The master plan of ‘development cities’ like Be'er Sheva was part of the Zionist project. The towns are the results of the Sharon plan - the master plan of Israel. The majority of such towns were built in the Galilee in the north of Israel, and in the northern Negev desert in the south. In addition to the new towns, Jerusalem was also given development town status in the 1960s. The large campaign to build new towns was promoted by the new Israeli State apparatus after the British colonial troops had to leave. The strategy of development town planning was labeled ‘population decentralization’ (Shachar 1971; Troen 1995). In the beginning the Mizrahi or Arab Jews were the major populations in the transit camps of the 1950s and were then sent to the development towns. These operations were called “from ship to frontier” by the state apparatus. Given these circumstances, most of the development towns quickly became dominated by low-income Mizrahi populations, mainly from North Africa. As the geographer, Oren Yifachtel, based at Ben Gurion University in Be'er Sheva notes: “A number of ‘Judaisation-related’ legitimizing factors, such as the ‘exigencies of national security’ and the ‘conquering of the frontiers’, were adopted wholesale by generations of Israeli professional planners, including architects, urbanists, economists and settlement experts.” European planning and spatial theories like Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City model and Walter Christaller’s central place theory were adopted. Thus, Be’er Sheva was organized under the principals of the positivist assumptions of economic geography (witschaftsgeographie). But as Yifachtel argues: “Largely absent from the planning discourse of the time, as appearing in documents, plans and books, was an examination of the social consequences of this ambitious project. Population dispersal goals, historical rationales, territorial strategies, design criteria and economic development proposals took centre stage, with only scant reference to the plight of the (mainly Mizrahi) people about to be housed in the new towns, or to their needs and aspirations. This can be partially explained by the social positions of most Israeli planners of the time, being European educated, middle- or upper class Ashkenazim. (Schechter 1990) This group of highly capable professionals, many of whom worked for the government, fused their own vision and interests with that of the state. Their plans were thus represented as reflecting ‘national’ or ‘state’ objectives, although they mirrored the views and interests of specific powerful elites.” The social geography of developments towns created ‘islands’ of deprivation, isolation, and peripherality. They are still the outposts of Israel’s frontiers to the surrounding Arab states.(MvO)
Sources:
Roy Kozlovsky, «Temporal States of Architecture: Mass Immigration and Provisional Housing in Israel» in: Isenstadt /Rizvi 2008 (wie Anm. 6), S. 139-160.
Anna Minta, Israel Bauen. Architektur, Städtebau und Denkmalpolitik nach der Staatsgründung 1948, Frankfurt a. Main, 2004, S. 248-253.
Maurice Roumani, The Case of the Jews from Arab Countries: A Neglected Issue, Tel Aviv, 1977, S. 32-33a.
Oren Yifachtel, Ethnocracy: Land and Identity Politics in Israel/Palestine, Philadelphia 2006.
Oren Yifachtel, «Trapped Voices: Mizrahim between Marginalization and Colonialism», in: Guy Abutbul, Lev Greenberg u. Pnina Mutzafi-Haler (Hg.), Mizrahi Voices, Jerusalem 2006, 384-397. Leonard Downie Jr., «Israel builds», in: Alicia Patterson Foundation Newsletter of Leonard Downie Jr., New York 1971, http://64.17.135.19/APF001971/Downie/Downie04/Downie04.html, Zugriff am 16.07.2011.
