Habitat International 41 (2014) 135e141

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Habitat International
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‘The right to the city’ revisited: Assessing urban rights e The case
of Arab Cities in Israel
Yosef Jabareen*
Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning, Technion e Israel Institute of Technology, 33855 Haifa, Israel

a b s t r a c t
Keywords: Based on a critical revision of Lefebvre’s right to the city, this paper proposes a conceptual framework for a
The right to the city right to the city that is made up of several rights. The study uses this framework to assess the right to the
Developing cities
city held by the Arab minority in Israel. The study indicates that inhabitants of cities in Israel, both Jews
Arab cities in Israel
Minorities
and Arabs, are to a large extent denied the right to the city, although unequally. Significantly, this paper
Planning reveals that the rights to the cities held by Palestinians in Israel are deficient and incomplete. This
problem is a structural and deeply political and ethnic one that could not be solved at the city level. The
right to the city has a political agenda that aims to enhance the political conditions of urban life and its
inhabitants in the face of the economic processes and the hegemony of the central state. A crucial insight
regarding the right to the city regards cityestate relationships, suggesting that the right to the city
represents a framework that aims to protect the city from state tyranny and technocrats and to provide
adequate human shelter with a strong political status. The absence of the right to the city has the potential
to intensify conflicts between the inhabitants and the state; conversely, it suggests that a progressive
right to the city might mitigate ethnic conflict.
Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Introduction
The right to the city, a term coined by Henri Lefebvre, has become
a symbol and an ideal for human rights in cities and among urban
communities in recent years. The right to the city has been a
leading concept and vision for the framing of rights and equality in
the recent literature on urban studies and other, related social
sciences. Many theorists in planning and urban-oriented disciplines
have contributed to emerging knowledge in this critical field that
explores rights, citizenship, and cities (Amin & Thrift, 2002; Attoh,
2011; Brenner, Marcuse & Mayer, 2012; Harvey, 2003; Harvey &
Potter, 2009; Isin, 2000; Klodawsky & Blomley, 2009; Marcuse,
2009a,b; Purcell, 2002, 2003).
Lefebvre (1996: 67) argues that prior to industrialization pro-
cesses, “the society, as a whole, made up of the city” and that each
city tends to constitute itself as an enclosed, self-contained, self-
functioning system. Lefebvre insists that the groups that consti-
tuted the traditional city were “rivals in their love of the city” (p. 67)
and that “each citizen was expected to have a reasoned opinion on
every fact and problem concerning him” (p. 81). However, in the
* Tel.: þ972 528655336.
E-mail address: jabareen@technion.ac.il.
modern city, the people’s rights and involvements have been
harshly distorted. In his The Urban Revolution (2003), Lefebvre ar-
gues that one of the most disturbing problems of urban life is the
extraordinary passivity of the people and the lack of participation of
those who are affected by urban projects and influenced by related
strategies. He asked “Why this silence?” and “What is behind the
strange situation?” (2003: 181). Lefebvre argues that “the city has
been attacked by industrialization” (p. 74), resulting in dispos-
sessed neighborhoods and uprooted people, deteriorated residen-
tial areas, ghettos for the underprivileged, disorganized people,
fragmented communities, spatial fragility, and property specula-
tion and exploitation. Lefebvre (2003: 136) concludes that the way
to approach the urban problematic depends on the economic, so-
cial, and political structure of the country, as well as its ideological
superstructures. Accordingly, he proposes the right to the city as a
response to the urban problematic, aiming to meet the “practical
and theoretical crisis” and challenges that face the modern city
(1996: 74). Although Lefebvre expresses admiration and nostalgia
for the traditional city over the “distorted” modern one, he states
that “the right to the city cannot be conceived of as a return to
traditional cities. It can only be formulated as a transformed and
renewed right to urban life” (1996: 158). Lefebvre concludes that
the right to the city “is like a cry and a demand” (Lefebvre, 1996:
158). Accordingly, “the right to the city manifests itself as a superior

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136 Y. Jabareen / Habitat International 41 (2014) 135e141
form of rights” (Lefebvre, 1996: 173), and those who are eligible for
the right to the city are all of those who inhabit the city (Lefebvre,
1996: 158).
However, Lefebvre’s concept of the right to the city is highly
abstract and lacks a framework for applicability (Fainstein, 2009).
Attoh (2011) suggests that although many progressive scholars
have embraced the idea of the right to the city, what they mean by
rights has often been left unexplored, and the term rights in this
literature remains a “black box.” Moreover, Attoh (2011) argues that
although the right to the city has generated excitement among
urban grassroots organizations and scholars, the right to the city
framework offers us little assistance in navigating the way forward.
