Oren Yiftachel


Oren Yiftachel is an Israeli professor of political and legal geography, urban studies and urban planning at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, in Beersheba. He holds the Lynn and Lloyd Hurst Family Chair in Urban Studies.

Early life and education

Yiftachel was born in Haifa and grew up on kibbutz Matzuva. Yiftachel earned a Bachelor of Arts in Urban and Regional Studies at the Western Australian Institute of Technology in 1983. He then went on to earn a Post-Graduate Diploma in Urban and Regional Planning there in 1986. In 1990, he received a Doctor of Philosophy from the Department of Geography at the University of Western Australia, in cooperation with the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning at the Technion – [Israel Institute of Technology]. For the next two years, he returned to Israel, where he was a post-doctoral fellow with the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology.

Career

While pursuing his Post-Graduate Diploma at the Curtin University of Technology, Yiftachel served as a Planning Assistant for the Perth Planning Collaborative, and later as a Planning Officer for the Perth City Council.
Since earning his Post-Graduate Diploma, Yiftachel has done a variety of planning and policy consulting work, including as a planner for the Regional Council of Unrecognized Villages, the Shire of Gingin, Perth, and Beersheba. He has also worked on several plans in the Naqab region, and nationally as part of the "Israel 2020" plan during the early 1990s. Recently, he has worked on an Israeli-Palestinian plan for a bi-national Jerusalem.
Yiftachel's teaching career began as a lecturer, and then as a senior lecturer at the Curtin University of Technology from 1987 to 1993. Since 1993, he has been a professor for the Department of Geography and Environmental Development at Ben-Gurion University, earning tenure in 1996. During this time, Yiftachel has served as a visiting fellow and a visiting professor for brief periods of time at a variety of institutions, including the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, the US Institute of Peace, the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Queens, Belfast, and the University of Venice. Yiftachel was also a Leverhulme professor at University College London, and as a research fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute.
Yiftachel was the founding editor of the journal Hagar: International Social Science Research, and was its editor-in-chief from 1999 to 2004. He has served on the editorial board of various other journals, including Urban Studies, Planning Theory, Environment and Planning, Space and Polity, Cities; Middle East Report, Journal of Planning Literature, International Journal of Middle East Studies, The MIT Electronic Journal of Middle East Studies, and ''Israel Studies Forum.''

Advocacy

Yiftachel is also an activist, and has been a member of several notable organizations, including Faculty for Israel-Palestine Peace, PALISAD, The Negev Coexistence Forum, the Adva Center's Center for Social Equity,' and Habitat International Coalition. Yiftachel served as a Co-Chair of B'Tselem from 2009 to 2012.' In 2012, he co-founded a new organization calling for an Israeli-Palestinian confederation, called "Two States, One Homeland". He is an occasional op-ed contributor to leading Israeli newspapers, including Haaretz, Ynet and Ma'ariv. Yiftachel is a member of Academia for Equality, an organization whose stated aims is to promote democratization, equality and access to higher education for all communities living in Israel.

