Neighborhood groups scored their most significant victory in recent memory today when the mayor agreed to a number of changes to the city’s new urban master plan.

A long-running battle over Tel Aviv’s proposed master plan reached a turning point today when Mayor Ron Huldai agreed to adopt a series of proposals put forward by neighborhood activists for the southern part of the city.

The mayor’s announcement this morning at a meeting of the local planning committee took pretty much everyone by surprise (including, apparently, the municipal planning department).

Huldai’s city hall had sought to develop one of the city’s last undeveloped areas, a broad swath of land in the southern part of the city, as a new central business district. When the first drafts of the new city master plan began to appear a couple of years ago, they showed the area, which is sandwiched between residential neighborhoods, filled with high-rise office buildings and bisected by a broad highway.

Local residents immediately voiced their rejection of the proposal. Once again, they argued, city hall was pursuing its own agenda while ignoring local needs. While the city’s plan for the area would bring in new tax revenue (office buildings pay significantly higher municipal taxes than residential apartments) and provide a new traffic corridor for commuters headed to the city center, they pointed out, it would also physically divide their neighborhoods, while neglecting to solve chronic urban problems such as an acute housing crunch and a lack of decent public transportation.

Soon after, a coalition of neighborhood activists and community-based organizations came together to create South Tel Aviv for People, a grassroots initiative formed to advocate for a more people-friendly planning vision for the city’s southern quarter. (Full disclosure: I live in this part of the city and am heavily involved in the initiative.)

Working with local communities, the group put together an alternative proposal for the area which envisioned it as a mixed-use district, with plenty of new apartment buildings, schools and parks built along pedestrian-friendly streets. The proposal made the case for setting aside a portion of the new apartments for affordable housing programs while building public transportation instead of highways and extending the city’s building preservation plan southward (currently, the city only grants protection to historical buildings in the center of town).

For the past two years, South Tel Aviv for People has advocated for this vision by issuing position papers, lobbying local politicians, holding public events and raising awareness of the issue through the media. Over time, the group has sharpened its criticism of city hall’s plans while formulating an increasingly coherent and persuasive alternative. Meanwhile, city hall has done its best to ignore the group and its ideas.

However, as the master planning process dragged on, these ideas began to gain traction with city council members, whose votes were needed to get the plan approved. This alarmed the municipal leadership, which had hoped to push the plan through the approval process without encountering any serious resistance (thanks, in part, to a total lack of transparency).

As a result, several hearings on the master plan were postponed or cancelled, while those that did take place often became bogged down in arguments and disorder.

Several months ago, after a particularly rancorous meeting, the group received an invitation to meet with senior planners at the municipality. Its representatives gave a presentation – which was duly ignored by the deputy head planner (the most senior person in the room), who gave his full attention to his Blackberry. Some officials attacked the group, while others tried to convince them that their reservations about the plan were misguided. Needless to say, nothing came of it.

The city councilors on the planning committee, however, were becoming more receptive to the group’s message, which made it harder for the mayor’s coalition to ram parts of the master plan through hearings.

Today’s hearing began with the usual rancor, as committee members (armed with a position paper formulated by South Tel Aviv for People) demanded answers to a number of open questions about the details of the master plan.

Then the mayor strolled in and, after a short private consultation with the head of his planning department, announced that he was reversing his position – effectively allowing the committee to adopt the community’s positions on a number of important elements of the plan.

According to the new changes, Shlavim Street (the backbone of the new district planned for south Tel Aviv) will become an urban street instead of a commuter highway, and the buildings built along it will be mostly mid-rise apartment buildings, instead of high-rise office buildings.

Additionally, the city’s new central bus station, a mammoth structure that spews pollution onto several southern neighborhoods, will be moved to a different location (presumably on the city’s outskirts). A large city-owned lot, currently occupied by parking lots and garages, will become a complex of schools for local kids and a prison located on the city’s southern border will be transferred elsewhere and office buildings built in its place.

Municipal planners also promised to publish the master plan in full within two weeks. Incredibly, city hall has thus far managed to resist calls to release these documents, which have been kept under wraps even as hearings on the master plan proceeded and votes on its proposals were held.

In another achievement for local civil society, a two-month public participation process on the master plan will be launched early next year.

There is still plenty of room for improvement. For example, the plan still contains nothing about affordable housing (an acute issue in a city where the cost of housing has skyrocketed over the past few years), public transportation or sustainability issues.

However, the decisions made today are a huge leap forward. By accepting the major tenets of the alternative plan that rose up from the grassroots, the municipal establishment has opened the door to further changes, while proving that regular citizens, through sustained activism, have the power to influence even the most stubborn politicians.

Cover image: South Tel Aviv for People logo. 

Policies which were considered hopelessly radical just a few weeks ago are now seen as not nearly radical enough.

The people of Israel have spoken loud and clear: they want “social justice” and a renewal of the social contract.

More specifically, they are calling for an end to the neoliberal economic policies of the last two decades and a return to the welfare state model, including greater investments in public education and health care, more affordable housing, greater concern for the sick, elderly and handicapped, and a generally more accountable form of government which actually hears and responds to its citizens.

Such policies would represent a massive departure from the current method – a 180 degree reversal, really, of the status quo. Yet, while public opinion polls have found somewhere around 90% support for these demands among the general public, it is not at all clear that the Bibi-Shas-Lieberman government is actually capable of addressing them in any serious way.

Shas’ ministers are certainly not. Unapologetically fundamentalist and sectarian, their response thus far has been to exploit the protests in order to provide cheap housing for their constituency – large ultra-Orthodox families who may or may not work for a living – while pushing through more construction in the settlements. They could care less about the tent protesters, who would never vote for Shas in any case.

Avigdor Lieberman also doesn’t seem to give a damn. He is counting on the fact that the bitter experience of the Russian immigrants who make up his constituency with state socialism has made them into die-hard supporters of the “free market.” Images of mass protests demanding welfare policies from the state, he hopes, will remind them of failed historical revolutions and the brutal dictators that came to power in their wake.

Thus, as a quarter of a million people marched through the streets of Tel Aviv last weekend, many of them calling to bring down the government, Avigdor Lieberman dined confidently in a posh restaurant on the other side of town – and he didn’t hesitate to report this to journalists the next day. Lieberman represents the very opposite of the free and open society envisioned by tent protesters. His politics are based on fear and incitement. He will not change either.

And Bibi? He, at least, is finally making a concerted PR effort to convince the public that he can change. This week he appointed a respectable leftist professor to head a team charged with negotiating with the leaders of the protest movement. According to the newspapers, the professor made it clear to Bibi that he would have to relinquish some of his most cherished philosophical beliefs, and Bibi, supposedly, agreed.

Notwithstanding Bibi’s sudden change of heart, responding to protesters’ demands will not be easy.

While Israel’s stated national religion has always been the cult of security, for the past two decades another ideology has gradually come to dominate the discourse. That ideology, of course, is neoliberalism, the so-called free-market economics of Milton Friedman, Reagan and Thatcher. Since the early 1990s, neoliberalism gradually became no less than the conventional wisdom in Israel – especially among government, media and social elites – regarding anything that fell outside the confines of the diplomatic-security sphere.

