Oren Yiftachel

Oren Yiftachel

Oren Yiftachel (Hebrew: אורן יפתחאל‎, born 1956) is a leading Israeli professor of political and legal geography, urban studies and urban planning at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beersheba. He holds the Lynn and Lloyd Hurst Family Chair in Urban Studies.

Life and career

Yiftachel was born in Haifa and grew up on kibbutz Matzuva. He did his service in the Israel Defense Forces in the Golani Brigade. During the 1980s and early 1990s, Yiftachel studied in Australia and Israel, specialiazing in urban studies and political geography. In 1990, he received a Doctor of Philosophy from the Department of Geography, the University of Western Australia, Perth, and the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning, the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa.[1] He returned to Israel, where he did his post-doctoral studies at the Technion from 1991 to 1992. .[2]He received postdoctoral position at the Technion, working on regional planning.

He has subsequently taught urban planning, geography, political science and Middle East departments, at various institutions, including: Curtin University, Australia; the Technion, Israel; the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, and UC Berkeley, in the United States; the University of Cape Town, South Africa and the University of Venice, Italy. He was a research fellow at RMIT University, Melbourne; the United States Institute of Peace, Washington DC; and the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, Jerusalem.

Yiftachel is the founding and past editor of the journal "Hagar: Studies in Culture, Politics and Place", and has serves on the editorial board of Planning Theory, IJMES, MERIP, Urban Studies, Journal of Planning Literature, and Environment and Planning A, Territory, Politics, Governance.

Yiftachel has worked as an urban and regional planner in a range of institutions, including the Perth City Council in Australia, the Kibbutz Movement and "Israel 2020" project in Israel. He specialized in advocacy planning and land consultancy. Recently he has worked on an Israeli-Palestinian plan for a bi-national Jerusalem, an alternative plan for the unrecognized Bedouin villages in southern Israel, and a plan for a multicultural Beersheba. Yiftachel has worked as an urban and regional planner in a range of institutions, including the Perth City Council in ; the Kibbutz Movement and "Israel 2020" project in Israel.

Yiftachel is also an activist, and has been a member of several notable organizations, including Faculty for Israel-Palestine Peace (FFIPP), PALISAD, The Negev Coexistence Forum, Adva (centre for social equality), and Habitat International Coalition. In recent years Yiftachel served as a board member and chair of B'tselem – the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories; and has co-founded a new Israeli-Palestinian peace movement – "A Land for All - Two States, One Homeland". He is an occasional op-ed contributor to leading Israeli newspapers, including Haaretz, Ynet and Ma'ariv.


Scholarship

Yiftachel has been a leading researcher drawing world-wide attention. During the last decade he has been the most highly cited Israeli scholar in geography and urban studies. (see - https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=2_N50mIAAAAJ). A special issue of an international journal was recently devoted to the theory of ethnocratic regimes two decades after their formulation by Yiftachel (http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/mcs/issue/view/399)

His works develops critical perspectives of space and power; minorities and public policy; 'ethnocratic' societies and land regimes. In urban and planning studies he's early work focused on Australian metropolitan planning and its impact on 'urban social sustainability'. He later developed a theory of the 'dark side' of urban planning and has contributed to opening up planning theory to critical theory in general, and to issues of identity, colonization and space in particular.

In recent years he has developed a theory of gray space and 'displaceability' as underlining condition of new urban regimes and citizenship. In parallel, he developed with colleagues a model of 'doing the just city' as a theoretical and professional alternative. In political geography, his work formulated the concept of 'ethnocratic' regimes, which has generated debates in ethnic and racial studies, regime theories and research in Israel/Palestine. His comparative work has focused on comparatively analyzing spatial policy towards minorities in a range of 'ethnocratic' states and cities, most particularly Australia, Sri Lanka, Estonia, Cyprus, Bosnia, Northern Ireland and South Africa. In recent years Yiftachel has worked on the political and legal geography of indigenous peoples, focusing on Bedouins in Israel/Palestine in a comparative framework.

