Conflict over land is destroying the landscape. [From the Jerusalem Report]
By
Daniel Orenstein
In the northern Negev, a Beduin is building a house for his family, and at the same time staking a claim to the land. The house is “unrecognized,” having been built on public land without government consent. About half of the Negev’s 120,000 Beduin live in unrecognized villages, and these villages are proliferating. Across the wadi from the Beduin, a Jewish rancher is setting up a homestead. Although it violates planning guidelines, the ranch gets encouragement from government agencies. The rancher is allowed to settle there to prevent Beduin encroachment. In what amounts to another display of ownership born of lack of alternatives, the Beduin are growing wheat on public land and grazing livestock in nature reserves. The government responds sporadically by spraying herbicides, confiscating herds, and occasionally demolishing homes. But fearing a “Beduin Intifada” if they fully enforce the law, government institutions join the lawlessness by condoning illicit Jewish ranching instead. The Jewish National Fund joins by bulldozing hillsides and planting trees, despite the environmental harm it does, to establish its presence. This conflict over land is destroying the landscape. This is a small chapter in a contentious history of a struggle to secure land within Israel’s pre-1967 borders, a less publicized but no less important struggle than the one in the Palestinian territories. Since 1948, policy makers have regarded areas with Arab majorities as a threat, where residents may become increasingly nationalistic and irredentist. For many, the riots that followed Ariel Sharon’s visit to the temple mount in October 2000 confirmed these fears. So Jewish communities were scattered across the countryside — from the development towns of the 1950s, to the Galilee mitzpim (lookouts) of the 1980s, to the “star” communities including Tzur Yigal, Bat Hefer and Lapid, northeast of Tel Aviv of the 1990s. Where Jews couldn’t be settled, forests, army training grounds and nature reserves were established. Meanwhile, expansion of Arab towns and villages was restricted by diminutive municipal boundaries, with little public land and virtually no public housing. Arab communities have had two options: Either build upward or use private agricultural land for development. The demographic results of these policies are mixed. There are now Jews living in most corners of Israel, but at a political and environmental cost. These land-use policies have not made the country more secure, as they have caused Israel’s Arabs to become increasingly estranged. Ben-Gurion University geographer Oren Yiftachel estimates that a third of Israeli Arab protests are attributable to land use concerns. The Arab national protest day — Land Day — focuses on land expropriations and unequal access to land. Fear of irredentism may have become a self-fulfilling prophesy. The environmental results of these land-use practices have been catastrophic. Politically driven settlement patterns have resulted in the loss of recreational space as well as aesthetic and historical landscapes, extirpation of plants and animals, loss of areas for recharging our aquifers. Scattering small Jewish communities has been a terribly inefficient way to use land reserves. Aside from taking an absurd amount of space per capita, infrastructure — water, electric lines, sewage — must be provided to each small community. Residents rely on automobile transportation, increasing demand for roads and worsening traffic and air pollution. The population of Israel is almost seven million, and open space is becoming a scarce commodity. Israel’s planners are acutely aware of this fact, and are working accordingly. The preservation of open spaces receives high priority in Israel’s major planning documents: Israel 2020 and National Outline Plan (NOP) 35. Yet, the implementation of our best environmental plans continues to be frustrated by the ethnic struggle over land. Witness the Prime Minister’s plan issued last year for new Jewish communities to be scattered between Arab population centers. One such community, planned for the midst of the Gilboa nature reserve, has already received approval of the Nature and Parks Authority. Several more are planned along the green line in the Northern Negev and other areas that NOP 35 has designated as critical open space. Land is the reason for the conflict, but using it as a weapon means that the concurrent loss of open space will continue — unless land-use policies become equitable. Both Jews and Arabs require a variety of residential alternatives to meet their needs and both will have to settle for medium- to high-density communities. Israeli Arabs hear the constant refrain that there is no land available to develop, that small settlements are unfeasible for provision of services, and that they must urbanize. Meanwhile, they watch the establishment of dozens of small Jewish communities, and Jewish-owned single-family ranches continue to appear around them. When the division of land is equitable, law enforcement can become more even-handed, and neither Jew nor Arab will be allowed to build illegally. The moshav farmers with their new (and illegal) warehouses built on agricultural land will face the same prosecution as the Beduin farmers that plow public land. Currently, unequal implementation of laws discredits both the laws and the democratic institutions that enforce them. Environmental degradation and the loss of open space in particular, are inextricably linked to the Israeli-Arab conflict. As long as the conflict continues, long-term environmental land-use priorities will continue to be sacrificed to so-called immediate political-security concerns. Ironically, in this conflict over land, the land is a victim. Daniel Orenstein is a PhD candidate in environmental studies at Brown University
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