(Though no self-respecting adherent of this philosophy would actually use the word “neoliberalism.” To this day, in fact, the word is used only by the philosophy’s opponents, who seek to put a name to a system of beliefs that has long remained amorphous and unnamed.)

Over the years, the policy that became most identified with Israeli neoliberalism was privatization – of banks, social services, government services and pretty much anything else that could be transferred from the government’s hands to a small oligarchy of prominent businessmen and their families. Often, public assets were sold off at well below market value, and, more often than not, deals were made even more profitable by the government’s “failure” to adequately regulate privatized industries.

In order to set the stage for the eventual privatization of public services and assets, various corners of the public sector were weakened. Budgets shrank, the civil service failed to grow even as its workload exploded and government services gradually became ossified – providing politicians with a pretext to eventually privatize them altogether, either directly or through various forms of outsourcing. After all, they argued, the private sector can always do things better than the public sector.

Meanwhile, society’s safety net was systematically shredded, resulting in ever-increasing rates of poverty.

The same exact methods have been used in almost every country on earth over the past several decades, almost always going hand in hand with unprecedented corruption. Menem’s neoliberal programs led to the collapse of Argentina in the early 2000’s. Hosni Mubarak’s government spent much of the last decade violently imposing neoliberal policies over a defenseless population, as did the US occupation of Iraq.

In the US, neoliberalism picked up speed under Reagan and later reached its peak under George W. Bush. The bubble finally burst in 2008, spreading its toxic fallout so far and wide that the country is still struggling to recover today, almost three years later. The Cameron government’s experiment with neoliberal “austerity” in the UK just blew up in its face.

Neoliberalism inevitably inspires a backlash. Poor and middle class people, who eventually notice that their lives have been made inestimably harder in a thousand little ways, eventually respond – usually with protests, sometimes with violence and, where they are fortunate enough to have non-neoliberal candidates to vote for, at the ballot box.

In Latin America, for example, a handful of states are now led by moderate leftists, who are attempting to institute a local version of European-style social democracy. Something similar is happening in Spain, and probably will in Egypt as well.

Now it has happened in Israel, and the political-economic discourse has been transformed as a result. Suddenly, policy ideas which would have seemed utterly unfeasible just a few months ago are now considered too little, too late. As long as tent camps continue to grow and spread, the new discourse will only get stronger and more coherent (hence the politicians’ constant desire to evacuate them).

Ironically, all of this happened on the watch of the man who has been Israel’s foremost prophet of neoliberalism for the past twenty years, and who, with his own hands, created many of the problems that he is now being asked to fix – first as prime minister in the nineties, then as finance minister under Ariel Sharon. His policies during the current term in office have been almost indistinguishable from his policies during those previous terms – until now, that is.

Can Bibi change his stripes? While it seems unlikely, there are precedents. Most notably, Ariel Sharon, the father of the settlements, who ultimately decided to evacuate the settlers from Gaza when his political future seemed to be on the line. (Whether that move resulted from a genuine change of heart or political exigencies is, of course, debatable.)

In any case, Benjamin Netanyahu now finds himself in a similar position. What the protesters are demanding from him would require that he repudiate the absolute core of his socioeconomic doctrine. On the other hand, if he can’t please them, he’s finished.

To paraphrase Einstein, the same neoliberal thinking that got us into this mess will certainly not get us out of it. The pressure is on for this government, or the next one, to develop a new narrative, a new way of envisioning the state’s responsibilities toward its citizens.

Time will tell if our elected leaders are actually capable of doing so, or if they will all have to be replaced with a whole new generation of political leaders who can, unlike previous governments, offer a new vision of a post-neoliberal Israel, and chart a path to get us there.

The Middle East’s dictators have already written their playbook, but what about the region’s quasi-democracies?

Middle Eastern dictators have followed remarkably similar paths in responding to the popular protests of the “Arab Spring.” So much so that a recent episode of This American Life attempted to codify them into a how-to guide for the Middle Eastern autocrat, detailing their steps one by one.

These included moves like ‘shut down the internet’ (step 1), ‘send in thugs’ (step 2), ‘blame Al Jazeera’ (step 7) and ‘organize paid demonstrations in favor of your regime’ (step 8).

However, what happens when popular protest breaks out in “the only democracy in the Middle East” – where things like cutting off the internet just won’t fly, and where the cost of hiring camel-mounted thugs is prohibitively expensive?

Caught without any such playbook, the protests which began on July 14 have forced our wise and experienced leaders to improvise, essentially making it up as they go along. Here, then, is a roundup of their actions thus far, offered as a free public service to other quasi-democratic governments in the region, who are liable to find themselves in their shoes sooner or later.

Step 1: Co-opt the protest

Cozy up to the demonstrators. Put on a casual shirt, drop by their tent camp and make nice. Tell them you are on their side, that you believe in their cause. Press some flesh and grin toothy grins for the cameras.

Step 2: Conspiracy theorize

When they refuse to go away, cast them as a fringe phenomenon. Call them “radical leftist anarchists.” Try to associate them with “enemy” groups, imply that they have violent tendencies. Hint that a left-wing, anti-government conspiracy is paying for their tents. Pin the blame on the usual suspects (left-wing NGOs and upstart political movements).

Step 3: Try paternalism

Tell the protesters you’re way ahead of them, that you’ve spent years thinking about the very same problems they’re complaining about now. Publicly invite them to come to Jerusalem to support your (neoliberal) reforms. Smile smugly for the cameras.

Step 4: Call them spoiled

Unleash the hordes of right-wing columnists and spin doctors against the ungrateful citizens. Attempt to paint them as spoiled, lazy children who are looking to get something for nothing. Call them communists. Emphasize the wisdom of the market, use words like “market forces,” “macro” and “supply and demand.”

Step 5: Fake empathy

Recognize the protesters’ distress. Call it “real.” Tell the media that you “embrace” and “identify with” them, reassure them that you’re only looking out for their best interests. Really. Promise “surprises.”

Step 6: Panic

Call frequent late-night meetings with senior ministers, float rumors of an impending cabinet shake-up, castigate ministers in front of the cameras, use macho army metaphors, cancel trips abroad.

Step 7: Bluff

Announce that you are planning to integrate some of the protesters’ demands into your neoliberal reforms, then don’t. Hope no one notices.

Step 8: Divide and conquer

Agree to meet with one of the protesting factions, but not with the others. Offer them some goodies, but only for them. Tell them it’s cause they’re special, that they’re “the foundation upon which the state is built,” or some such nonsense. Hope they take the bait.

Step 9: Make a plan 

Call a press conference. Present the exact same neoliberal reforms as before, but repackaged and with minor adjustments. Be sure to emphasize: “there is no magic bullet.” Use hand gestures. Project an air of jovial collegiality with cabinet ministers. Use Power Point. Tell the nation that everything’s under control, flash smug smile repeatedly. Use selective hearing when responding to journalists’ questions.

