On Apartheid Planning

Scholars have shown how colonial powers use cartography, urban planning regulations and land policies as tools for controlling and dominating people and natural resources, resulting in segregation and enclaving of controlled communities², but never with the intensity that we see in Occupied Palestine. Over the past 73 years, the Israeli State Apparatus has manufactured laws that amount to nothing less than apartheid.³ These laws have granted Jewish Israeli citizens  a superior status as compared to Palestinians when it comes to civil rights, residency rights, access to land, and freedom to move and build. Spatially, the Zionist project in Palestine has consisted of what Israeli urbanist Oren Yiftachel has called the systematic Judaization of the land, at the expense of its native populations. The project has implied a forcible transfer of Palestinians to make way for the building of illegal Israeli settlements. It has also prohibited millions of Palestinian refugees from returning to their homes, only to confiscate their homes and lands on the grounds of their (forced) absence. 

Land policy and zoning regulations are integral elements of the Zionist colonial project. Land regulations build legal fictions, such as the “absentee law”, to justify the appropriation of Palestinian land and seizure as Israeli state land. They have led to systematic land confiscation and dispossession. In addition, zoning regulations deliberately restrict Palestinian rural and urban development, while enabling Israeli colonial expansion.⁴ Consequently, numerous Palestinian towns and villages are confined by so-called security zones, nature reserves, national parks, and infrastructural corridors that restrict people’s movements. For example, around 150,000 Palestinian residents of Jerusalem have been physically separated from the city by a 700km concrete wall, which Israel started building in 2002.⁵ Such policies left the densely populated towns and villages with little room to expand and promoted the occupation of the area built on the ruins of Palestinian villages destroyed in 1948.⁶ 

History tells us that people resist colonial planning and Palestine is no exception. The impact of apartheid planning and policies that have evolved over the years under the military occupation of Israel may have planted its own seeds of destruction. The hostile environments of borders, walls, gates and security checkpoints have turned into terrains of confrontation, protest and reclamation. The deeper the segregation and the fragmentation, the greater the frontiers of the confrontation. Thus, in the past two weeks, we witnessed mobilizations and united protests throughout Occupied Palestine within each of these inscribed borders from the green line, to the entry of Umm AlFahm, to the dividing line in Jerusalem, to the separation wall, threshold of sanctuaries, checkpoints and segregated roads. 

The state-sanctioned terrorism of the Israeli war machine against Palestinians is losing its legitimacy as its blatant violations of human rights become more apparent by the day. In the past weeks, thousands of protestors have taken to the streets around the world, mobilizing to denounce Israeli settler-colonialism. They are joined by a recent statement by planners and architects who have expressed their solidarity with the Palestinian cause. There is no doubt that peace can only be achieved with the resolution of military colonial planning, and, for that to happen, planners and architects need to be critically involved in recovering the progressive potentials of their profession and its commitments to inclusion and social justice. For the Beirut Urban Lab, this remains the core element of our research agenda and advocacy.