"Palestinian Voices: Feminist Thought As A Tool For Resistance"

First International Conference, June 28-29, 2007

Dr. Yosef Jabareen

Dr. Yosef Jabareen received his Ph.D. in urban planning from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology -, and he was graduated from Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. At the present, Jabareen is a Senior Lecturer in Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning at the Technion and a Senior Researcher at the Neaman Institute for Advanced Studies in Science and Technology, Technion. Between 2003 and 2006, he Jabareen was a Lecturer in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT- Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, and a Visiting scholar in the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture; School of Architecture and Planning at MIT. Jabareen’s next coming book is about employment issues of Palestinian women.

Gender and the National Planning Discourse in Israel (1948-2007)

Since 1949, tens of different comprehensive land-uses and population dispersal plans in the national and district levels have been produced to determine and shape the demographic and geopolitical spaces of Israel. This article aims to conceptualize the discourse of national planning in Israel, to identify its main concepts, and to analyze its evolution between 1948 and 2007. Discourse analysis means anything beyond the sentence, language use, and a broader range of social practices that includes nonlinguistic and nonspecific instances of languages. Specifically, we are looking for a dominant legitimate language and social practices of the national planning agenda. Such a discourse is composed of various concepts that together construct its framework. For this matter, this paper analyzes different types of planning documents including all comprehensive national plans of Israel that were designed since its establishment, and large scope regional plans that were initiated by the Jewish Agency. This paper concludes that the national public planning in Israel has generated a coherent political discourse regarding the Jewish nation building and the dispossession of the Palestinians. Moreover, this discourse has constantly ignored minority and indigenous people rights and gender inequalities. At the heart of the national planning discourse stand consistently some major concepts, colonization, population dispersal, economic development for geopolitical ends, national consensus and legitimacy among the majority, and exclusionary procedure for the indigenous minority.