Housing policy, design, and struggle: The colonial production of space of Israel/Palestine, one new city at a time

Housing policy and housing design have a long history as instruments of colonial domination in Israel and as strategies for shaping the Jewish state as such. This thesis examines how a housing crisis framework, including local struggles for the right to housing, may be utilised by the Israeli Zionist regime to counter insurgent practices of Palestinians in the country and simultaneously appropriated for the Palestinian national struggle. The thesis originally compares state planning by Israel and by the Palestinian Authority: a state-initiated plan for an Arab city in Israel, Tantour, and a privatised Palestinian housing development in the West Bank, Rawabi. This comparison enables me to explore how local solutions to the housing crisis shape and recast colonial relations in Israel/Palestine, seen from the perspective of the colonised. The study focuses on a struggle by a group of Palestinian activists in the Tantour case who are fighting to shape the new Arab city according to local housing needs and to incorporate it in their towns jurisdiction. Their struggle is examined in comparison to a small group of Palestinian citizens of Israel who chose to obtain homeownership in Rawabi in the West Bank. I deploy mixed methods designed to explore urban space as co-produced by state power and inhabitants. Among these: a critical review of planning documents, site visits, and in-depth interviews with planners and inhabitants. Foregrounding the narratives of Palestinian citizens of Israel, I argue that neoliberal solutions to the housing crisis are changing the relationship between Palestinian sumud praxis, meaning resistance by remaining on the land, and the Zionist colonial strategy of Judaising space. In both cases I discover how Palestinian sumud has found new ways to endure in neoliberal times. The case of Rawabi in the West Bank sheds light on homeownership as a new mode of remaining and helps to place the Tantour case in Israel on a spectrum of sumud that ranges from individual economic resilience to collective anti-colonial struggle. Thus, I offer a conceptualisation of the right to housing as a struggle to de-colonise housing, and advocate for a case-based, grounded theorisation of the housing crisis itself. The thesis makes a substantial contribution to scholarship of settler-colonialism, to the study of the political geography of Israel/Palestine, and to developing a critical agenda in housing studies.