Palestinians in Israel
Smotrich vows to cancel plans that created Arab contiguity in Galilee
Image credit: Bezalel Smotrich — Eitan Fold via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0) · License
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Israel's finance minister told a Tel Aviv conference on Wednesday that if he returns to government he will cancel planning schemes that, in his words, created contiguity of Arabs and choked Jewish settlement in the Galilee.
Bezalel Smotrich, who leads Religious Zionism, was speaking at the "Time of Decision" conference run by Ynet and the newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth with the Israel Democracy Institute, eight weeks before the 27 October Knesset election.
He set out a plan for two state bodies that decide where Palestinian citizens of Israel may build: the Israel Land Authority, which administers the state land that covers most of the country, and the Planning Administration.
"I will remove the post-Zionist people from there, legislate, and take control of these systems," he said. He would legislate, he added, rather than plead with officials and legal advisers.
Smotrich said he would cancel programmes advanced over decades that he called dangerous and anti-Zionist, built deliberately in a post-Zionist way to enable a takeover. Asked about the Judaization of the Galilee, he answered that he would cancel plans that had created Arab contiguity.
What the two bodies decide#
For the roughly two million Palestinian citizens of Israel, planning is not an administrative subject. It is the mechanism through which the state has held their towns' boundaries in place for decades while their populations multiplied.
The consequence is documented and familiar: municipal lines that have barely moved, master plans that expire without replacement, and houses built without permits because no permit is available — the pipeline that ends in a demolition order.
Adalah, the legal centre in Haifa, has argued for years that Israeli land and planning law functions as a system of control rather than a neutral technical regime. Smotrich's answer on Wednesday described the same machinery from the other side of the table, and promised to tighten it.
The politics behind the promise#
The minister made the pledge from a weak position. His party has signed a joint-run agreement with Moshe Feiglin of Zehut, and he spent part of the same appearance attacking Ofer Winter's new list for polling below the electoral threshold.
Israeli commentators have read the Smotrich–Feiglin merger as an attempt to clear that threshold rather than as a bid for power, and Smotrich left the door open to a wider right-wing union with the Likud.
That is the shape of the campaign now underway. A minister whose own seat is not assured is bidding for votes with a promise about who may build in the Galilee, and the people whose building he is discussing are citizens who will vote in the same election.
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