Scholarship

Yiftachel's 2018 curriculum vitae claims he is "ranked first among Israeli" scholars in the fields of geography, planning, and urban studies. A special issue of an international journal was recently devoted to the theory of ethnocratic regimes, two decades after their formulation by Yiftachel.
Yiftachel's works develop critical perspectives of space and power; minorities and public policy; 'ethnocratic' societies and land regimes. His early scholarship in urban and planning studies focused on Australian metropolitan planning and its impact on 'urban social sustainability'. He later developed a theory of the 'dark side' of urban planning and has contributed to opening up planning theory to critical theory in general, and to issues of identity, colonization and space in particular.
In recent years he has developed a theory of gray space and 'displaceability' as underlining condition of new urban regimes and citizenship. In parallel, he developed with colleagues a model of 'doing the just city' as a theoretical and professional alternative. In political geography, his work formulated the concept of 'ethnocratic' regimes, which has generated debates in ethnic and racial studies, regime theories and research in Israel/Palestine. His comparative work has focused on comparatively analyzing spatial policy towards minorities in a range of 'ethnocratic' states and cities, most particularly Australia, Sri Lanka, Estonia, Cyprus, Bosnia, Northern Ireland and South Africa. Yiftachel has worked on the political and legal geography of indigenous peoples, focusing on Bedouins in Israel/Palestine in a comparative framework, and developed concepts such as 'gray spacing', 'mtrozenship' and 'urban displaceability'.
In a series of books and articles, Yiftachel explores comparatively the types of regimes that typically develop under condition of ethnic conflict. In this framework, he conceptualizes the Israeli regime as an ethnocracy, promoting a dominant project of 'ethnicization' throughout Israel/Palestine, in which ethnicity dominates citizenship. He documents the various practices of this project, and the manner in which it has constructed ethno-class identities and stratified citizenship through the process of expansion, development, projects of Judaisation and politicization in the different regions of Israel/Palestine. His model traces the nature of the Zionist project, taking into account the historical circumstances spawning Jewish 'colonization of refugees'. His early work also focused on the tension between liberal and ethnocratic-religious components of the Israeli regime, and on the privileged status given European over Eastern Jews established during the settlement project, but also the recent closing of the gaps through on-going colonization of Palestinian lands.
Palestinians are relegated to the status of 'unwanted' indigenous peoples resisting the ethnocratic project. Yiftachel uses a multidisciplinary approach, inspired by Neo-Gramscian thinking and by a range of Marxian, post- and neo-colonial theorists. In the study of Israel/Palestine he was one of the first to break the traditional scholarly divisions between analysis of Arab-Jewish relations and internal Jewish dynamics, and one of a handful of scholars to question whether Israel acts as a democratic state within the Green Line. The Israeli regime, according to Yiftachel, has presided over the entire historic Palestine for over five decades, and should be analyzed according to the power structures he claims it imposed over the entire territory. Yiftachel developed the 'settler-ethnocratic' model to highlight the regime's main historical-material logic, and the concept of 'creeping apartheid' to describe its recent manifestation and the development of four different 'separate and unequal' types of citizenship under the Israeli regime.
Major concepts in Yiftachel's work including the terms 'trapped minorities', 'fractured regions', 'ruptured demos', 'internal frontiers', 'frontiphery', 'gray spacing' and 'displaceability'. His recent work also develops a 'South-Eastern' perspective, and aims to provide alternative conceptualizations to the dominant theories and discourses generated by American and European academic centers.

Publications

Yiftachel has published over 120 articles and chapters. Among his books, edited collections, and monographs:
;Author
  • Yiftachel, O.. Planning a Mixed Region in Israel: The Political Geography of Arab-Jewish Relations in the Galilee, Avebury, Gower Publishing Limited, Aldershot, Hampshire, UK, 376pp, 44 maps and figures, 39 tables, 13 plates..
  • Yiftachel, O.. Planning as Control: Policy and Resistance in Deeply Divided Societies, Progress in Planning Series, Vol. 44, Pergamon-Elsvier, Oxford, UK, 89 pages, 9 figures, 4 tables,.
  • Yiftachel, O.. Guardians of the Vineyard: Majd al-Krum as Fable, The Institute for Israeli Arab Studies, Beit Berl; 126 pp., 7 maps and figures, 6 tables, .
  • Yiftachel, O.. Ethnocracy: Land and Identity Politics in Israel/Palestine.
  • Kedar, S.; Amara, A.; & Yiftachel, O.. Emptied Lands: Legal Geography of Bedouin Rights in the Negev, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
;Editor
  • Hedgcock, D., & Yiftachel, O., eds.. Urban and Regional Planning in Western Australia: Historical and Critical Perspectives, Paradigm Press, Perth, 306pp, 34 maps and figures,
  • Yiftachel, O., & Meir, A., eds.. Ethnic Frontiers in Israel: Landscapes of Development and Inequality in Israel, Boulder, Westview Press, 337 pages, 18 tables, 25 maps and figures,.
  • Yiftachel, O.; Alexander, I.; Hedgcock, D.; & Little, J., eds...
  • Kemp, A., Yiftachel, O., Newman, D., Ram, U., eds.. Hegemonies and Resistance: Israelis in Conflict, .
  • Amara, A., Yiftachel, O. & Abu-Saad, I.,. Indigenous Justice? Human Rights among Bedouins in Southern Israel/Palestine, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press.
;Editor
  • Yiftachel, O.; & Abu-Saad, I., eds..
  • Ghanem, A. & Yiftachel, O., eds.. "The Vision Documents: a New Order for Arab-Jewish Relations in Israel?", Special theme issue of State and Society, 165 pp, 3 figures, 4 table.
  • Yiftachel, O. & Mandelbaum, R., eds.. "Social Justice and Israel Planning", Special Issue of Planning – Journal of the Israeli Planning Association, Vol. 12, No. 1: 145-270.
  • Yiftachel, O. & Porter, L., eds.. "Settler Colonialism, Indigeneity and the City", special issue of Settler Colonial Studies, Vol. 8