The frontiers of urban mix: Palestinians, Israelis, and settlement space

This chapter examines the symbolic role of environmental transformation, in theory and practice, in the contention over space in Natseret Illit, a mixed development town in the Galilee. The Israeli vision for Natseret Illit—a purely Jewish new town amidst the Palestinian heartland in the Galilee—was eroded in the 1970s and 1980s with the gradual arrival of immigrants of another variety. The Palestinian tendency to build relatively few residential units per unit area brought about substantial physical expansion of most Palestinian rural communities in Israel, often at the expense of previously agricultural land. B. Kimmerling's analyses of the place of territory in Zionism and in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict specifies presence, ownership, and sovereignty as the three components of territorial control. The environmental transformation associated with Zionist settlement thus marks the sanctification of land as national social space, initiating it into the realm of Israeli nation-building.