Step 10: Give cops a raise

Young police officers making the minimum wage might become overly sympathetic to protesters. When no one’s looking, give them a hefty raise, while continuing to insist that you can’t afford one for the country’s doctors – who happen to be on a hunger strike.

Step 11: Play the “responsible adult” 

Put a figure to protesters’  demands, preferably in the billions. Hint that implementing them would lead to a Greece-style debt crisis or a US-style near-default. Remind the population how successful your macroeconomic policies have been.

Step 12: Appoint a panel

Recruit some of the more socially-minded cabinet ministers and a few well-paid consultants to engage in dialogue with the protesters. Send in Shimon Peres.

Step 13: Give ‘em the finger

Ram above-mentioned neoliberal reforms through parliament. Ignore the protesters demonstrating outside, as well as their leaders’ characterization of said laws as “cynical and wicked.” Look  unbearably self-satisfied during the vote.

Step 14: Declare a 180

Tell the head of the panel you appointed that you are willing to change your stripes and repudiate your neoliberal worldview. Release a few trial balloons.

 Step 15: Beat the war drums

Wait for a terrorist attack or security-related incident to occur, and then use it to divert attention away from socio-economic issues. Revert back to pre-protest security discourse.

 Step 16: Return to business as usual 

After the panel you appointed submits its recommendations for policy changes (which, needless to say, will be cosmetic), you can finally get back to the status quo ante. In order to prevent the return of the social-economic discourse to the headlines and op-ed pages, amp up the saber-rattling.

Step 17: Create a decoy

Encourage members of your coalition to propose a diarrhea-like flood of anti-democratic bills. That should divert the attention of the bleeding hearts and the media for the time being. Doesn’t hurt to target NGOs’ sources of funding either.

Step 18: Wait for next elections

Cover image: A “stroller protest” marching through the center of Tel Aviv on July 28, 2011. (Photo courtesy of ActiveStills.org)

Netanyahu is incapable of meeting tent protesters’ demands because he is wedded to a rigid, anti-urban ideology.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has a serious problem on his hands. Tens of thousands of angry young people are taking to the streets, yelling things like “the people want social justice” and “the answer to privatization – revolution,” while calling on him to resign.

His proclamations that he “embraces” and “identifies with” the protesters only seem to have further incensed them, and they refuse to buy the stale bill of goods he is trying to sell them as a solution to the housing problem.

Worse still, the people seem to have “lost their fear.” In the context of the Arab Spring revolutions, this phrase was used to describe a collective shaking-off of the mortal fear of the regime harbored by the masses. This fear – of harassment, blacklisting, arrest, persecution, torture or death – is what kept people in line for so many decades under dysfunctional and kleptocratic regimes.

In Israel, the fear is not of the regime, but of external threats: Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas and other bearded bogeymen. Nurtured assiduously by the government, these fears are what have kept the people in line for decades, as the country’s wealth was siphoned off by the army, the settlements, the ultra-Orthodox and the oligarchy. As long as the external threat was  dangled over Israelis’ heads on a weekly or daily basis, the masses didn’t dare to raise their heads.

But now they are, and worse still, they are discovering the hidden lines that connect all of the multitude of small, isolated battles taking place in the country.

It seems an entire new generation has become radicalized practically overnight. In a single week, the population has gone from being docile and indifferent to indignant and irate.

Despite attempts by his loyalists in the media to present them as political puppets of one left-wing conspiracy or another, or spoiled children whining about not getting their lollipop, the demonstrations have only gained strength, forcing Bibi to actually attempt to address their grievances.

This is a problematic situation for both sides. The demonstrators, most of whom had never encountered the intricacies of Israel’s byzantine land planning system before moving into their tents, have thus far failed to put forward a clear set of demands – although in a single week they have developed democratic decision-making mechanisms that put the current Knesset to shame, and have been debating their demands day and night.

Whatever these end up being, Netanyahu will find it hard to address them in any meaningful way. Bibi, whose political and socio-economic positions apparently ossified back when he was still known as Ben Nitay, has been nothing if not consistent in his views. The problem is that those views reflect an outdated and anachronistic approach, and one which is completely at odds not only with the worldview of the protesters, but with Israel’s official planning policy.

Bibi’s American dream

Bibi’s grand vision can be summed up in one tidy word: sprawl. A combination of the classic Zionist “I will cover you in a dress of cement and concrete” zeal with the free-market real estate economics that he learned about in the US, Netanyahu’s grand plan involves turning over vast tracks of virgin land to big developers, so that the latter can construct massive residential projects, while the magic of the free market lowers prices. Supply and demand.

“Undeveloped land is dead land, which doesn’t understand anything. When you develop it, it understands.”

This pearl of wisdom was uttered by none other than Israel’s prime minister, during a visit to the Dead Sea in which he was dazzled by all the “dead” land he found just waiting to be developed.

Bibi’s vision is of an unrestrained real estate market, in which developers buy up (state) land on the edges of the city, develop it, and then buy up more land, further out, and develop it.

The result of this model is always the same: a monotonous, soulless landscape of suburban tract housing zoned for single uses – here residential, there commercial, and so on. Public transportation is neglected in favor of private cars and elevated highways, complete with mammoth interchanges and endless parking lots, all subsidized generously by the state. Picture the suburbs of any American city.

This model, which began to catch on in Israel in the 1970s, was later rejected by the state’s planning institutions in favor of a more compact and sustainable pattern of growth. Planners here realized at some point that, unlike the US, Israel is a tiny country, where unrestrained development could easily overwhelming the country’s remaining open spaces.

The result was National Master Plan 35, a blueprint for the entire country’s future growth, based on limiting sprawl, redirecting construction back into cities, investing in public transportation and preserving what is left of the country’s natural areas. The plan was approved by the government in the early 2000s, and has since been undermined by almost all of the country’s leaders.

None more so than Benjamin Netanyahu, who is one of the world’s last true believers. Along with the Republicans in the US, Chicago School economists and disciples of the late Milton Friedman, Netanyahu remains a market purist. His blind faith in the wisdom of unencumbered markets has withstood even the free-market-induced crash of 2008 and the sharp declines of economies which he touted for years as models for Israel, primarily that of Ireland.

Nowhere is this truer than in the real estate market. In Bibi’s eyes, the market will solve the social problems created by the housing shortage. Deep down, he doesn’t believe in planning or other “outrageous” forms of regulation any more than he believes in ‘two states for two peoples.’

As far as the environmental problems which we now know are created, beyond a shadow of a doubt, by sprawl, as well as the soulless environments which result when contractors are allowed to prioritize quantity over quality, Bibi simply ignores them.

A three-pronged reform

The strategy that he has chosen to implement his vision is three-pronged.

First, privatize state-owned land by passing a law reforming the Israel Lands Administration, which holds 90+ percent of the country’s land. Check.

Second, create emergency planning committees (“national planning committees,” or in Netanyahu parlance, the “supertanker” plan) to fast-track construction on those lands, bypassing the existing planning system, which presumably would never consent to such a thing. Check.

Third, rewrite the country’s planning law such that, among other things, the ability of the public to oppose building plans would be sharply reduced. The Knesset is still working on that one.