Moreover, “within the scholarship it remains a fuzzy concept,” very
broad and with a number of inconsistencies and sticking points
(Attoh, 2011: 678). Marcuse (2012: 27) asks, “what does the right to
the city mean? Whose rights are we talking about? What right is it
we mean?” (p. 27). Apparently, there is a striking lack of work that
conceptualizes the right to the city and explains exactly what type of
rights the right to the city advocates. Does this concept refer to
group rights, individual rights, or a mixture of both? Or does the
right to the city come at the expense of individual rights, as Attoh
(2011) suggests? A better conceptual framework will make it
possible to address rights in cities and the limits of the right to the
city in actual settings. In the next section, this paper presents the
conceptual framework of the right to the city.
Attoh (2011: 674) suggests that Lefebvre in fact spends little
time elucidating what a right to the city might look like in a prac-
tical sense, saying, “Lefebvre’s notion of rights was sketchy at best,
and, worse, the growing scholarship on the ‘right to the city’ offers
little clarification.” Purcell (2003: 576) argues that “few have
engaged in a close reading of Lefebvre’s work.or seriously
examined the implications of Lefebvre’s idea and how it might
provide the basis for a new form of citizenship that challenges the
neoliberal world view.” He argues that “the lack of a critical
engagement with Lefebvre’s idea has led to an overstretching of the
concept.”
Therefore, this paper aims to propose a conceptual framework of
the right to the city and apply it in a real urban setting in developing
cities. Therefore, based on Lefebvre’s writings, the paper first pro-
poses a conceptual framework that will allow for an assessment of
the extent to which the right to the city could be achieved in
different cities around the world. Then, the paper applies the
conceptual framework to assess its limits and achievements in the
case of the cities of the Palestinian minority in Israel.
The assessment of the right to the city among the Palestinian
minority cities in Israel, which compose approximately 20% of the
state population, is theoretically intriguing for a few reasons. The
first is the centralist nature of the political structure of Israel and
the uneven distribution of power between cities and their local
authorities and the central state. This issue provides us with the
opportunity to examine the issue of rights in cities located in a
powerful centralist political state. The second reason is the pre-
vailing territorial and ethnic conflict between Palestinians and Jews
within Israel itself or between the Palestinian citizens of Israel and
the state. This conflict has a decisive role in terms of spatial plan-
ning and space production. Israel is defined as a ‘Jewish-Democratic
State’ where Palestinian Muslims and Christians, who primarily
oppose this definition, live as ethnic minorities. Third, there is a
high level of ethno-spatial segregation, as the vast majority (90%) of
Palestinians live in completely ethnically segregated Palestinian
cities. This ethno-spatial segregation allows us to examine the right
to the city in exclusionary minority cities, or the cities of ‘others’ or
the ‘underprivileged’.
This paper is composed of four sections. The first section ana-
lyzes the concept of the right to the city and provides an analytical
framework for the assessment of the concept in cities. The second
section analyzes the right to the city among cities of the Palestinian
minority in Israel. The final section draws conclusions and makes
recommendations.
Methods
To build the conceptual framework, a conceptual analysis
method was used. This method is a grounded theory technique that
aims to “generate, identify, and trace a phenomenon’s major con-
cepts, which together constitute its theoretical framework”
(Jabareen, 2009, 2013). Each concept possesses its own attributes,
characteristics, assumptions, limitations, distinct perspectives, and
specific function within the conceptual framework. According to
Deleuze and Guattari (1991), “all concepts are connected with
problems;” therefore, we are dealing with “a problem concerning
the plurality of subjects, their relationship, and their reciprocal
presentation” (p. 16). In our case, these concepts are related to ur-
ban rights issues. Accordingly, the conceptual framework of the
right to the city, which this paper seeks to develop, is a network of
interlinked concepts. I refer here to a right as a concept. The con-
ceptual framework is composed of concepts that “link with each
other, support one another” (p. 18).
The methodology delineates the following stages in the devel-
opment of a conceptual framework: a) mapping multidisciplinary
data sources, b) reviewing the literature and categorizing the
selected data, c) identifying and naming the concepts, d) decon-
structing and categorizing the concepts, e) integrating the concepts,
f) synthesizing, re-synthesizing, and clarifying, and g) validating
the conceptual framework. The process of constructing the con-
ceptual framework involves extensive review and classification of
the literature that addresses environmental, social, cultural, and
urban aspects of resilience. This literature originates from a variety
of disciplines and fields of study, such as sociology, anthropology,
public policy, political science, economics, ecology, geography, and
urban planning.
The conceptual framework of the right to the city
This section identifies and presents the conceptual framework
of the right to the city after the completion of an analytical reading of
Lefebvre’s writing on cities and the right to the city. Apparently, it is
sometimes not easy to grasp Lefebvre’s writings, and identifying
the rights in his thesis regarding the right to the city is not an easy
mission.
