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INDEX OF POLICY PAPERS
By Date:
By Topic: Israel's Grand Strategic Thinking |
POPULATION DISPERSAL - Policy Paper No. 42, 1998 Executive Summary Since the establishment of Israel, its governments have been exercising the population dispersal policy. By doing this, they have been exerting a decisive influence on the infrastructure and distribution of the population of the country. However, since the beginning of the 1990s, Israel has been undergoing a process of changes in its national planning. The National Master Plan No. 31 and Israel 2020 still pay lip service to a population dispersal policy, while, in fact, the focus is on the Tel Aviv metropolitan area alone (the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv Core area). The National Plan (Israel 2020) is based on three main, false, assumptions. The first is that Israel in 1967 lines will live in an environment of peace. The second, that the Israeli population will not live in a desert area. And the third, that Israel, as a Western Society, will live in a western-like environment. These three assumptions are a result of the planners’, - themselves living in the narrow strip along the Israeli coast, referred to in this article as the “Fata-Morgana Region”. In this region, the Israeli society lives a western life, and doesn’t understand, or acknowledge, that a mere 10 kilometers to the east people live by Middle Eastern standards of life. These differ from those of the Fata-Morgana Region in large economic, religious, nationality, cultural and moral-code gaps. Copying the Western models over to Israel can and will endanger the country. A good example is the new policy of concentrating the Israeli Jewish Society in one big city – the Core area. In the Middle East, the only way to secure and ensure the Jewish territory, is to adopt the old-yet-new policy of population dispersal. In the present period of “twilight”, this can be the next Zionist challenge. This paper was published in Hebrew in the September 1998 issue of NATIV. |