From Sharon to Sharon

Spatial planning and separation regime in Israel/Palestine

תקציר

Two personalities, more than any other, represent the history of Israeli spatial planning: Arieh and Ariel Sharon. Both have had an enormous impact on the political, military and legal geographies of Israel/Palestine. Despite notable political differences, the two men led Israeli planning to promote a similar spatial strategy throughout the last six years, encapsulated by the acronym SEEC (Settlement/Security, Expansion, Ethnicization, Control/Commercialization). This strategy has provided a meta-planning framework for the contested Judaization of Israel/Palestine. The paper uses Gramscian, (post)colonial and Lefebvrian approaches to conceptualize planning as a mediator between hegemonic and oppressed forces in a ceaseless societal process of space production. It argues that the SEEC strategy was not merely a guide for spatial policies, or an important element in the project of Jewish liberation, but a critical foundation of a new regime, reshaping both space and society and determining key elements of citizenship, such as property, mobility, rights and power. Hence, the Sharonian planning strategy has constituted a central pillar in Israel‘s ethnocratic regime, by granting professional legitimacy to the planned geography of "separate and unequal". This has become part of the infrastructure of a process of  "creeping apartheid" now evident in Israel/Palestine.