by Maj. Gen. (res.) Gershon Hacohen
Without renewed Jewish settlement momentum in the land that is still available, the police and law enforcement agencies will be unable to alter this unlawful reality.
Unrecognized Bedouin village in the Negev, photo via Wikipedia
BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 1,630, July 7, 2020
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Israel’s National
Outline Plan (NOP 35) has effectively frozen Jewish settlement in the
Galilee and the Negev and spurred massive illegal building and land
occupancy by the Negev’s Bedouin community. Without renewed Jewish
settlement momentum in the land that is still available, the police and
law enforcement agencies will be unable to alter this unlawful reality.
It is a historical irony that nearly a century
after a string of British White Papers (in 1922, 1930, and 1939) sought
to thwart the Jewish national rebirth by imposing draconian restrictions
on Jewish land purchase and settlement—in flagrant violation of
Britain’s obligation under a 1922 League of Nations mandate to
facilitate the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine—an
official Israeli national development plan is effectively having exactly
the same effect.
Approved by the government in 2005, the National
Outline Plan (NOP 35) seeks to guide Israel’s spatial development in the
first two decades of the 21st century while taking into
account demographic forecasts, spatial infrastructure, and trends in
land and site preservation. In reality, the plan has effectively frozen
Jewish settlement in the Galilee and the Negev, leading in turn to
massive illegal building and land occupancy by Bedouin in the Negev.
The police, the military, and the other law
enforcement agencies suffer from a perennial shortage of manpower and
resources, and from the lack of a regular presence in these lands. What
is required is the constant, active presence of Jewish farmers and
residents as well as an ongoing momentum of legal expansion.
The approval and implementation of the National
Outline Plan as a long-term master plan was an under-the-radar
revolution. Who doesn’t want to preserve green spaces and protect them
from development and construction? Under the cover of a seemingly
irreproachable idea, a quiet revolution was conducted.
Subsequent governments can decide, as they did in
September 2011, to set up new localities, but implementing that decision
depends on the approval of the National Planning Authority of the
Interior Ministry. NOP 35 explicitly stipulates that such matters are
not the exclusive domain of the government: “A regional outline plan,
intended to establish a new community, will be implemented only if…a
planning institution is convinced of the justification for establishing
the new community.” The government is thus at the mercy of professional
functionaries. It can push for a settlement policy but not decide on
one.
NOP 35 thus echoes Britain’s White Papers in two
respects. First, it established constraints that make setting up new
Jewish communities a labyrinthine task that gives bureaucrats the power
to block government decisions. An example is the snail’s pace of the
procedural aspects of building the Trump Heights community in the Golan.
Second, for many communities, including in the
Negev and the Galilee, NOP 35 puts a limit on the number of Jewish
households (300-500). This traps most of the communities in a planning
vise that precludes the possibility of growth. The outcome is that an
array of Jewish communities in the Land of Israel cannot grow
organically.
What chance is there, for example, for a few dozen
Jewish families in Hararit, an isolated Galilee locality that is
forbidden to surpass 400 households, to put down roots and ever become a
multigenerational community whose children will build their lives
there? Or consider the two adjacent localities of Tuba-Zangariyye and
Kfar HaNassi. In 1955, each numbered 200 families. By 2005,
Tuba-Zangariyye had expanded to 1,000 families while Kfar HaNassi’s size
remained the same as it was in 1955. For the long term, the National
Outline Plan has set targets of up to 400 households for Kfar HaNassi
and up to 10,000 for Tuba-Zangariyye.
On the overt, declarative level, NOP 35 was
intended to protect green spaces. In reality, it has achieved the
opposite effect by serving, deliberately or not, as a barrier to Jewish
settlement and opening the floodgates for illegal building and
settlement expansion by the Negev Bedouins.
Is it still possible to establish new Jewish
localities in Israel? When in September 2011 the government decided to
set up 10 Negev localities, it was harshly criticized by the Israeli
media. According to an editorial in Haaretz:
The [vastly empty] Negev does not need new
[Jewish] localities, which will gobble up land, infrastructure, and
budgets and destroy a region with great ecological importance. The
communities will not solve the housing shortage in Israel. At most they
will allow a few hundred families to get better housing in a remote
area. The building of the new localities will also cause an unnecessary
confrontation with the Bedouins in the Negev.
The question arises: At what point does a
sovereign state, acting in its own territory on its own authority,
become obligated to avoid implementing its policy for fear of
confrontation with dissenting or lawless minority groups?
Maariv dismissed the plan to establish 10 communities by saying, “The tower and stockade days [of the 1930s] are gone.” Yediot Ahronot
called the plan “an example of recklessness” and added: “Our problem is
a tiny living space, which means we have to plan population
distribution with great caution. Hopefully the warning against gradually
shrinking open spaces, which is sounded the world over, will also reach
the ears of our cabinet ministers.” In a world with 7 billion people, Yediot asserted, green spaces for the production of food must be preserved.
Yet the paper had no criticism of the intensive
building on the infinitely smaller, much more densely populated Sharon
Plain, whose land is far more fit for food production than the Negev’s
rocky soil. Construction is proceeding apace on fertile agricultural
land in Ramat Hasharon, Raanana, and Netanya without stirring any
controversy.
The 10-locality plan was blocked. Meanwhile, the
Negev’s open spaces are being closed by massive illegal construction in
Bedouin areas. In institutional language, this expansion is known by the
euphemism “unrecognized communities.”
Part of the reason for Israel’s loss of
sovereignty in the Negev is the difficulty of enforcing law and order
there. Without the renewal of Jewish settlement momentum in the land
that is still available, the police and law enforcement agencies will
not be able to alter the lawless reality.
This is an edited version of an article published in Makor Rishon on June 19.
Source: https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/israel-white-paper/
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