These are the “reforms” that Netanyahu has been touting incessantly since the tent protests began on July 14. While they have some merit – the ILA truly is a horrendous dinosaur in need of reform, the planning system is often slow and inefficient and could use more hands on deck, and the country’s planning law is archaic and in need of a few tweaks – the devil is in the details.

Rather than propel the country forward, into the era of sustainability and social equity, Bibi’s grand vision will drag us backward, accelerating massive, uncontrolled (sub)urbanization while degrading the country’s standard of living.

As for the claim that flooding the market with tens of thousands of units will lower prices, most serious economists and planning experts are not buying it.

Wanted: an urban lifestyle

Another thing that Netanyahu’s reforms ignore: young people today are not interested in living in some bland suburban hi-rise.

It’s no accident that the tent city phenomenon began in central Tel Aviv. While a slew of commentators have scolded Tel Aviv’s young people for their desperate attempts to remain in the city, the truth is that no other place in Israel can offer what is, and has always been, Tel Aviv’s major selling point: the cosmopolitan, urban lifestyle it offers.

Nowhere else can young people find so many opportunities, economic as well as cultural and social, to live alternative lifestyles or hold opinions considered alien by middle-of-the-road, suburban Israel, or to live an ecological lifestyle which is not dependent on the automobile.

The protesters don’t want to move to cheap housing out in the middle of nowhere, they want to stay in the city. And, unfortunately, there is only one city in Israel that offers young people a truly urban way of life.

Benjamin Netanyahu is a walking anachronism. His government is detached and useless. Both are shackled to failed ideologies which cannot solve the problems we are facing.

Therefore, it is up to us, the young people, to find solutions to this problem (and possibly others as well) ourselves. Housing protesters need to get proactive, brainstorm, put their heads together with NGOs and academics, come up with a clear, simple list of demands from the government, and refuse to give an inch until they are met.

A tent camp in the middle of Tel Aviv is Israel’s answer to the ‘Arab Spring.’ 

Demonstrators pitching their tents Thursday night on Tel Aviv’s Rothschild Boulevard. (Image courtesy of ActiveStills)

Even before the first tent went up on Rothschild Boulevard last Thursday night, the authorities had already decided it was bad news. That morning, someone  in the municipality had gotten wind of plans to pitch a “tent city” in the middle of one the city’s most affluent streets as part of a protest against the skyrocketing cost of housing in Tel Aviv, and decided to nip it in the bud.

The chances for negative publicity were high, as the activists were vowing not to leave until real solutions to the city’s housing crunch were found. As city hall had nothing real to offer them, the police were instructed to rescind the demonstrations’ permit, which had already been issued.

The protesters insisted they would show up with tents in any case. Upon the intervention of deputy mayor Assaf Zamir, whose party purports to represent the interests of the city’s young adults, the permit was reinstated – but that didn’t stop protestors from showering both Zamir and mayor Ron Huldai with beer, water and eggs when they dropped by the encampment later that evening for a visit.

The weirdness of that encounter pretty much set the tone for everything that was to follow. Huldai, according to protesters’ accounts, began by lecturing the demonstrators on the proper way to conjugate the Hebrew verb “to rent,” before launching into a self-satisfied rant about how the Tel Aviv Municipality is pioneering the art and science of creating affordable housing in Israel. He concluded with his usual refrain, which he traditionally uses to justify his inaction across a range of fields: ain li samchuyot – literally, I lack the authority. Or, in a freer translation – blame the government.

The protesters, to their credit, weren’t buying it. Flush with the excitement of a nascent social movement, which already then seemed destined to echo far and wide (yesterday it landed on the august pages of the Guardian), and a bit insulted by the mayor’s condescension, the demonstrators ran him out of the makeshift camp, while spraying him with various beverages and chanting “a mayor for the rich” as he retreated.

Wet, frustrated, and a bit shocked, the aging Huldai retreated to the passenger seat of his car, where he was forced to wait impatiently while his driver attempted to remove a protester who had planted his behind on the hood of the automobile and refused to budge.

The normally media-shy Huldai would later launch an aggressive rearguard media offensive, expressing reserved support for the protesters and their cause, which he deemed “legitimate,” while requesting that they keep public order and hygiene. That night, he wrote on his Twitter feed: “I came to Rothschild Boulevard tonight to speak with the demonstrators, but it became clear to me that they don’t want to listen.”

Politicians discover the tent camp

Huldai’s prognosis was only half correct – they did indeed want to listen, but only if the speaker actually had something to say. Over the next few days, as the camp became the epicenter of a voracious media circus, numerous politicians attempted to mollify the demonstrators with various and sundry forms of cheap populism, and most were driven away in contempt.

One such lawmaker, a member of the ruling Likud party, seemed genuinely surprised at the general refusal of the young crowd to kiss her rear end, at one point shouting at a demonstrator in front of news cameras: “What, are you a retard?!” She stalked off, fuming, and later told the media that she had encountered a crazed mob of radical leftist agitators. The demonstrators, for their part, responded by creating a musical remix of the memorable moment and posting it on YouTube.

Other politicians, however, mainly from the left-wing opposition, were warmly welcomed into the fold, as were any number of sympathetic passers-by, some of whom came bearing food, supplies, advice and even prayers.

The Prime Minister, for his part, offered what he might have considered a sincere gesture, encouraging the demonstrators to “come to Jerusalem and help the government pass its real estate reforms.” The reforms in question were a package of bureaucracy-busting, supply-side, neoliberal proposals so stale and controversial that they have even encountered substantial push-back in  the Knesset (the same Knesset which routinely passes racist and obnoxious laws without skipping a beat, such as the law passed last week which criminalizes calls to boycott the settlements).

The place quickly acquired a carnival atmosphere. At one point on Friday night, tent-dwellers were lining up to bellow off-key renditions of protest classics like Tracy Chapman’s Talkin’ ‘bout a Revolution and Madness’ Our House (“Our house, in the middle of the street”) into the microphone of a karaoke machine that someone had set up inside the main tent.

The media discovers the tent camp

However, the demonstrators’ apparent inexperience in dealing with the media and the lack of a clear list of demands allowed all sorts of ill-wishers to manipulate their image and misrepresent their aims.

It wasn’t long before grumpy commentators – almost uniformly old, male, white and privileged – began to describe them as spoiled children, whining about wanting to live in the center of town but unwilling to work hard enough to pay for it. Senior politicians, including the Housing Minister (who hails from the ultra-religious Shas party), jumped on the bandwagon, eager to delegitimize what they saw as a potential threat to their political hegemony.

More gracious commentators offered them friendly advice, telling the demonstrators to go live somewhere where they could actually afford to pay the rent, say, the Negev desert, or maybe in the settlements.

By Sunday, the fourth day of the protest, pictures of the tent camp (which had still not reached more than a few dozen tents) were on the front pages of all the newspapers, and numerous copycat demonstrations were said to be in the works in towns and colleges across the country.

