Oren Yiftachel

Oren Yiftachel (Hebrew: אורן יפתחאל‎, born 1956) teaches political geography, urban planning and public policy at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

Yiftachel studied during the 1980s in Australian and Israeli universities. He has subsequently taught in urban planning, geography, political science and Middle East departments, at various institutions, including: Curtin University, Australia; the Technion, Israel; the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, and UC Berkeley, in the US; University of Cape Town, South Africa and the University of Venice, Italy. He was a research fellow at RMIT, Melbourne; the US Institute of Peace, Washington DC; and the Van Leer Institute, Jerusalem.

Yiftachel is the founding and past editor of the journal “Hagar: Studies in Culture, Politics and Place”, and serves on the editorial board of Planning Theory (essay editor), Society and Space, IJMES, MERIP, Urban Studies, Journal of Planning Literature, and Social and Cultural Geography.

Yiftachel works on critical theories of space and power; minorities and public policy; 'ethnocratic' societies and land regimes. In urban and planning studies he's focused on the ‘dark side’ of urban planning and has contributed to opening up planning theory to critical theory in general, and to issues of identity, colonising power and space in particular. 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 analyzing spatial policy towards minorities in a range of 'ethnocratic' states and cities, most particularly Australia, Sri Lanka, Estonia and South Africa.

In a series of books and articles, Yiftachel conceptualizes the Israeli regime as an ethnocracy, promoting a dominant project of ‘ethnicization’ throughout Israel/Palestine. 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 and politicization in the different regions of Israel/Palestine. A major focus of his work has been the ‘Zionist-Palestinian dialectic’, and the evolution of Zionist 'colonialism,' Palestinian resistance and counter mobilization. His work has also focused on other marginalized ethno-classes such as the Mizrahim (Eastern Jews), ‘Russian’ Israelis, Orthodox Jews, the Druze and the Bedouins.

Yiftachel uses a multi-disciplinary approach, inspired by Neo-Gramscianism thinking and by a range of 'related' Marxian and postcolonial critical 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 (Israeli pre-1967 borders). The Israeli regime, according to Yiftachel, has presided over the entire historic Palestine for over four 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.

Yiftachel’s work is rich in spatio-political theorization, with development of concepts such as ‘trapped minorities’, ‘fractured regions’, ‘ruptured demos’, ‘internal frontiers’, ‘frontiphery’, ‘creeping apartheid’, and ‘gray urbanism’. He attempts to ‘theorize from the South-East’ by providing alternative conceptualizations to the dominant theories and discourses generated by American and European academic centers.

Yiftachel has worked as a planner and activist in a range of institutions, including the Perth City Council in Australia and the Kibbutz Movement in Israel. He specialized in advocacy planning and land consultancy. Recently he has worked on an Israeli-Palestinian plan for a bi-national Jerusalem, an alternative plan for the unrecognized Bedouin villages in southern Israel, and a plan for a multicultural Beer Sheva.

Yiftachel is also a board and founding member of several activist and professional organizations, including Faculty for Israel-Palestine Peace (FFIPP), PALISAD, The Coexistence Forum, Adva (centre for social equality), the Israeli Planning Association, Ekistics and Habitat International. He is a regular op-ed contributor to leading Israeli newspapers, including Haaretz, Ynet and Ma'ariv.

Books

Yiftachel has published over 100 books, papers and book chapters. Among his books:

• Planning a Mixed Region: Political Geography in Galilee, Ashgate, 1991.
• Urban and Regional Planning in Western Australia (with D. Hedgcock), Paradigm Press, 1992.
• Planning and Social Control: Policy and Resistance in a Divided Society, Pergamon, 1995.
• Ethnic Frontiers and Boundaries (with A. Meir eds), Westview, 1997.
• The Power of Planning (with Hedgcock, Little, Alexander eds), Kluwer, 2002.
• Israelis in Conflict (with Kemp, Newman, Ram eds), Sussex, 2004.
• Ethnocracy: Land and Identity Politics in Israel/Palestine, Pennpress, 2006.

References

http://www.geog.bgu.ac.il/members/yiftachel/yiftachel.html

External links

• Recent publications

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Name	Yiftachel, Oren
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Date of birth	1956
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