Abstract
Frontier settlements played a key role in the formation of Israeli society and its territorial project. In the pre-statehood years and during the first decades after the establishment of the state of Israel, settling the frontiers formed one of the main national objectives, securing the nation’s control over space while promoting a unified local identity. Appropriately, settlement practices and discourse focused on pioneer rural communities and industrial towns, with a clear emphasis on housing units and residential estates. With the privatisation of the local economy, the national settlement development mechanism was privatised as well, the former state-led enterprise was harnessed to the interests of the market, and the earlier focus on housing was thus replaced by a property-oriented approach. This article studies the transformations in Israeli frontier settlement practices while analysing their changing modes of spatial production and the terminology they relied on. Studying the development process of Tzur-Yitzhak and Harish, two Israeli localities on the border with the occupied Palestinian West Bank, this article demonstrates how they first emerged as small-scale rural settlements and eventually turned into corporate-led projects. Presenting the geopolitical and societal interests behind both case studies, as well as the manner their proposed planning altered over the years, this article illustrates the transforming modes of production and the evolution of the local settlement terminology, demonstrating the shift from a pioneer-oriented to a market-led frontier settlement.
Highlights
Conquering the Frontier “The Conquest of the Desert” was the theme of an inter‐ national exhibition hosted by the state of Israel in 1953, representing the main achievements of its first five years and reflecting its main ideology
Palestine was a frontier area to be domesticated by “blooming the desert” (Sufian, 2007, p. 263) while simultaneously fos‐ tering the formation of a new national Jewish identity that is spiritually and physically connected to the local landscape. This idea corresponded with the well‐known concept of “a land without a people to a people with‐ out a land,” portraying Palestine as an empty, undevel‐ oped, and unsettled area waiting for redemption (Said, 1979, p. 9)
Not sur‐ prisingly, unofficial reports of the Ministry of Construction and Housing (MCH) estimate that half of the apartments in Harish were bought as assets by investors (Levi & Bahor‐Nir, 2018; Tzur, 2018), relying upon derivative rents to generate profits, demonstrat‐ ing the financialisation of the efforts to domesticate the Israeli frontier
Summary
Conquering the Frontier “The Conquest of the Desert” was the theme of an inter‐ national exhibition hosted by the state of Israel in 1953, representing the main achievements of its first five years and reflecting its main ideology. 263) while simultaneously fos‐ tering the formation of a new national Jewish identity that is spiritually and physically connected to the local landscape. This idea corresponded with the well‐known concept of “a land without a people to a people with‐ out a land,” portraying Palestine as an empty, undevel‐ oped, and unsettled area waiting for redemption The termi‐ nology of this discourse constantly evolved, adapting to the new territorial tools and the modes of produc‐ tion the Israeli geopolitical project relied on. Architectural drawings, protocols, policy reports, and marketing strategies, this article examines the trans‐ forming modes of production the Israeli frontier domesti‐ cation mechanism relied on and its evolving terminology
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