A more than decade-long struggle waged by regional councils in the rural areas of the Galilee and the Negev against the barriers placed on the development of rural settlements reached the government's table last month. The Minister for the Development of the Negev and Galilee, the Minister of Settlements and the Minister of Finance joined forces with the Minister of Defense in a joint effort to correct the distortion. But even though the central government has woken up to the failure, there is still a long way to go. In order to understand the difficulties, it is necessary to describe the overt and covert motives that led the state authorities to create institutional and procedural discrimination, in fact, against settlement.
The tangle of barriers to settlement development comes down to three main focal points. The first barrier is activated by virtue of the National Outline Plan - TAMA 35. Its formulation began under the guidance of Yossi Sarid, when he was Minister of the Environment in the Rabin government, and it was approved in 2005 by the Sharon government. The plan was formulated out of recognition of the need to protect open spaces as green areas and prevent development and new construction in them.
Thus, two basic principles for planning the area were established: the first – to refrain from establishing new settlements, and the second – to limit the development of existing rural settlements. Accordingly, a planning quota was imposed on Jewish localities for the number of households in each locality – no more than 400 on average. The quota was published in the appendix to the National Master Plan – Table 2 – and was imposed only on Jewish localities.
The "green" constraints imposed by the master plan may be appropriate for a Western European country, where the population has barely grown. But when they are imposed without adaptation to the unique conditions of the State of Israel, when they are imposed mainly on Jewish settlement (while the Jewish population is concentrated on the coastal strip, in towers jutting out from Nahariya to Ashkelon), the plan ignores the security needs to control the open space and the lands that control the main arteries. With the limitation of Jewish settlement spaces, in an ongoing process, Israel's sovereign control over open space in the pastures, in the Negev and Galilee, gradually faded.
Reducing competition
The second barrier stemmed from restricting the right of localities to have an admissions committee up to a quota of 400 households. This limitation has significance in economic and community aspects. In communal communities that have reached the quota, even if they were able to expand the number of plots for construction, the marketing of the land by the Israel Land Authority (ILA) shifted from that stage to marketing by tender to the highest bidder.
Such marketing greatly reduces the ability of local residents to compete in market competition for the right to live in their locality, and creates a threat to the identity of the community fabric. The right of preference for local residents, on the other hand, exists without any reservation in the marketing of state land by the ILA in all non-Jewish villages. The definition of marketing for "local people" is often stated publicly in the tender wording.
The third barrier stems directly from the price of land for housing, which is increasing in Jewish localities. This barrier stems directly from the growing gap between the limited supply of plots and the growing demand. To no less extent, it also stems from the land marketing policy of the Israel Land Council and the Ministry of Housing, which strives in Jewish localities to maximize the potential income for the state treasury.
Under these conditions, the price gap is created between a plot in the non-Jewish village, which will be marketed by the ILA and the Ministry of Housing at a price of about NIS 150,<>, and the same plot in the adjacent Jewish community, which will be sold to a settler for more than NIS <> million.
At this price, the chances of a young Jewish couple settling in a rural community in the Galilee or the Negev are diminishing. At soaring prices, most buyers represent families who have already reached financial consolidation. Most of them no longer have preschoolers. Thus, kindergartens in localities in Misgav, Emek Yizreel and Emek HaMayanot regional councils are closing. In this trend, the socioeconomic ranking of these localities touches on the 10-8 scale, which eliminates any request for a discount and subsidy in the price of the lot, as if it were a request for a discount for a plot in Kfar Shmaryahu.
Motives for barriers
In response to harsh criticism leveled at the Director General of the ILA at a cabinet meeting held on 28 May, Housing Minister Yitzhak Goldknopf came to his defense in an official letter, stressing: "I consider it my duty to repudiate the statements directed at the ILA, which supposedly leads an anti-Zionist policy."
Minister Orit Struk also clarified that she does not accuse the officials of the planning authorities and the Israel Authority of being anti-Zionist. It is advisable to believe that this is indeed the case. Nonetheless, there is no denying that what has taken place in recent years, blocking the development of Jewish rural settlement in the Galilee and the Negev, is a clear shift from all the conventions that existed until a few decades ago in the sense of the obvious, in the logic directed at the government's actions in the development of Jewish settlement.
What can nevertheless explain the overt and covert motives for stopping the settlement is the growing influence of two trends. One stems from a dramatic change in the policy of the Ministry of Finance and the Israel Authority in marketing national land for housing, and the other stems from the growing influence of academic trends in the fields of public administration, sociology, and geography.
After the collapse of Mapai's rule, and with the economic turnaround led by Shimon Peres during the 1985 financial crisis, Israel switched to capitalist logic. At the same time, the marketing policy of national land for residential purposes changed and focused on maximizing the potential income for the state, to the point of acting with speculative logic. The change directly affected land prices in the rural area, which until then had been marketed at a low price due to national considerations.
The second trend is expressed in the approach in academic circles according to which rural settlement harms the Arab population, inter alia through the Basic Law: The Nation-State. It seems that among the junior and senior professional echelons of the state authorities, the intention to correct this has been adopted. In other words, to stop the momentum of the settlements and give free rein to
Arab settlement in the Galilee and the Negev.
If no change takes place, and barriers are removed, young couples will have no chance of realizing their dream of living in the rural areas of the Galilee and the Negev. Thus, the State of Israel will lose not only control over the Galilee and the Negev, but also the very ability to establish a homeland consciousness, which depends, as on Florence's connection to Tuscany, on the cultural and spatial connection between city and village life.
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