Beyond the Two-State Solution by Yehouda Shenhav

Author:Yehouda Shenhav
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley

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It is impossible to discuss land in the political sense, as a basis for sovereignty, without considering it as a means of production and a capital asset. Any analysis failing to entwine these two aspects of the land will be sorely lacking. Israeli social democracy is selective because it insists on separating the two.

Since the early 1990s, the state has been allowing Jewish farmers – especially in kibbutzim and state-owned farming land – to unfreeze land, making real-estate use of the land once reserved for agricultural needs. The explanation for the new policy was ostensibly the lack of housing for the newly arrived immigrants from the former Soviet Unions. The agricultural elite fought to cement this change in laws and regulations that would turn the Jewish farmers into landowners. This includes a bill entitled “Cementing Farmers’ Land Rights,” which applies to 1 million acres out of the 4 million within the Green Line. Allocating most of the land reserves within the Green Line to a small group of Zionist farmers has no social, moral or economic justification. It reduces even further the chances of returning some of the lands expropriated from Palestinian owners or allowing the owners to return, and increases even more the inequality between land-owning Jews – a mostly Ashkenazi agrarian aristocracy – and Israel’s Palestinians, as well as the gaps between the landowners and the Second and Third Israel.

The privileges regime runs Israeli space through the system of regional councils, which operate on policy developed in settlers’ societies. Not a single new Palestinian community has been built in Israel since 1948 (excluding the Beduine towns), and over 100 existing communities were declared “unrecognized.” Between 1995 and 2001, only 0.25 percent of the land was made available for Arab use, while only 2.5 to 3.5 percent is owned by Arabs, despite the latter being some 17 percent of the population.129 Palestinian citizens of Israel have no access to the land, to the planning departments, to the Israel Land Administration, or to the supra-national organizations managing the lands, like the JNF and the Jewish Agency. The division of land in the Galilee discloses not only disproportionate distortions between Arabs and Jews, but also between Jews and Jews, based on ethnicity and class. In the Galilee, 63 percent of the lands are in the jurisdiction of regional councils with a Jewish Ashkenazi majority, and are populated by a meager 6 percent of the area’s population. Only 21 percent of the land is in the jurisdiction of local councils with a Mizrachi majority. The situation of the Arab population there is considerably worse: Arab local councils control 16 percent of the land, while Arabs form 72 percent of the population.130

Segregation within the Green Line is no less than the segregation across it. In fact, the more complex and ambiguous the “exterior” border becomes (“fence,” “wall,” “disengagement,” “retreat,” “reinforcement”), the tougher and clearer are the internal borders between ethnic and economic groups. The book Separation, edited by Chaim Yaakobi and Shelly Cohen,

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