The Jewish-Arab City: Spatio-Politics in a Mixed Community by Haim Yacobi

Author:Haim Yacobi [Yacobi, Haim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General, Social Science, Regional Studies
ISBN: 9780415845502
Google: 6wE_lgEACAAJ
Goodreads: 17269486
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2009-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 4.3 Advertisement for Ramat Elyashiv (pamphlet).

of Jewish inhabitants in Lod that destroys the religious community in the city … and strengthens the Arab population in the city” (www.bemuna.co.il/lod).

In an advertisement, this housing project is presented as a place where “we build Zionism in the center,” located “thirty-five minutes from Jerusalem, fifteen minutes from Tel Aviv.” The specific location of the project is in Lod’s city center, which has been subject to the process of Arabization. The ad goes on to claim that this housing project “will provide the new inhabitants both communal security and openness to the wider community, the environment in Lod and beyond.”

Here again, spatio-political processes and discourses that characterize the colonization of the occupied territories also frame the Jewish–Arab mixed space. Let me suggest that these attitudes stem from the concern that a process of defamiliarization with these mixed spaces that undergo a process of Arabization may occur within the wider Israeli public. In this context, I will refer to Feige’s claim (2002: 13) that territory can remain under the control of the state while its citizens deny that they belong to it. Although Feige refers to the efforts to attach the occupied territories to the Israeli territorial consensus, the cases discussed in this chapter point to how the geopolitical and historical circumstances reflect such an attitude within the green line as well. Moreover, it seems that Israeli politics that focus on the notion of separation since the Oslo agreement (Gordon 2008), an issue that has been pushed forward due to the construction of the separation wall, became a political technology of mediating conflict.

Indeed, discourses and practices of border demarcation infiltrate the geographical core of Israel. Spatial separation between Jewish and Arab citizens becomes visible in the form of walls, barricades and roads. The fear of losing demographic and consciousness control brings practices from “there,” such as Hitnachalut, to “here.” In this context, it is interesting to refer to the work of Newman (1996), who points to the manipulation by which the settlements in the occupied territories were constructed tangibly and symbolically as legitimate suburbs of Israeli cities within the green line. These settlements became an attractive destination for the Israeli middle class who could not afford the bourgeois dream of a house and a garden within the green line. Yet the process in Lod is different; the Hitnachalut in the core of the country, in Lod, is first the expression of an ideological program that does not aim to blur its political agenda, i.e., Judaizing a Jewish–Arab mixed city. Thus the urban politics between both parties in the city is organized in a binary manner that is based on fear, exclusion and resistance that puts aside municipal issues such as education, infrastructure and other common interests. Indeed, following Agamben (2005), this chapter points to the way in which political norms that were once exceptional have now become the norm.

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