Introduction—Geographic Discourses: The Changing Spatial and Territorial Dimensions of Israeli Politics and Society

Abstract

Introduction—Geographic Discourses:The Changing Spatial and Territorial Dimensions of Israeli Politics and Society David Newman (bio) This special issue of Israel Studies focuses on some of the spatial and territorial dimensions of Israeli society. The authors can be loosely described as constituting the academic discipline encompassed by Geography, although this is a broad definition in the sense that it includes urban planners, an environmental scientist, an architect, and a geographer straddling the disciplinary boundaries between Geography, Political Science, and International Relations. This reflects the holistic nature of geography as a discipline, encompassing a wide range of social, physical, and political topics, brought together in an attempt to understand the way in which human landscapes evolve and change over time. This introductory essay seeks to set a conceptual and thematic frame for understanding the diverse nature of the papers, which have been included in this special issue, focusing as they do on various aspects of planning Israel's urban and rural landscapes. Previous surveys of Israeli human Geography have been undertaken by one of the contributors to this volume, Stanley Waterman.1 A comprehensive bibliography of Israeli geographers' writings up to the early 2000s was compiled by Ben-Gurion University geographers Shaul Krakover and Yehuda Gradus,2 and this should be a useful companion to some of the themes, which are developed in this collection of papers. The volume brings together three of Israel's five Israel Prize recipients in the field of geography.3 A memoriam paper on the life work of geographer and planner Arie Shachar, who died unexpectedly at a relatively young age, has been written by Hebrew University geography and planner, Eran Razin. Another paper, in honor of the most recent Israel prize recipient, [End Page 1] Professor Elisha Efrat of Tel-Aviv University, and also a former State planning practitioner, has been written by his colleague, recipient of the Israel Prize for his work on mapping and cartography a few years previously, Professor Moshe Brawer.4 The Themes of Israeli Human Geography To understand the main themes of Israeli human geography one has to understand the positioning of the scholars themselves. Israeli geography is a very Israeli, very Jewish, and very male profession. This writer, following his immigration to Israel in 1982, became the first tenured member of any Israeli geography department who was born and educated entirely outside the frame of one of the country's five Geography Departments. This reflected an era in which Israeli geography tended to be insular, focusing on the unique perspectives and empirical analyses of the changing Israeli (Jewish) landscapes. To be a geographer, one needed to know their way around Israel, its locations and sites, the minutiae of local change, place names, and Biblical associations. The development of a wider comparative and conceptual frame for the study of Israeli geography only really emerged from the 1980s onwards. There have been only a handful of Arab geographers or planners within Israel's academic community. This probably reflects the fact that the study of spatial and territorial change is perceived as an inherently political topic, which reflects the nature of past, present, and future control of land by the hegemonic power of the State in its conflict with the ethnic Arab minority. This has not increased significantly in recent years, the only notable exception being Rassam Khamaisi, a geographer and planner from Haifa University (recently elected as the first Arab president of the Israel Geographical Association), has undertaken research on the changing municipal and administrative patterns of Arab settlement spaces.5 Collaborative work between Israeli (Jewish) and Arab–Palestinian geographers has been few and far between. The two main examples being the joint political geographical research undertaken by David Newman and Ghazi Falah in the early 1990s, focusing on the territorial dimensions of a two-state solution,6 and the later work by Oren Yiftachel and Asad Ghanem (a political scientist) on the political nature of the land regime7 and notions of "ethnocracy".8 Nor has Israeli geography and planning been blessed with a significant number of women practitioners. While this may be reflective of the [End Page 2] Israeli social sciences as a whole, it nevertheless stands out...