing solutions - which results in migration to cities such as Carmiel or Upper Nazareth.

Israel's veteran mixed cities, such as Acre and Lod, arose without planning, says Yacobi. During the 1980s, the authorities began to understand that the demographic balance in these cities was changing in favor of the Arabs.

"The tool of planning is the most effective tool to create a homogenous Jewish space," he says. "When it turned out that the demographic balance wasn't being maintained in these cities, the state started to use the planning mechanism in a discriminatory fashion: It developed the Jewish space and encouraged the Arabs to leave."

And when the Arab population realized what was happening, it began to build illegally, Yacobi explains. "It began as a means to survive, and later took on a political character, with a dimension of protest: 'We are here whether you like it or not, because we have nowhere else to go.'"

The planning policy in these cities, which tried to "correct" the demographic balance, wound up creating a social patchwork. These cities have neighborhoods in which a kind of ghetto of people from the former Soviet states has been created, or a population of Arabs who feel discriminated against, or veteran Jewish populations who don't have the means to move elsewhere.

In Yacobi's opinion, the lesson is that discriminatory policy can't work: all it does is create social trouble.

"The main solution is to acknowledge that these cities are shared, at the urban and national level," urges Khamaisi. "At the level of planning, neighborhoods should be planned that allow mobility of the Arab population into the towns, and provide solutions for the middle classes. The Arab population should become part of the familiar, legitimate landscape.

Multi-culturalism has to be acknowledged and the concept that the Jewish population comes first, creating alienation, has to be abolished."

Proper planning based on true study of the facts can improve the situation of the people in these cities, and mainly, reduce friction. "There is no choice," says Khamaisi. "The state has both Arab and Jewish populations, and the tools to create development for both populations have to be found.

"I believe that fiery, racist dialog does not contribute to either the Jewish or Arab population. A dialog of legitimacy and positivism needs to be created, which could advance development on both sides that would help at the regional and local levels. It is important to build infrastructure for life together, and for opportunities. A weak population is a recipe for collision, and strengthening the population strengthens the city."

Yacobi chooses to be optimistic. In his opinion, mixed cities have a healthy potential for Israeli society, as long as that policy creates equal opportunities and is not discriminatory. In contrast to the rural areas, where tensions between Arabs and Jews arise over land and the opportunity to advance, and are therefore more explosive, in the mixed cities the two people already live side by side, sometimes for decades.

"I believe that instead of looking at this as a problem, we should look at the potential," Yacobi advises. "If Arabs are happy in the mixed cities, Jews will be, too, and then we'll have cities with strong populations. Equitable planning policy will turn these cities into normal ones with a flourishing bourgeoisie, like in other cities that aren't called mixed. Anybody who thinks that's utopian should look at the reality and see that discriminatory policy has failed. Now we have to give another policy a chance."