The Sharon Plan reconsidered: how Eliezer Brutzkus’ pre-1948 separatism shaped Israel’s New Towns

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the Sharon Plan, Israel's celebrated New Towns programme and a central ethos of early statehood. Conventional wisdom unequivocally identifies it with the renowned Bauhaus-graduate Arieh Sharon and the progressive spirit of architectural modernism. I reveal, by contrast, how the plan drew on an obscure blueprint devised by an urban planner, Eliezer Brutzkus, in the context of the Peel Partition Plan in 1937. The Peel Partition Plan proposed, for the first time, to divide Palestine into separate Arab and Jewish states, based on population transfer. Brutzkus reacted to the new horizon of a Jewish-only statehood by devising proto-national mass urbanization plan, based on the ‘comprehensive planning’ of a land emptied of its Arab majority. In 1948, this plan was updated and canonized as the Sharon Plan. This previously unexplored thread re-situates Sharon's modernist feat within the longer-term history of Zionist colonization and dispossession. Further, Brutzkus drew on geoeconomic and demographic planning policy tools, rather than on architecture and design. As such, this case demonstrates the importance of attending to disciplinary multiplicity as a vital part of the period's legacy, rather than collapsing it under the blanket term of architectural modernism.