A right may be defined as “a privilege or claim to which one is
justly entitled,” and can be described using the following state-
ment: “to be denied a right is to be placed at a particular disad-
vantage, forced to acquiesce to the rights claimed of others”
(Klodawsky & Blomley, 2009: 573). Additionally, in liberal societies,
rights are notionally universal, applying to all equally. However, in
real life, people are differently positioned in relation to rights
(Klodawsky & Blomley, 2009).
In his writings, Lefebvre mentions many rights, and these rights
sometimes represent the same content and values. Therefore, I
merged some of these rights to allow each right to be distinctive
and represent an independent concept of content. Following a
critical analysis of the concept, this paper proposes a framework for
the right to the city as a right composed of distinct and intertwined
rights, as follows:
The right of appropriation
This right regards the right of people to use and produce spatial,
social and cultural spaces. This right entails the right to design and
 Y. Jabareen / Habitat International 41 (2014) 135e141
aesthetics in the urban arena. Purcell (2003: 577) suggests that “in
advocating the right to appropriate urban space, Lefebvre is not
referring to private ownership so much as he is referring to the
right of inhabitants to ‘full and complete usage’ of the urban space
in the course of their everyday lives (Lefebvre, 1968; 1996: 179)”.
Therefore, “the right to appropriate urban space involves the right
to live in, play in, work in, represent, characterize, and occupy ur-
ban space in a particular city” (Purcell, 2003: 578).
The right of participation
This right regards the people’s involvement in social, cultural,
spatial, and economic space production. Therefore, this right in-
cludes the right to information on what is going to be produced or is
already produced and the right to an oeuvre. Lefebvre (1996: 173,
translated in Kofman & Lebas, 1999: 33) involves the following:
“For 200 years the rights of citizen had hardly changed from that
of the right to express an opinion and vote. However, citizenship
should aim to create a different social life, a more direct de-
mocracy, and a civil society based not on an abstraction but on
space and time as they are lived.”
This right “grants the right to participate centrally in any deci-
sion that contributes to the production of urban space. The decision
could be under the auspices of the state (such as a policy decision),
of capital (an investment decision), or any other entity that affects
the production of space in a particular city”, and “it could be made
at a range of scales; it could involve any level of the state (national,
provincial, local), or corporations that operate at any scale (global,
national, local)” (Purcell, 2003: 578). Lefebvre suggests that “The
right to the city manifests itself as a superior form of rights: right to
freedom, to individualization in socialization, to habitat and to
inhabit. The right to the oeuvre, to participation and appropriation
(clearly distinct from the right to property), are implied in the right
to the city” (Lefebvre, 1996: 173e4). Don Mitchell (2003: 17) sug-
gests that “the most important is Lefebvre’s normative argument
that the city is an ouvre-a work in which all its citizens participate.”
The city as ouvre is “alienated.and not so much a site of partici-
pation as one of expropriation by a dominant class (and set of
economic interests)” (Mitchell (2003: 18).
The right to centrality
For Lefebvre, “the call for a right to the city is a right to cen-
trality” (Elden, 2004: 151) and “that is the right not to be excluded
from the centrality and its movement” (Elden, 2004: 157). Lefebvre
proposes that
“The right to the city, complemented by the right to difference
and the right to information, should modify, concretize and
make more practical the rights of the citizen as an urban dweller
(citadin) and user of multiple services. It would affirm, on the
one hand, the right of users to make known their ideas on the
space and time of their activities in the urban area; it would also
cover the right to the use of the center, a privileged place,
instead of being dispersed and stuck into ghettos (for workers,
immigrants, the `marginal’ and even for the ‘privileged’) (1991a:
2342, translated in Kofman & Lebas, 1996: 34).
This right ensures access to power, the use of abstract and
concrete spaces and central and peripheral places, and effective
people’s participation. Therefore, this right entails the right to use
urban spaces, including privileged spaces. Importantly, “the right to
centrality thus involves both a right to take a leading role in deci-
sion making as well as the right to physically occupy, live in, and
137
shape the central areas of the city” (Purcell, 2003: 578). Marchal
and Stébé (2011) suggest that by proposing the notion of central-
ity, “Lefebvre wanted to put an end to the dualism of the centre/
periphery which is indissociable from the rich/poor divide”, and
therefore, “centrality restored the right to socialize and assemble; it
restored the right to live, to adapt oneself to the surroundings, to do
what one wanted with one’s living space; it restored the need for
conviviality, sharing and defining spaces beyond what politicians
and town planners decreed.”
