Planning, Land Ownership, and Settler Colonialism in Israel/Palestine

Abstract

This article discusses the challenges that the settlement process poses to Israeli property regimes, examining the ways that public apparatuses, specifically those related to urban planning, are creatively mobilized to address and mitigate such challenges. The article focuses on two case studies: the Palestinian village of Kamanneh in the Upper Galilee and the Ganey Aviv neighborhood of Lydda, one of Israel’s so-called mixed cities. Based on these case studies, the paper argues that the planning process’s technical and legal manipulations as well as the raw political power involved produce and reproduce the settler-colonial logic of ownership in land as a territorial and symbolic mechanism of control.