On the whole, journalists seem to have reacted to the whole thing with unprecedented enthusiasm – possibly due to being pleasantly surprised at the emergence of such a dynamic and ongoing news story in the midst of the languid summer, or perhaps out of genuine excitement that, for the first time in years, an authentic protest movement seemed to be taking shape, partially inspired by our neighbors in Egypt, Jordan and Syria, as well as more recent protests in Spain.

The media’s reaction was, of course, not uniform. While Haaretz seemed to mostly support the protestors, the tabloid dailies offered sensationalized headlines and mixed analyses. A Jerusalem Post editorial applauded the emergence of a new kind of consumer protest movement, sort of a cottage cheese boycott 2.0, and the grassroots vibe which seemed to bridge the gaping abyss between left and right, while also giving the government kudos for supposedly being on track to solve the problems.

The truth, however, is that no one in power – not the mayor, not Bibi, not the Housing Ministry and certainly not Kadima (which did zero for the cause while in office, and has continued to do zero in the opposition) – have as yet taken any real steps to solve the housing crisis. They have all clearly sinned, and instead of trying to cover up that fact, they should repent, and fast, so that they can begin to move past their usual rancor and ineptitude and find a credible way to begin to deliver real solutions to the problem.

Of these there are quite a few of these, a good number of them quite doable, and many of them generally politically palatable (to the people and our saner elected representatives, though not necessarily to the PM and members of his ultra-right, neoliberal clique).

Potential solutions to the housing crisis

First, an affordable housing law must to be passed right away. This could be part of the ongoing effort to rewrite Israel’s planning law, or a stand-along law. In any case, it must grant municipalities the legal authority to formulate their own affordable housing policies. Until that happens, affordable housing programs that have already begun to take shape in a handful of Israeli cities will remain frozen, and in some cases be reversed.

Second, the government needs to resurrect its public housing programs. What was once a formidable system for housing the under-privileged (while “affordable housing” generally relates to apartments for the middle class, “public housing” refers to subsidized housing for the poor) has gradually been allowed to disintegrate. In Israel of 2011, poor families receive pitiful housing vouchers which barely allow them to live in the country’s worst ghettos, while no new public housing stock has been built in two decades, and existing stock is sold off to developers (who are encouraged by the authorities to evict any residents still living in the properties).

As Technion researcher (and, full disclosure, a former professor of mine) Dr. Emily Silverman pointed out this week in an op-ed, the well-timed departure of a number of veteran Housing Ministry officials from key positions opens up the possibility that new blood in the ministry could bring about a new spirit of action and initiative. However, this can only happen if the government supports and facilitates such a process.

Also, the formulation of a “right to housing” law would certainly help improve the situation by forcing the government to recognize its responsibility to guarantee that it citizens are able to find proper housing at affordable prices.

What city hall can do 

On the local level, the Tel Aviv Municipality needs to seriously up its game. Much has been written on this blog about the new master plan being advanced for the city. Scandalously, that plan does not include a chapter on affordable housing, despite city hall’s stated enthusiasm for the subject (the official excuse is that the lack of affordable housing legislation leaves the municipality without the  legal authority to promote affordable housing – or, in other words, ain li samchuyot).

Even if it can’t be implemented right away because of government malfeasance, affordable housing must be included in the master plan, as city council members have repeatedly insisted, both as a clear statement of intent and as a means of pressuring the government to pass the necessary legislation. City hall’s decision to roll over in resignation, instead of fighting for its rights, is a pathetic failure of leadership.

Even more disturbing is another fact which came to light recently during a discussion of the new master plan. Uniquely among Israeli cities, the Tel Aviv Municipality actually holds a significant amount of city-owned land and properties, which could easily be converted into residential buildings containing small apartments and affordable units. However, it turns out that neither the municipal planning teams nor members of the city council have been allowed full access to information about the scope and location of these properties.

The reason, apparently, is that a single municipal bureaucrat has for years treated the municipal properties department as his own private fiefdom, doling out information only to the extent that he sees fit. This is certainly not in accordance with the rules of good government, and it is mayor Ron Huldai’s duty to root out such cases of dictatorial behavior among city officials inside his administration.

The master plan, by the way, will not significantly expand the supply of housing (affordable or otherwise) in the city over the next couple of decades. Instead, planners have chosen to rezone land for millions of square meters of new office buildings (which bring in much higher city taxes and make much fewer demands on the municipality, in terms of things like new schools, community centers, etc.). Is this the way to plan for the future in a city that is already experiencing a severe housing crunch?

Talking about a revolution?

These ideas are, of course, just the tip of the iceberg. Affordable housing policy does not require reinventing the wheel. A variety of policies exist, and they are certainly known to decision-makers, local as well as national. International precedents exist in abundance, and working proposals continue to be put forward on a regular basis by the Coalition for Affordable Housing in Israel and, on the Tel Aviv level, by the municipal opposition, which this week released a well-thought-out proposal detailing simple steps city hall could take to alleviate the housing shortage in the near term.

Ones hopes that the various groups will manage to sit down together and kick out an orderly list of demands, just as the young protesters camping out in Cairo’s Tahrir Square did (and continue to do). If such a scenario actually takes shape, then perhaps the enthusiasm of the media and activist community will be validated, and Israel might just experience a little taste of the revolutionary spirit blowing through the Middle East these days.

Meanwhile, the tent camp on Rothschild Boulevard is looking more and more revolutionary. Last night, the tents numbered close to a hundred, the people in the thousands, and celebrities, politicians and reporters were eagerly rubbing shoulders with people playing music, projecting movies on makeshift screens, reclining on couches, playing with their children and distributing meals to demonstrators.

Unusually for Israel, no uniformed security forces whatsoever were present – no police, no soldiers, no border policemen, no unmarked cops on motorcycles. The lack of law enforcement seemed to provide space for a refreshingly relaxed and open atmosphere, as, one after another, young people took advantage of a Hyde Park-style microphone to share their thoughts about the protest and what form it needed to take. Passers-by beeped and shouted out their solidarity with the cause, as organizers huddled over laptops used Facebook and Twitter to blast their message out into the world.

One final thought. The positive vibes and open atmosphere of the protest camp seem to already have succeeded in accomplishing one thing: persuading Israelis to discard the automatic cynicism which characterizes so much of life in Israel and is seen by many as one of the primary obstacles to real political change here.

Dropping this cynicism is perhaps the Israeli equivalent to what the young revolutionaries in Arab countries have described as “losing their fear,” a spontaneous mental process in which people shed, overnight, decades of ingrained mental patterns and begin to see their predicament more clearly.

If this is indeed the case, then perhaps there is hope.

Insensitive planning and a lack of transparency have generated significant opposition to plans for bike lanes in Tel Aviv.

A rendering of Bloch Street in central Tel Aviv, after its upcoming renovation (image courtesy of Tel Aviv Municipality).

After years of pressure from advocacy groups, the Tel Aviv Municipality has finally adopted an aggressively pro-bicycle agenda. Bike lanes are being paved, a bike-share system is being launched, and the city’s PR machine is working hard to sell the new strategy. Yet, the insensitivity and obtuseness which with the new policy is being implemented have already provoked a limited backlash, which, if left unchecked, threatens to endanger the entire project.