The right to inhabit: or the right to urban citizenship
The city “gathers the interests.of the whole society and firstly
of all those who inhabit” it (Lefebvre, 1996: 158). Accordingly, the
urban eligibility for the right to the city is for all people who inhabit
it. Individuals and communities’ right to inhabit does not override
that of “foreign invaders” (see Mitchell) and immigrants. Citizen-
ship involves rights, duties and membership in a distinct political
community (Kymlicka & Norman, 1994).
The right to habitat
Lefebvre (1996: 173e4) suggests that the rights “to habitat and
to inhabit” are implied in the right to the city.” This right represents
one of the most important socio-economic rights of individuals and
their families and is the right to housing. One aspect of the
contemporary social and urban protest around the world has been
the claim to the right for decent housing. This right includes the
right to safety, a clean and protected environment, environmental
justice, clean water, and basic infrastructure.
The right to individualization in socialization
This right is the first that is clearly directed toward individuals
and not the ‘people’ or a ‘class’. Today, this right is trivial, although
not in Arab cities. This right is less critical in western culture but
still important in traditional cultures. The right entails the right to
freedom and the right to difference. The idea is that “the city is the
place where difference lives” (Mitchell, 2003: 18).
In summary, the right to the city, as presented here, is based on “a
moral claim, founded on fundamental principles of justice”
(Marcuse, 2012: 27), it incorporates “multiple rights” that challenge
the uneven and distorted relationship between the state and the
city, and it eventually addresses the urban crisis and strives to
restructure it. The right to the city challenges the hegemony of the
state and its institutions in the city, and it emphasizes local domi-
nation over the production of urban spaces rather than the hege-
mony of the state and its institutions.
Geopolitical and demographic context
This paper focuses on the Palestinian minority cities in Israel. In
the aftermath of the war of 1948 between Arabs and Jews, Israel
was established and 780,000 Palestinians were dispossessed and
displaced (Abu Lughod, 1971; Forman & Kedar, 2004; Morris, 1987).
Only 156,000 Palestinians remained within the state of Israel and
became Israeli citizens. The overwhelming majority of the Pales-
tinian urban elite and middle class were deported from the country
and became refugees on the West Bank, Gaza Strip and in neigh-
boring Arab countries. From 1948 to 1966, the Palestinians in Israel
lived under military rule (Emergency Defense Regulations) applied
only to them, although they were formally declared citizens of the
state in 1948. Military rule placed tight controls on all aspects of life
for the Palestinian minority, including severe restrictions on
movement, prohibitions on political organization, economic
138 Y. Jabareen / Habitat International 41 (2014) 135e141
restrictions, and the censorship of publications (Jiryis, 1979; Ram,
2013; Yiftachel, 2006).
During the period of Israeli military rule over the Palestinian Arab
population, the “Israeli authorities gradually but rapidly created
legal structures to seize, retain, expropriate, reallocate, and reclassify
the Arab lands appropriated by the state” (Forman & Kedar 2004:
809). In addition, the Israeli government used these laws “to insti-
tutionalize the dispossession of Palestinian Arabs displaced by the
1948 war and trace the legal transformation of their land during the
formative years of Israel’s land regime (1948e60)” (Forman & Kedar
2004: 809e10). The major outcome of the massive confiscation of
Palestinian land is Israel’s current ownership of 93% of the land in
Israel. Only 2.5% of Israel’s land is privately owned by Palestinian
citizens. That is, the state of Israel directly controls the vast majority
of the country’s land and is responsible for land use planning, land
allocation and distribution according to its policies.
The Palestinian Arab minority in Israel is an indigenous minority
that was the majority in Palestine until 1947. At the end of 2011, this
minority constituted approximately one-fifth of the state’s popu-
lation. This minority included some 1,600,000 persons out of seven
millions persons living in Israel. The Palestinian minority in Israel
belongs to three religions: Moslems constitute 82%, and Christians
and Druze each constitute 9% (ICBS-Israel Central Bureau of Sta-
tistics, 2013).
Assessment of a Minority’s right to the city
This section assesses the Palestinian minority’s right to cities in
Israel according to the rights of this framework, as follows:
The right of participation
Two major factors hinder Arab inhabitants’ right of participation
in their cities. The first is related to the exceedingly uneven dis-
tribution of power between local and central authorities. The legal
and institutional distribution of power between the central gov-
ernment and local authorities in Israel represents an extreme he-
gemony of the central government over cities. Jewish as well as
Arab local authorities in Israel are subordinate to the “extreme
centralism” of the national government and often viewed as
extremely weak (Razin, 2004). In addition, the local government
has had limited autonomy in a rather narrow range of functions,
and they exercise power on only a partial basis in terms of legis-
lation, taxation, financial management, and joint activities with
other bodies. Their competencies and areas of jurisdiction are
spelled out in ministerial orders, primarily issued by the Ministry of
the Interior, as authorized by law. However, the local authorities
remain largely dependent upon the central government in each of
these areas. Ultimately, this uneven distribution of power between
the central and local authorities deprives urban inhabitants of
adequate exercise of their right to the city (Alfasi & Portugali, 2004;
Alterman, 2001; Razin, 2000).
