MADAR Symposium: Jabarin: the Accelerated Pace of Judiazation Planning Threatens to Overturn the Balance in East Jerusalem within a Few Years.

Ramallah: Professor Yousef Jabarin said the Zionist national plans, and the Israeli plans that will follow, dealt with the Palestinian space as an empty one, excluding any signal to any Palestinian or Arabic name.

Jabarin affirmed that the basic claim underpinning the Israeli planning approach is the promotion of the possibility to build a modern entity from scratch.

The statements came in a symposium organized by The Palestinians Forum for Israeli Studies MADAR, in Ramallah, yesterday, on Yousef Jabarin’s book “National Planning in Israel: Strategies of Exclusion and Dominance”, recently released by MADAR.

Director General of MADAR, Dr. Honaida Ghanem, said that Jabarin’s book is the first research of its kind in Arabic, depicting the history of planning in Israel and analyzes its elements and its connection to the colonial settlement project.

Jabarin spoke about the architectural massacre in which Israel destroyed thousands of homes that reflect what may be called a Palestinian architectural trend, pointing that an entire village, which is “AlKhairiya”, was buried and turned into the largest dumpster in historic Palestine.

He unraveled many indicators of ideological planning and its ethnic nature that is based on discrimination rather than citizen interest; favoring one group over the other, unjustly. This is evident in the Galilee and the Negev. In the Galilee the problems in planning are diagnosed by the Israeli planner as the existence of a few Jews and the continuation of Arab existence (51% of the Galilee residents), and offers the resolution, of what it views as a problem, through building attractive cities for the Jews and provide work opportunities to prevent what they call negative Jewish immigration.

Jabarin illustrated the deep paradox in Negev, where many plans, including the Prawer plan, seeks to constraint the Arab presence within a limited space, while wide areas are offered for dispersed Jewish outposts, regardless of their population, which could sometimes be for one person only, unraveling, in the same time, the harmony between the role of the army and the legal and planning institutes in the Negev. He expressed that the battle in the Negev is very important in light of constraining the Arabs in territories occupied in 1948 in ghettos, and highlighting the real struggle of Arabs in the face of Prawer plan, especially among younger generations, reminding of the Land Day, which was detrimental in stopping large and collective land confiscation.

Earlier, Jabarin was suspicious of the Zionist claim to have bought 7% of historic Palestine before the Nakba, and spoke about the first plan, in which Ben Gurion appointed a 180 experts on a committee between 1948 and 1951, mandated to plan for Israel for decades. As a result, Palestinian cities were exterminated and new cities were built on their remains.

Jabarin added that the second plan (31) was completed after the Russian immigration in the early 90s, and today there is plan (35) for Israel until 2060, based on the vision of Israel as a Jewish democratic state.

He pointed that the similarity between settlement policies in territories of 1948 and the current strategies, lie in dispersing settlements and then connecting them.

In Jerusalem, Jabarin showed the resemblance in the policy, explaining that the aesthetics of Palestinian architecture are in western Jerusalem which is ignored in negotiations, and the fact that after the occupation of East Jersualem, large areas were dealt with as Biblical green lands, ignoring the Palestinian existence.