Judaization

The word is not a polemic imported by critics; it is a translation of the Hebrew yehud, used in Israeli government planning documents, ministerial titles and development-plan names from the 1950s onward. The Galilee ended the 1948 war with a Palestinian majority that had not been displaced, and successive governments treated that demographic fact as a strategic problem. The remedy was to expropriate land, to plant Jewish towns and settlements among and above the Arab villages, and to confine those villages within municipal boundaries that could not expand.

The instruments were legal and administrative rather than military. Land was taken under the Absentees’ Property Law, the Land Acquisition Law of 1953 and repeated “public purpose” seizures; villages were denied master plans, so that building became illegal and demolition lawful; regional councils were drawn to exclude Arab localities from their own agricultural hinterland; and admissions committees were empowered to screen applicants to new communal settlements. In 1975 the plan to expropriate a further tranche of land around Sakhnin, Arraba and Deir Hanna produced the mobilisation that culminated in the general strike of 30 March 1976 — Land Day — in which six Palestinian citizens of Israel were shot dead.

In the Naqab the same logic produced the category of the unrecognised village: Bedouin communities, most of them concentrated by the military government into a restricted zone in the 1950s, whose settlements the state declines to recognise, service or connect, and which it demolishes in order to move their residents into planned townships and free the land for Jewish settlement — most starkly at Umm al-Hiran, where a village of Israeli citizens was demolished so that a Jewish town could be built on the same ground.

In Jerusalem after 1967 the policy operated through the drawing of municipal boundaries to maximise land and minimise Palestinian residents, through settlement construction in the annexed areas, through the revocation of residency status, and through the systematic refusal of building permits. Human Rights Watch, surveying these mechanisms across Israel and the occupied territories in 2021, concluded that they form a single system organised around maintaining Jewish domination over land and demography. Whatever one calls the system, the policy that produces it has usually been happy to call itself by its own name.

Sources

• Land Day, 30 March 1976 — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest)
• A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution — Human Rights Watch, 2021