Local authorities in Israel are doubtlessly weak in terms of re-
sources and lacking in sufficient power with regard to the pro-
duction of space (Jabareen, 2006). Israel has a highly centralized
planning system for the use of land, in which the central govern-
ment is involved first by way of its extensive powers to oversee
local-level planning decisions and second through its power to
draw up binding national plans for land usage (Alterman, 2001;
Fenster, 2004). Alterman (2001: 262) concludes that “given the
highly centralized structure of decisions, it is not surprising that
central government is closely involved in many aspects of spatial
planning,” which is channeled through the hierarchy of plans, from
national plans, to district plans, and down to the level of local plans.
The Ministry of the Interior itself supervises the activities of the
local authorities and is primarily responsible for many important
areas of space planning and development. In summary, the result of
the centralized and hierarchical structure of the production of
space, which arises from the formal planning process, is that urban
inhabitants are left with limited power to meaningfully affect the
production of space in their locales e cities and neighborhoods.
The second factor hindering their right of participation lies in the
ethno-political structure of the state. The legal and ethno-political
structure of the state determines the distribution of power between
the central government and the cities, and between ethnic groups,
primarily between Jews and Palestinians. The ethno-distribution of
power in Israel is dramatically biased and unequally distributed be-
tween Arab and Jewish groups, which gives the Jewish communities
and cities privileged power in two aspects: the first is their privilege
for establishing new settlements, and the second is the highly more
feasible access to the local power and decision making of the central
governments and its ministries. Oren Yiftachel’s (2006, 2012) critical
concept “ethnocracy” provides a tool for analyzing the outcomes of
state planning policies and their effects on different ethnic groups. He
defines Israel as an “ethnocratic” regime that is based on the exclusion
of Palestinians and employs ongoing policies and practices that
expand and deepen Jewish control over the contested territorial and
economic resources in the country.
Therefore, urban Palestinian citizens of Israel are limited in their
capacity to produce their spaces following their “hearts’ desire,”
aspirations, and community visions. This limitation results in
inefficient urban management and poor spatial, environmental,
physical, architectural, and cultural functioning in urban life
(Jabareen, 2006).
The Arab minority is barely represented in the central govern-
ment, and aside from a few exceptional cases, elected Palestinian
representatives and their parties have not been invited to partici-
pate in any governmental coalition since 1948. Although Pales-
tinian Arab citizens are legally allowed full political participation in
Israel, the community faces numerous obstacles to equal repre-
sentation in political bodies (DePietro, 2013).
As an example, the current government of Israel, which was
formed in 2013, includes 22 ministers, none of whom is an Arab
(King, 2013a, 2013b). As a result, the interests of Palestinians in
general and their cities in particular are not represented in the
central government or its powerful ministries. Although Palestinian
inhabitants have the right to vote, to be elected to the Knesset
(Israeli Parliament), and to elect their local councils and although
representatives of their political parties serve in the Knesset, the
right to real and influential participation is limited. In summary,
Palestinians are located outside governmental power and are
extremely weak in the parliamentary game in Israel.
Israel was founded by Jews to be the national home of the Jewish
people. This element shapes not only the collective and formal
identity of the state but also institutional structure, the allocation of
resources, spatial policies, and the determination of national pri-
orities (Al-Haj & Ben-Eliezer, 2006; Fenster, 2004; Rouhana &
Ghanem, 1998; Yiftachel, 2006). In terms of resource allocation and
participation in decision making at the national level, the Pales-
tinian has highly limited formal power and is left with only the
option of resisting centrally made decisions. Furthermore, Pales-
tinian citizens have weak representation within the public sector
and governmental institutions, composing only 6% of civil service
employees in 2013. Given the highly centralized nature of the state
of Israel, Palestinians therefore possess little power with which to
shape their cities and produce their desired spaces.
Moreover, the hierarchy of power in the statutory planning,
development, and production of physical spaces weakens the
ability of the inhabitants of Palestinian cities to genuinely shape
their space. Palestinians are greatly under-represented at the
 Y. Jabareen / Habitat International 41 (2014) 135e141
governmental level and at the national and district levels of plan-
ning committees. Legally, therefore, in addition to the lack of
community participation in the planning process, they have little to
say during the statutory planning process, with the exception of the
right to submit formal objections to plans when a Plan itself is
completed and legally submitted to the District Planning and
Building Committee illustrates the hierarchy of institutions and
their powers and the level of Palestinian representation within
these institutions.
