Violent De-Politicisation: (sub)Urbanising a Palestinian Middle-Class

New cities are being built in Israel and Palestine as neoliberal responses to the current ‘housing crisis’. This paper combines a production of space perspective with the Zionist settler-colonial doctrine of conquest of labour and conquest of land, in order to examine how such projects are re-producing colonial spatialities. Specifically, interviews with planners, activists and inhabitants are used for comparing two current suburban developments that target a so-called ‘Palestinian middle-class’ on both sides of the 1967 Green Line. They reveal private homeownership as a new state strategy in the ongoing production of periphery and national territory. In Israel, the first ‘Arab city’ planned since the 1948 Palestinian Nakba/founding of the Jewish state supposedly marks a transformation in the state’s conduct towards its Palestinian citizens; in Palestine, a private development is tasked with expressing the state’s financial and political independence, ostensibly signaling a shift towards a particular ‘urban’ as grounds for proclaiming nationhood. Both cases are linked by market approach to housing, by architecture and planning as means for nationalising disputed landscapes and by practices of sprawl, land grabbing, displacement and dispossession. They become concrete abstractions of a de-politicised Palestinian middle class – spaces of counter-resistance violently integrating anti-colonial potentials into the (sub)urbanisation of Israel/Palestine as a whole. Still, in the Palestinian case, some inhabitants reject criticism of normalising the occupation and are instead optimistic about the power of real estate to promote their ‘right of return’. In Israel, the new development has engendered a local movement that draws on the democratic facets of the centralised planning mechanism for anti-colonial activism. Eventually, while the framing of local conflicts as ‘housing crisis’ legitimates violent suburbanisation of contested territories and facilitates attempted de-politicisation of the Palestinian anti-colonial struggle itself, it nevertheless opens new possibilities for resisting the colonial regime.