In a series of books and articles, Yiftachel explores comparatively the types of regimes that typically develop under condition of ethnic conflict. In this framework, He conceptualizes the Israeli regime as an ethnocracy, promoting a dominant project of 'ethnicization' throughout Israel/Palestine, in which ethnicity dominates citizenship.[3] He documents the various practices of this project, and the manner in which it has constructed ethno-class identities and stratified citizenship through the process of expansion, development, projects of Judaisation and politicization in the different regions of Israel/Palestine.[4] His model traces the nature of the Zionist project, taking into account the historical circumstances spawning Jewish 'colonization of refugees'. His early work also focused on the tension between liberal and ethnocratic-religious components of the Israeli regime, and on the privileged status given European over Eastern Jews established during the settlement project, but also the recent closing of the gaps through on-going colonization of Palestinian lands.

Palestinians are relegated to the status of 'unwanted' indigenous peoples resisting the ethnocratic project.[3] Yiftachel uses a multi-disciplinary approach, inspired by Neo-Gramscian thinking and by a range of Marxian, post- and neo-colonial theorists. In the study of Israel/Palestine he was one of the first to break the traditional scholarly divisions between analysis of Arab-Jewish relations and internal Jewish dynamics, and one of a handful of scholars to question whether Israel acts as a democratic state within the Green Line (Israeli pre-1967 borders). The Israeli regime, according to Yiftachel, has presided over the entire historic Palestine for over five decades, and should be analyzed according to the power structures he claims it imposed over the entire territory. Yiftachel developed the 'settler-ethnocratic' model to highlight the regime's main historical-material logic, and the concept of 'creeping apartheid' to describe its recent manifestation and the development of four different 'separate and unequal' types of citizenship under the Israeli regime..

Yiftachel's work is rich in conceptualization, with development of q conceptual architecture including terms such as 'trapped minorities', 'fractured regions', 'ruptured demos', 'internal frontiers', 'frontiphery', 'gray spacing' and 'displaceabilty'. . His recent work also develops a 'South-Eastern' perspective by providing alternative conceptualizations to the dominant theories and discourses generated by American and European academic centers.


Positions on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Yiftachel is highly critical of the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories and its continued occupation and colonization of the West Bank in the wake of the 1967 Six Day-War. By that time, Israel had, he argues, a homeland and therefore the takeover of those territories lacks any moral justification. In the long run he envisages as an ideal resolution of the conflict a unified state with consociational power sharing.[2]

Bedouin Negev land court case

Yiftachel gave expert witness testimony in a case involving a Bedouin claim to land at Al-Araqeeb in the southern area of Israel.[3] The Bedouin suing the State of Israel lost the case. In the ruling, the judge criticised Yiftachel for not being prepared, and criticised Yiftachel's evidence as unreliable. She accepted the evidence given by Ruth Kark who testified as an expert witness for the state.[3][4] Yiftachel called the ruling "troubling" in that it "unjustly dispossesses many Bedouins who have simply inherited the land from their ancestors".[3]

Publications

Yiftahel has published over 120 articles and chapters in many respected academic outlets.Among his books and mongraphs:

Author:

  • Yiftachel, O. (1992): Planning a Mixed Region in Israel: The Political Geography of Arab-Jewish Relations in the Galilee, Avebury, Gower Publishing Limited, Aldershot, Hampshire, UK, 376pp, 44 maps and figures, 39 tables, 13 plates. ISBN 1-85628-255-4.
  • Yiftachel, O. (1995) 'Planning as Control: Policy and Resistance in Deeply Divided Societies', Progress in Planning Series, Vol. 44, Pergamon-Elsvier, Oxford, UK, 89 pages, 9 figures, 4 tables, ISBN 0-0804-2656-5.
  • Yiftachel, O. (1997), Guarding the Grove: Majd al-Krum as Fable, The Institute for Israeli Arab Studies (The 'Seam-line Series'), Beit Berl; 126 pp., 7 maps and figures, 6 tables, ISBN 0305-9006-95 Parameter error in {{isbn}}: Invalid ISBN. (Hebrew).
  • Yiftachel, O. (2006) Ethnocracy: Land, and the Politics of Identity Israel/Palestine (PennPress - the University of Pennsylvania Press, 306 pp. 26 figures, 4 tables; translated to five languages).
  • Kedar, S., Amara, A.' Yiftachel, O. (2017), Emptied Lands: Legal Geography of Bedouin Rights in the Negev, Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Editor:

  • Hedgcock, David and Yiftachel, Oren (editors) (1992), Urban and Regional Planning in Western Australia: Historical and Critical Perspectives, Paradigm Press, Perth, 306pp, 34 maps and figures, ISBN 1-8634-2172-6
  • Reviewed in the journals Planning History, Planning Perspectives, Urban Policy and Research, New Zealand Geographer, Austplan, Western Plannerֶ
  • Yiftachel, O. and Meir, A. (editors) (1998), Ethnic Frontiers in Israel: Landscapes of Development and Inequality in Israel, Boulder, Westview Press, 337 pages, 18 tables, 25 maps and figures, ISBN 0-8133-8929-1.
  • Yiftachel, O., Alexander, I., Hedgcock, D. and Little, J. (editors) (2001), The Power of Planning: Spaces of Control and Transformation, Kluwer Academic Publications, the Hague; ISBN, 214 pp.; 6 tables, 17 figures). ISBN 1-4020-0533-4.
  • Kemp, A., Yiftachel, O., Newman, D., Ram, U. (editors) (2004) Hegemonies and Resistance: Israelis in Conflict, (280 pp., 4 tables, 11 figures; Sussex Academic Press) ISBN 1-903900-65-4.
  • Yiftachel, O. and abu-Saad, I. (eds), 2008. Bedouin-Arabs Society in the Negev, Special theme issue of Hagar: Studies in Culture, Politics and Identity, Vol. 8. 257pp, 16 tables, 13 figures, 52 photographs).
  • Ghanem, A. and Yiftachel, O. (eds), 2010. The Vision Documents: a New Order for Arab-Jewish Relations in Israel?, Special theme issue of State and Society, 165 pp, 3 figures, 4 table (Hebrew). https://www.facebook.com/pages/StateSociety-%D7%9E%D7%93%D7%99%D7%A0%D7%94-%D7%95%D7%97%D7%91%D7%A8%D7%94/169000099786857
  • Yiftachel, O. and Mandelbaum, R. (eds) 2015, Social Justice and Israel Planning; Special Issue of the Planning – Journal of the Israeli Planning Association, Vol. 12, No. 1: 145-270.http://www.aepi.org.il/
  • Amara, A., Yiftachel, O. and abu-Saad, I. (eds), 2013. Indigenous (In)Justice? Human Rights among Bedouins in Southern Israel/Palestine, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press. http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780979639562

http://www.geog.bgu.ac.il/members/yiftachel/books/Indigenous%20(In)Justice.pdf

  • Yiftachel, O. and Porter, L. (eds) 2018, Settler Colonialism, Indigeneity and the City, special issue of Settler Colonial Studies Vol. 8 (introduction and six papers)

Books

Yiftachel has published over 100 books, papers and book chapters. Among his books:

  • Planning a Mixed Region: Political Geography in Galilee, Ashgate, 1991.
  • Urban and Regional Planning in Western Australia (with D. Hedgcock), Paradigm Press, 1992.
  • Planning and Social Control: Policy and Resistance in a Divided Society, Pergamon, 1995.
  • Ethnic Frontiers and Boundaries (with A. Meir eds), Westview, 1997.
  • The Power of Planning (with Hedgcock, Little, Alexander eds), Kluwer, 2002.
  • Israelis in Conflict (with Kemp, Newman, Ram eds), Sussex, 2004.
  • Ethnocracy: Land and Identity Politics in Israel/Palestine, Pennpress, 2006.

References

  1. ↑ 'Prof. Oren Yiftachel: Curriculum vitae (Short Version),' 2014.
  2. ↑ Katie Attwell, Israeli National Identity and Dissidence: The Contradictions of Zionism and Resistance, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015 p.26.
  3. 1 2 3 Joanna Paraszczuk and Sharon Udasin (March 19, 2012). "Court rejects 6 Beduin Negev land lawsuits". Jerusalem Post.
  4. ↑ Hebrew transcript of court case
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