Moreover, in addition to the ethnic conflict and its results in the
form of the deficient right to the city among this minority, Arab
women are suffering twice, for their nationality and gender. They
are not participating in any sort of planning or design of their local
urban spaces. For the most part, they are not elected to local mu-
nicipalities, and none of the 66 mayors are female Arabs. They do
not hold any municipal local power to influence their spaces.
The right of appropriation
The deficiencies in the right of participation among Palestinian
inhabitants directly contribute to the incompleteness of their right
of appropriation. Appropriation implies not only the right to occupy
already-produced urban space but also the right to produce urban
space that meets the needs of its inhabitants. Moreover, appropri-
ation grants inhabitants the right to the “full and complete usage”
of urban space in the course of everyday life. The political structure
and the consequent power allocation between Arabs and Jews
largely determines the limited scope of the right to appropriation
among urban Palestinians and denies them full and complete usage
of their urban sphere (see Jabareen, 2006).
Although a local authority in Israel has a degree of autonomy, its
right to authorize and approve plans is legally limited. This limi-
tation reaches an astonishing apex at the neighborhood level, at
which a detailed plan for a community must be approved by the
District Committee of Planning and Building, and eventually, by the
interior minister. In almost every Arab city, the elected mayor
usually opposes the planning policies of the District Committee of
Planning and Building concerning his city and neighborhood plans.
Opposition to planning policies has become a significant theme for
Arab representatives and their national institutions, primarily the
Follow-Up Committee of the Arabs in Israel.
The right to centrality
On the one hand, Arabs have access to local power and the use of
central and peripheral places within their locales. On the other
hand, there are two major deficiencies in their right to centrality.
The first is connected to the effectiveness of their participation in
and determination and planning of their local spaces. As mentioned
on previous pages, the legal system of Israel with regard to space
production and planning does not give urban inhabitants the
appropriate power to affect the production of space according to
their “hearts’ desires” or to take a leading role in decision making
and the shaping of their cities.
The second is the right to use urban spaces, including ‘privileged
spaces’. In Israel, there are approximately 700 small Jewish settle-
ments in which the Arab citizens of Israel have almost no right to
live, buy or build a house (Adalah, 2007, 2011). However, there are
two cases in which the Israeli Supreme Court asked communities to
allow an Arab family to build their house in one of these areas
(Adalah, 2007, 2011). At the present, Selection Committees operate
in approximately 700 agricultural and community towns, which
account for 85% of the total number of villages in Israel. These
towns fall within the jurisdiction of 53 regional councils, which are
distributed throughout the country and exercise control over
139
approximately 81% of the land-space in the state (Adalah, 2007).
The Admissions Committees Law was approved in 2011. According
to Adalah e the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel e this
law seeks, inter alia, “to dispossess and exclude Arab citizens from
the land; turn their citizenship from a right into a conditional
privilege” (Adala, 2011). The Admissions Committees Law legalizes
“admission committees” that operate in communities and villages
built on state land (Adalah, 2007, 2011). The law gives these com-
mittees, bodies that select applicants for housing units and plots of
land, full discretion to accept or reject individuals hoping to live in
these communities. According to Adalah (2011), which legally
represents the highest High Follow-Up Committee for Arab Citizens
of Israel, is an extra-parliamentary umbrella organization that
represents the Arab minority in Israel at the national level and
encompasses all political parties, mayors of local authorities, and
civil society organizations:
“The committees include a representative from the Jewish
Agency or the World Zionist Organization, quasi-governmental
entities, and are used in part to filter out Arab applicants, in
addition to other marginalized groups. The law allows these
committees to reject applicants deemed “unsuitable to the so-
cial life of the community. or the social and cultural fabric of
the town,” thereby legitimizing the exclusion of entire groups”.
In summary, the right to centrality for Arabs in Israel is limited
and does not include accessibility to and use of ‘privileged spaces.”
Israel was founded by Jews to be the national home of the Jewish
people. This role is reflected not only in the collective and formal
identity of the state but also in its institutional structure, allocation
of resources, spatial policies, and determination of national prior-
ities. Yiftachel (2006: 295) suggests that planning in Israel is an
ethnocracy, which “denotes a type of regime that facilitates and
promotes the process of ethnicization, that is, expansion and con-
trol. It surfaces in disputed territories, where one ethnonational
group is able to appropriate the state apparatus and mobilize its
legal, economic, and military resources to further its territorial,
economic, cultural, and political interests.”