Tel Aviv is experiencing a surge of interest in urban cycling. As the number of people choosing to get around the city by bicycle has grown in recent years, so has the municipality’s budget for building new bike lanes.  According to a new 5-year plan, close to 40 km of new bike lanes will be paved over the next few years, many of them along central streets.

Meanwhile, the city’s bike lanes themselves have gradually evolved from pitiful logos spray painted onto sidewalks to color-coded sidewalk paths, to the elegant street-level, separated lanes built along main streets in the eastern part of the city in recent years.

All of this has engendered a new breed of activists, mostly car owners, who complain that city hall’s newfound enthusiasm for bicycles will lead to the unilateral elimination of dozens of already-scarce parking spots. While still in its infancy, the backlash has already taken on a number of different forms: internet activism, angry exchanges at city council meetings, even a lawsuit.

Tel Aviv is not alone if facing such a backlash. Similar scenarios have played out recently in several other cities around the world.

In New York, where the administration of Mayor Michael Bloomberg is pursuing an ambitious program of urban sustainability, an energetic new transportation commissioner has installed some 400 kilometers of new bike lanes over the last four years, eliminating hundreds of parking spots in the process. While considered by many to be a success – the project has led to a sharp increase in bicycle use while reducing traffic accidents – it has also drawn some very vocal criticism, mainly from a privileged minority of car owners.

In response, the city’s mayor and transportation commissioner have pledged to redouble their efforts to build a consensus around bike lanes, through better communication with the public, greater attentiveness to civic leaders and a more inclusive planning process. So far, the strategy appears to be working.

In Tel Aviv, however, the city’s leadership has reacted to the umbrage of local car owners with its typical dismissive, my-way-or-the-highway attitude. “The streets of Tel Aviv do not belong to the residents,” a senior official in charge of transportation at the municipality recently told a local newspaper. “No one owns the streets or the parking spots, and the municipality does not have to conduct negotiations with the residents.”

Mayor Ron Huldai reacted with similar disdain when residents of Bloch Street showed up at a recent city council meeting to contest the decision to cancel several dozen parking spaces in order to make way for a new bike lane. As the mayor calmly ignored the residents’ protests, the council chairwoman made it clear that they would not be allowed to air their concerns, and threatened to have them forcibly removed from the meeting.

This kind of response is unlikely to defuse opposition.  On the contrary, it is pretty much guaranteed to further antagonize the project’s opponents, especially as the municipality’s flagship bike sharing project begins to flood the city with hundreds of additional cyclists this spring – potentially creating more friction between pedestrians, cars and bikes on city streets and sidewalks.

Looked at differently, however, perhaps the bike lanes versus parking discourse reflects a false dichotomy. Listen closely to the arguments of opponents and it becomes clear that what really irks them, even more than the loss of a few parking spots, is that no one bothered to include them in the decision-making process. On the other side, the pro-bicycle crowd has conveniently ignored the lack of transparency to which it would normally object.

If this is the case, then perhaps the best way to defuse the anti-bike backlash before it spreads is for the municipality to engage in an open, honest dialogue with the public. This might begin by presenting the city’s 5-year plan for bike lanes – formulated without public participation and never approved by the city council – to the public, while clearly communicating the reasoning behind it and its benefits, and creating space for public input.

Municipal officials might also make an effort to engage with disgruntled citizens who stand to lose their parking spots. In the case of Bloch Street, a meeting has been scheduled between residents and senior officials at the municipality. Next time around, perhaps it would be wise to meet with affected residents at an earlier stage of the planning process.

Moreover, while bicycles are certainly part of the solution, bike lanes alone will not solve the city’s chronic transportation problems. City officials would probably have an easier time persuading skeptical car-owners of the benefits of bike lanes if the latter actually believed that the municipality was engaged in a real effort to create immediate, near-term public transportation solutions.

In addition to bike lanes, these might include improvements to the bus system, along with more and better-enforced dedicated bus lanes, several lines of BRT (bus rapid transit) and the creation of a metropolitan transportation authority. According to various reports, some of these moves have already been set in motion, yet they are being promoted without any real effort to inform or involve the public.

Tel Aviv residents have repeatedly expressed their demand to be included in the planning of their streets and neighborhoods. Thus, presenting such a package to the public at this point would probably be the single most popular move the city’s leadership could make, even if it meant taking away parking spots and/or traffic lanes.

The transition from a car-dependent city to one which prioritizes public transportation, bicycles and pedestrians is not a cosmetic change but an inherently transformative process. As such, if the municipality is serious about making it happen, it must do away with its preference for closed-door decision-making and adopt a new spirit of openness and collaboration.

Originally published at +972 on 24 April 2011.

How the city’s new master plan will transform its skyline forever.

Since the late nineties, Tel Aviv’s skyline has undergone a radical change. Once a low-strung panorama of flat roofs, dominated by the ubiquitous solar water heater, in recent years office and residential towers have been popping up seemingly at random. The proliferation of towers has created a disjointed skyline, disturbed the urban fabric in historical areas and antagonized entire neighborhoods.

Perhaps in light of this recent history, the new city master plan makes a concerted effort to regulate the controversial topic of tall building construction – defining for the first time where new skyscrapers will be allowed, and where existing skylines will be preserved. At the same time, the plan would grant an official (and likely irreversible) stamp of approval for new skyscrapers in certain sensitive and controversial areas, in some cases ignoring the vociferous opposition of neighborhood groups.

Here, then, is a brief rundown of the changes proposed in the master plan, published as a public service (due to the fact that the municipality, whose duty it is to publicize things like these, has thus far neglected to do so):

In the city center (west of Ibn Gvirol Street, the area known as the “White City”) the skyline will be more or less preserved as is. Most new buildings will be allowed to rise to 6 ½ stories: including a commercial floor, 5 stories of apartments and an extra half floor on the roof (which will presumably become penthouse apartments). That said, plans for skyscrapers that have already been granted official approval in the area (there are still a handful that haven’t begun construction yet) will still be built.

Also, despite the widespread recognition that designating the city’s beachfront for hotel towers was a mistake, the plan nevertheless designates almost the entire beachfront for hotels in 25 story towers.

In other historical neighborhoods – notably much of Jaffa, Florentine, Neve Tzedek, “Old” Ramat Aviv and Maoz Aviv – new buildings will not be allowed to rise higher than the surrounding built environment.

East of Ibn Gvirol Street, residential tower construction will be encouraged in numerous areas (see map – the darker the color, the higher the buildings), as well as on Einstein Street, near Tel Aviv University.

One of the plan’s central principles is to strengthen Tel Aviv as the business capital of Israel. In practice, this will mean lots of new office buildings (office space in the city will more than double under the master plan), with entire forests of corporate skyscrapers sprouting on both sides on the Ayalon Highway. This, in fact, is one of the less controversial elements of the plan, as a broad consensus exists among green organizations, neighborhood groups and even the municipal opposition that building skyscrapers in this particular area makes sense.

