The great land robbery

"It's hard to build, it's hard to buy, it's hard to plan and it's even hard to renovate," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at the annual Caesarea conference last Thursday, elaborating on the difficulties of even enclosing an apartment balcony. With embarrassing superficiality, he quoted from a document drafted by the Finance Ministry for the Israel Lands Administration, entitled "The land reform - questions and answers." The document brims with rosy promises, and its purpose is clear: to obscure the unprecedented step the government is planning with regard to our rarest and most important national resource - land.

Under the guise of implementing the Gadish Committee's recommendations on the need to streamline the ILA, the government is preparing to divest itself of its own - and, even worse, the public's - sovereignty over the planning and use of land. This includes everything from the scenic landscape to the water economy to the distribution of green or agricultural lands versus crowded urban areas, center versus periphery, cities versus villages. And all this is being done hastily, via a problematic use of the Economic Arrangements Law - in defiance of a sharply worded opinion by the Knesset's legal adviser, which stated that the Arrangements Law is not the appropriate vehicle for carrying out a reform of this magnitude.

The treasury document promises that privatizing the land - in other words, transferring control of all the most expensive land in the center of the country from the ILA, meaning the state, to whomever wants to buy it - is a marvelous growth engine that will reduce home prices and, once and for all, eliminate the cumbersome planning bureaucracy.

This is a confused and misleading grab bag of claims. Housing prices in Israel are indeed high, but young couples could be aided via the construction of subsidized rental apartments, exemptions from real estate taxes and other measures. Selling expensive land in the center of the country to private entrepreneurs is actually liable to raise the price of apartments - something that has happened before. Entrepreneurs who own land generally prefer to use various means, some more legitimate than others, to enhance its value and then resell it, or to build only in their spare time. The collapse of Heftsiba ought to serve as a warning on this issue.

"Every leaseholder will be able to buy his apartment," the treasury promises. But an amendment passed in response to the Gadish recommendations has been enabling this since 2006. What the reform does is alter the relevant clause from "the sale of a dwelling in a high-density construction project" (meaning a leaseholder can buy his own apartment) to "the sale of real estate assets" (meaning anyone can buy any such asset). It even extends the possibilities to purchasing land for which no zoning plan exists! In other words, everyone will be able to buy as much state land as they please, obtain speedy authorization to use unzoned land and build whatever they please. Okay, not everyone. Just every one of the five wealthy tycoons who in any case buy up everything in this country.

Yet this will not apply to the Negev and the Galilee. The land there will be handed over to the Jewish National Fund, whose representatives on the ILA have already approved the reform. In these regions, where those in need of housing are mainly Arabs, the JNF will clasp the land close to the Jewish breast. But in the center, private real estate entrepreneurs will have a party at the expense of infrastructure and public needs. Anyone who does not believe this should visit the scandalous expansion that David Appel has built in Ginaton, while bypassing all those planning processes and zoning plans that the reform seeks to eliminate.

The cumbersome processes that Netanyahu complained of are even more burdensome in the countries we usually envy. It is hard to find another country where the enclosure of balconies, the glorification of ugliness and the lack of consideration for others are as rampant as they are in Israel. In New York or Amsterdam you cannot even replace a windowpane without a permit from the municipality.

Overall planning in Israel is the responsibility of one of the country's most professional agencies, the Interior Ministry's Planning Administration. The local planning committees, which are responsible for filling in the details, indeed suffer from various weaknesses, of which the most important is the dangerous involvement of politicians hungry for real estate development. But the reform will only make this problem worse because in the "Lands Authority" that will be established in place of the ILA, the sole decision-makers will be representatives of the government and the JNF (with the minister in charge of the agency even having veto rights). The agencies responsible for planning, citizens' rights, upholding the law and preserving the environment will all be left outside.

The reform will produce neither an engine nor growth, neither homes for all nor greater efficiency. Instead, it will produce anarchy in land planning, reserves and regulation, for the benefit of tycoons close to the government - and who, from now on, will also own an abundance of private property and land.

A bank whose managers have sinned can be nationalized by the government. But how can the government return lands to the public once a holiday village, a country club and a pool have already been built on them?