The right to inhabit
Similarly to all modern states in the world, citizenship in Israel is
not granted based on residence in a specific city. As in other
countries, those with national citizenship have the right to vote and
be elected to the national parliament regardless of their place of
residence. At the local level, only citizens who reside in a specific
city for a certain period of time (6 months) have the right to vote
and be elected. Foreign workers, illegal immigrants, and those who
do not have citizenship have no right to vote. In this sense, Arabs
and Jews in Israel have the same status.
However, citizenship in Israel is somewhat more complicated
than it is in other countries in the world. Since its establishment,
Israel has enforced demographic policies aimed toward maintain-
ing a strong Jewish majority population. Israel’s Declaration of In-
dependence (1948) states two principles important for an
understanding of the idea of citizenship and the legal status of
Palestinian citizens of Israel. First, the Declaration refers specifically
to Israel as a “Jewish state” committed to the “ingathering of the
exiles.” Although such references to the Jewish nature of the state
permeate the Declaration, it contains one reference to the main-
tenance of complete equality with regard to political and social
rights for all of its citizens, irrespective of race, religion, or sex.
However, there are still some laws that discriminate against the
Palestinian minority in Israel. The most important immigration law,
The Law of Return (1950) and The Citizenship Law (1952), allow
Jews to immigrate freely to Israel and gain citizenship but excludes
140 Y. Jabareen / Habitat International 41 (2014) 135e141
Palestinian refugees who left their homes during the War of 1948.
These laws identify the state as a Jewish state; they provide benefits
or privileges solely to the Jewish population. In brief, Palestinians
who were born and lived in cities before 1948 and who become
refugees in the aftermath of the War of 1948 have no right to return
or be granted citizenship in their former cities. Furthermore, during
the last year, the discriminatory Nationality and Entry into Israel
Law, which prohibits the granting of any residency or citizenship
status to Palestinians from the Occupied Territories married to Arab
citizens of Israel, was renewed. In addition, the government is
initiating new amendments that will severely limit the status of any
“non-Jews” in Israel married to Israeli citizens. Other initiatives
exclude Arabs and regularly threaten their citizenship. “The citi-
zenship of Arabs in Israel is so distorted that it can surely be called
‘de facto Class B citizenship,’ although no law determines it as such”
(Dichter, 2005: 1). According to Adalah (2011), the Citizenship Law
(Amendment no. 10), which was enacted on 28 March 2011: “is one
of the most extreme punitive measures at the disposal of states, and
may result in cruel and disproportionate punishment, particularly
when pursued against a particular group of citizens, in this case
Palestinian citizens of Israel” (Adalah, 2011). These laws of citi-
zenship dramatically affect not only the concept of urban citizen-
ship but also citizenship itself. Although Arabs have formal Israeli
citizenship, their national citizenship is limited, as mentioned, and
eventually, there is no space for claiming urban citizenship.
The right to habitat
The struggle for the right to habitat and housing has been a
major theme in the Palestinian minority’s political agenda since the
establishment of Israel in 1948. Critical issues of land confiscation,
housing, recognition, and planning policies have led to collective
actions such as mass demonstrations and national strikes among
this minority.
Various issues exist regarding the Arab Minority’s right to
inhabit. This paper lacks space to cover these issues, and therefore,
will discuss them in brief. One of the critical issues of the Arab
minority in Israel is the lack of state recognition of 36 Arab villages
in the Negev, in the south of Israel (Yiftachel, Goldhaber, & Nuriel,
2009). The informal, semi-urban settlements and villages of the
indigenous Palestinian Bedouin in southern Israel, which are
formally unrecognized by the state, have become the setting of
harsh and hostile confrontation between the Israeli state and its
Palestinian citizens over the last six decades. These informal set-
tlements, which house approximately 70,000 people, lack basic
services and infrastructure, including running water, sewage sys-
tems, electricity, and paved roads, as well as health, cultural and
educational services (Abu-Saad, 2012; Yiftachel, 2012; Israeli Prime
Minister’s Office, 2013). The state considers these villages illegal
entities, and their inhabitants therefore face the constant threat of
the demolition of their homes and damage to their cultivated lands.
According to Human Rights Watch (2008: 3), “since the 1970s, Is-
raeli authorities have demolished thousands of Bedouin homes in
the unrecognized villages.” One of these villages, Al-Araqib, was
destroyed for approximately the 35th time in July 2010 (Adalah,
2011). In countering state policies directed toward these informal
villages, the Palestinian Bedouin have struggled to gain recognition
for their 46 villages and acquire land ownership of approximately
589,000 dunums (Israeli Prime Minister Office, 2013). Their
continuous protests have resulted in the formal recognition of 13 of
their 46 villages. Moreover, on February 10, 2013, the Israeli gov-
ernment approved a plan to regulate the Bedouin settlements in
the Naqab, which will relocate and displace some thousands of
residents to existing towns and will recognize other villages (Israeli
Prime Minister Office, 2013). Interestingly, in many cases,
informality appears as a mode and logic of development and
reconstruction among Arabs.