Further south, however, the plan proposes additional skyscrapers in more controversial areas.

One of these is along the old Ottoman railway (which once travelled between Old Jaffa and Jerusalem), between Neveh Tzedek and Florentine. The plan designates the entire corridor for buildings of up to 40 stories – a move which would create a wall of cement and glass between Tel Aviv and Jaffa, and which has been fought for years by area activists.

The first project built in the complex, Neve Tzedek Tower, has been widely condemned for its disproportional size and its design, which turns its back on the street and the surrounding neighborhoods. The head of the municipal planning committee, Doron Sapir (who also happens to bear a large share of the responsibility for the tower’s approval) even pronounced it a “planning mistake.” If that is the case, it is unclear why the municipality insists on continuing to promote more such mistakes alongside it.

Nearby Shlavim Street, which passes between Jaffa and south Tel Aviv, will be designated as a corridor of tall office buildings (up to 25 stories). The plan calls for the street to be widened such that it would funnel traffic from the city’s southern entrance to its center, with the road widening even more at intersections.

Area residents who, during public participation hearings, were presented with two possible alternative for the area, both variations on the highway + office towers theme (one with a bit more highway, one with a few more towers) expressed their sincere demand for a community-based alternative for south Tel Aviv and Jaffa – one which would invest in the community, and not just in infrastructure. While this demand was recorded in the municipality’s reports, municipal planners have shown no indication that they will take it seriously, and seem bent on ignoring it.

In fighting against plans for skyscrapers, residents of Tel Aviv neighborhoods oppose powerful forces: developers and architects (who have a clear economic interest in encouraging the phenomenon), municipal officials (hungry for the extra tax money tall buildings provide) and a deeply-rooted fondness for development and “progress” in their various forms. At the same time, various myths have been put into the service of skyscraper development, such as the myth that skyscraper neighborhoods are necessarily denser than low- and mid-rise areas (they’re not) and the unspoken assumption that anyone can afford to live in them (only the very rich can).

And what of sustainability? Tel Aviv’s first LEED-certified office building is already under construction, and a new, super-innovative Israeli green building standard is about to come into force. Everyone, including developers, seems to be thinking about green architecture these days, and the country’s Environmental Protection Minister is even considering incentivizing green construction.

With so much happening in the field, the new master plan would be an excellent opportunity to position Tel Aviv on the forefront of green architecture in Israel. And indeed, according to municipal planners, the plan will include some form of green building guidelines. But what kind, exactly – and will the city’s guidelines be consistent with the new national green building standard? Like so many other things in the master plan, this remains an open question.

__________

Got questions? Ideas? Opinions on the city’s future? Tell the Tel Aviv Municipality what you think about the master plan: email the planning team at mitar@mail.tel-aviv.gov.il, contact a city council member or leave a comment on the municipality’s Facebook page.

Originally published in Hebrew on Mishmar Hamoatza’s blog on March 15, 2011. Map and rendering courtesy of Tel Aviv Municipality.

City Council member suggests letting citizens decide how to allocate a portion of the city’s development budget.

Participatory budgeting is defined by Wikipedia as “a process of democratic deliberation and decision-making, and a type of participatory democracy, in which ordinary residents decide how to allocate part of a municipal or public budget.” The idea was pioneered in Porto Alegre, Brazil, where it was used to engage previously disenfranchised citizens in the democratic process while distributing resources to poorer neighborhoods.

In Tel Aviv, no one really knows how the city draws up its $1.25 billion yearly budget, but city residents are certainly not involved. Like many of the city’s policies, the budget is created though an opaque process and released to the public in an inaccessible format. Recent efforts to force the municipality to release its annual budget in a more accessible format went all the way to the courts.

Last month, Dr. Noah Efron, a member of the City Council from a party called City for All, suggested opening up a portion of the budgetary process to citizen participation. The Mayor, as he often does, had the motion removed from the Council’s agenda, effectively killing it.

But perhaps the time has come for a more transparent and democratically-formulated budget in Tel Aviv?

A comprehensive plan for Tel Aviv’s future is flat, unimaginative and out of touch with the city’s spirit and people.

Halfway through his third term in power, Tel Aviv Mayor Ron Huldai is promoting his most ambitious project yet: a comprehensive master plan, meant to guide the city’s explosive development over the coming decades.

The magnitude of the plan is difficult to overstate; the mayor himself has described it as a “constitution” for the city. Yet, try Googling the master plan and you’ll find almost nothing. Amazingly, despite the enormous impact it is expected to have on the city, the plan has yet to be released to the public in full.

While some information about the contents of the plan is buried deep inside the municipality’s website, the city’s well-oiled PR machine has made no serious effort to bring it to the attention of the general public. (Quite the opposite, in fact: during a recent overhaul of the municipal website, several documents actually disappeared.)

During a series of public hearings, ostensibly designed to solicit feedback on the plan’s proposals, residents were given a partial and selective picture of the plan. As a result, municipal officials were able to limit discussions to narrow, predetermined parameters, while excluding the plan’s more controversial elements.

This pattern has continued as discussions on the master plan have moved to the city council. In meeting after meeting, council members have complained of receiving insufficient information about the plan. The result has been a series of unfocused and contentious discussions – yet the mayor has resisted council members’ calls for greater openness.

Meanwhile, the municipal spokesman’s office has apparently imposed a media blackout, telling journalists that no comments or interviews on the master plan will be forthcoming until after it is formally approved by the city council (at which point it will presumably be too late for the public to influence the plan in any case).

With no access for journalists, media coverage of the plan has been almost nonexistent, and with few details to go on, civic groups have had a difficult time influencing the planning process. The public, for its part, remains only minimally aware of the plan’s existence. This has proven a winning strategy for controlling the terms of the debate, though hardly a democratic one.

An analysis of portions of the plan that have been released, as well as materials distributed to city council members, reveals that the lack of transparency may be obscuring an unambitious and depressingly mediocre plan – one that stops short of offering real solutions for Tel Aviv’s urban problems, while failing to propose a compelling vision for the city’s future.

One of the plan’s most glaring shortcomings is its failure to propose a viable solution to the city’s transportation problems. Despite a rhetorical commitment to creating sustainable transportation systems, the plan hinges entirely on the realization of long-delayed plans for a light rail/subway system – a project which is only expected to begin to come to fruition a full decade from now, if not even later.

This is especially disappointing considering the emerging consensus (among residents, activists, government bodies and even municipal officials) that a parallel investment in nearer-term solutions, such as improved bus lanes and bus rapid transit (BRT), would offer more immediate results.

Regarding the city’s other major problem – the spiraling cost of housing – municipal officials are not saying if the plan will pursue anything more aggressive than the bare-bones policy on affordable housing that the municipality has already adopted.

Climate change, another critical challenge, is not even mentioned in the plan. As both Israel’s most carbon-intensive city and its center of creativity and innovation, a strategy to position Tel Aviv on the vanguard of national efforts to move to a low-carbon economy would seem like a no-brainer. Strangely, although the city says it is working on a separate plan for reducing emissions, that plan will apparently not be integrated into the master plan.

