The Right to the Suburb: The ‘American Dream’ of Palestinian Citizens of Israel

Abstract

This article analyses the suburbanization efforts of Palestinian Citizens of Israel (PCI) as a simultaneous act of individualistic self-fulfilment and decolonization. The local suburban turn of the 1980s was an integral part of the Israeli state’s geopolitical project, intended to enhance the Jewish presence in areas of national importance; the PCI’s presence in this process was thus restricted. Nevertheless, the desire of middle-class PCIs for better living standards resulted in increasing aspirations to take part in the national suburban turn while challenging its settler-colonial aspects. One of these efforts was Neve-Shalom/Wahat-al-Salam, a joint Jewish-Arab community that emerged in the 1980s as an attempt to produce an inclusive alternative to the ethnicity-based and territorially-minded Israeli spatial production mechanism. In my examination of this case study, I first explain its innovative perspective and how it defied local settlement patterns. Analysing its development over the past four decades, I show how Neve-Shalom/Wahat-al-Salam began as an alternative ex-urban community, which later turned into an exclusive, binational suburban environment, thereby challenging ethnicity-oriented spatial practices on the one hand, while recreating class-based seclusion on the other.