The Palestinian minority’s collective struggle for equality has
become an integral part of the citizenship and national components
of their identity. The issues of land confiscation, the demolition of
unauthorized houses, economic injustice, and inequality in
governmental resource allocation for their cities have led the Pal-
estinian leaders to declare national strikes against governmental
policies directed toward the Arab Minority.
The right to individualization
Although this right appears to be quite achievable in Western
countries and cultures, it is not apparent in Arab society and cul-
ture. Urban Palestinians have the right to individualization in so-
cialization and the right to difference, but Arab women cannot
freely practice these rights. The right to individualization in the
urban arena is gender constructed. Arab women in Israel live in a
context of Arab culture, and the society that surrounds them shares
many social, religious, and cultural characteristics with the Arab
world. Arab society in Israel, as elsewhere, is collective, hierarchical,
and patriarchal and is currently undergoing a gradual transition to a
more individualistic and liberal form of society (Zoabi, 2012). The
collective dimension, however, is still dominant, and society as a
whole remains largely traditional and religious.
Discussion
This paper suggests that inhabitants of cities in Israel, both Jews
and Palestinian Arabs, are to a large extent denied the right to the city,
although unequally. Cities in Israel constitute the space within which
the nation-state asserts its presence, thereby “nationalizing” and
“confiscating” what might have remained purely local and
communal. The institutional, legal, and ethno-political structure of
Israel and the hegemony of the national over the urban level have
resulted in the denial of both Jew and Arab urban inhabitants’ Right to
the City. However, this paper reveals that Palestinian citizens of Israel
are denied the right to the city to a greater extent than their Jewish
counterparts. This situation stems directly from the legal and ethno-
political structure of the state, which has established and still de-
termines the distribution of power between the central government
and cities and between ethnic groups, primarily Arabs and Jews.
The rights of urban Palestinians are restricted to specific scales
and fields. Urban Palestinian citizens of Israel are limited in their
capacity to produce their spaces consistent with their “hearts’
desire,” aspirations, and community visions. This limitation results
in poor spatial, environmental, physical, architectural, and cultural
functioning in urban life and the urban arena. Since 1948, Arabs in
Israel have striven to reconstruct and reproduce their own physical,
economic, and social urban spaces according to their own needs
and culture. However, they have been denied the right to produce
physical, cultural, social, and economic urban spaces according to
their “hearts’ desire,” needs, culture, and aspirations.
The Palestinian minority is not a “silent” and obedient group
that accepts the absence of the right to the city. This minority resists,
manipulates, and uses different maneuvering strategies to enhance
their right to their cities. The incomplete rights to participation, to
appropriation, and to urban citizenship among the Palestinian
minority have impaired the right to urban self-determination. To
achieve this, the Palestinians have collectively resisted, achieving
certain objectives in the urban arena. The struggle for the right to
urban self-determination has been a major theme of their political
daily agenda. Issues such as land confiscation, housing, and plan-
ning policies have led to collective actions among this minority, as
this section indicated.
 Y. Jabareen / Habitat International 41 (2014) 135e141
The absence of the Right to the City has the potential to intensify
conflicts between the inhabitants and the state. In our case, such
conflicts exist between the Palestinian minority and Israel. Will a
progressive right to the city mitigate the conflict if the right to the
city is provided? Urban rights might ease the national political
conflict. The assessment of the right to the city amidst an ethnic
conflict appears to be a difficult mission. It is difficult to avoid the
ethnic conflict and the relations between the majority and the
minority even when the city is at stake. The hegemony of ethnic
conflict over the right to the city is apparent in our case, which does
not provide a proper environment for adequate discussion.
This paper indicates that the rights to the cities given to Pales-
tinians in Israel are deficient and incomplete. This problem is a
deep, structural political and ethnic one that could not be solved at
the city level. The right to the city has a political agenda that aims to
enhance the political conditions of urban life and its inhabitants in
the face of the economic processes and the hegemony of the central
state. A crucial insight regarding the right to the city regards citye
state relationships, suggesting that the right to the city represents a
framework that aims to protect the city from state tyranny and
technocrats and to provide adequate human shelter with a strong
political status.
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short - corresp-1.
Yosef Jabareen, is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Architecture and Town
Planning at the Technion e the Israel Institute of Technology. A graduate of Harvard
University’s GSD and a former lecturer at the Department of Urban Studies and
Planning at MIT, Cambridge, USA.