One thing, however, that is clear is that the plan will transform the city’s skyline beyond recognition. While low skylines will be preserved in the center of town and in parts of Jaffa, areas east of the city center would be transformed into a forest of skyscrapers. In a victory for real estate interests over long-standing opposition by residents, the plan would also allow for extensive high-rise construction in the south of the city, creating multiple corridors of office and residential towers, which would hover awkwardly above existing low-rise neighborhoods.

In comparison to long-term plans for other cities around the world, Tel Aviv’s new master plan aims low. For example, San Jose’s “Green Vision,” a 15-year plan adopted in 2007, includes ambitious, quantifiable goals such as adding 25,000 new green jobs to the local economy, planting 100,000 trees, powering the city with 100% renewable energy and using recycling and waste-to-energy technologies to eliminate 100% of the city’s solid waste.

In cities around the world, the trend is clear: urban master plans are no longer simply tools for handing out buildings rights to developers, but road maps to urban sustainability. That Tel Aviv’s leadership has yet to grasp this fact speaks to a profound failure of imagination.

The best way to shake up the stagnant logic of the new master plan is to expose it to the public. The new master plan would benefit greatly from an open public debate, something which has been sorely lacking thus far. Rather than shutting out the city’s people and NGO community, many of whom have long expressed an eagerness to be partners in shaping the city’s future, the municipality would do well to tap into their creativity.

In order for this to happen, the municipality needs to release the new master plan to the public, immediately and in its entirety. Following full publication of the plan, the municipality should create a website dedicated to explaining the plan’s proposals to the public (an accepted practice around the world), while creating space for residents, NGOs and community groups to help shape the plan. At the same time, the municipality must engage with the media and raise the level of awareness about the plan among the general public.

Tel Aviv is a city of openness and creativity, and its planning and municipal governance should reflect that spirit. The last thing Tel Aviv needs is another formalistic document, cooked up by worn out technocrats and approved over the heads of the public. What is truly needed is a master plan that authentically reflects the collective wisdom of the city’s people and civic organizations, formulated in an open and democratic process. Only then can such a plan legitimately be called Tel Aviv’s “constitution.”

Originally published at +972 Blog on Jan. 23, 2011.

Authorities: “We need to plant trees here to protect the land.”

Note: The following is a media communique released by Tarabut-Hithabrut, an organization which describes itself as an “Arab-Jewish movement for social and political change.” The release concerns a small Israeli Bedouin village in the Negev called Al Araqib, which the authorities have leveled multiple times in the last six months, claiming it was built illegally.

Yesterday it was demolished for the 9th time, and by the time this document was released today, the village had already been leveled for the 10th time. In both cases, multiple people were injured, including children.

In the US, today is Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. day. In his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Dr. King wrote: ”Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

Here is the release:

Al Araqib Residents Expelled to Make Way for Trees

On Sunday, January 16^th, 2011, the Israel Lands Administration (ILA) accompanied by a heavy police presence destroyed the Bedouin village of Al Araqib for the 9^th time since its total destruction in July 2010. During the village’s destruction the police forces used large amounts of violent force, including sponge bullets (a police method of crowd dispersal) which injured eleven of the residents, one of them in his eye.

This time it seems that the ILA has decided to expel the residents once and for all. This is corroborated by statements made by Shlomo Zeiser, the ILA officer in charge of inspection, in an interview with the “Walla” news website: “In addition to the ongoing work, we cleared away the debris from the previous demolitions, which were an environmental and safety hazard. At the same time, we started to prepare the place for planting, in order to protect the land there.”

Throughout the demolitions the police forces arrested a number of residents who were protesting the destruction of their homes. Parallel to the demolition, ILA personnel began to clear away the remains of the eight previous demolitions, and started construction works to level the land in order to prepare it for planting trees. Activists who arrived at the village this morning (Monday, 17.1) in order to observe and document the events were stopped by police forces, and one of them, Professor Gadi AlGazi, a historian from Tel Aviv University and activist in the Hithabrut-Taraabut movement, was arrested by the police.

The village of Al Araqib has existed for 80 years. In the early 1950′s the new Israeli state requested of the residents to leave their village temporarily, promising that they will be allowed to return to the village in six months. This promise was never fulfilled. In the beginning of the 1990′s the village residents and their descendants decided to return to their lands and to make good on the promise that was made to them. Since then the Israeli government has been using different means to try to expel them again. Among the more outrageous attempts included sending airplanes to blanket the residents’ wheat fields with toxic pesticides meant for weeds. After the High Court of Justice ruled that this method comprises a risk to health and human life, the government ceased using this method and began using tractors to uproot the young wheat sprouts. After the authorities realized that the Al Araqib residents were holding steadfast to their land and are not giving up, the government sent hundreds of heavily armed police and bulldozers to destroy the village and expel the residents by force. The first demolition was committed on the 27^th of July, 2010, in which an entire fully populated village, including its houses, barns, orchards, and animal houses, was destroyed.

The residents returned and built dwellings for themselves, and the authorities returned and destroyed these eight times. After the second demolition Sheikh Siyakh A-Turi, the leader of the village, was exiled from the village and was forbidden from entering its lands. Al Turi was forced to dwell in the village’s cemetery. From this cemetery Sheikh A-Turi sent a message of peace and reconciliation to the residents of Israel, where he explained why the Bedouins are not invaders, and called on the government to cease the demolitions.

The ongoing demolitions are not a coincidence. They are part of The 30 Day Plan, which is the plan to rid the Negev of its Bedouin residents. The last demolition is also a part of this plan. What is happening at this very moment in Al Araqib is nothing new in the history of the State of Israel. Cleansing the land, of its original residents as well as of any remnant of their existence—structures, agricultural lands, trees, and more—and then covering the land with trees. This is a practice that has been put into place in many other places in Israel. For instance, after the 1967 war, the Arab villages of Yalo and Imwaas in the Latrun area were completely destroyed and the trees of “Canada Park” planted on their ruins. And so on and so forth, in dozens of different cases. And now it seems that the state is trying to erase any trace of the existence of the residents of Al Araqib and deny any connection they have to this place.

At this very moment, the residents of the village have been assembled in their village’s cemetery overlooking the village, the same cemetery that they have used for 80 years. They are forbidden to approach what is left of their village. From the cemetery they can observe the bulldozers and other heavy machinery busy leveling their village, erasing any vestige of the human history of that place. Jewish National Fund (Keren Kayemet Le’Israel) employees are already preparing the ground for planting, and if we don’t stop them before it’s too late, the village’s land will be covered with green saplings starting this Thursday, in anticipation of Tu BiShvat, the Festival of the Trees.

We cannot allow that to happen. This is ethnic cleansing, plain and simple. They expel human beings, destroy their homes, and try to erase any trace of their existence. This is an attempt to rewrite the history of Zionism, to retroactively prove the known Zionist motto: “A land without a people, for a people without a land.” But this land was occupied. The residents of Al Araqib are living testimony of this, and for this reason, perhaps, the authorities are so determined and violent in their attempts to expel them from their lands.

Photos courtesy of ActiveStills.