Distributive Justice and Regional Planning: The Politics of Regional Revenue-Generating Land Uses in Israel

Abstract

In this article, I examine the connection between the economic strength of a local authority and the distribution of space in the region. The goal of this article is to examine the degree to which the distribution of revenue-generating land uses in Israel accords with the Rawlsian principle of distributive justice, and how that distribution affects the economic and social condition of development towns in comparison with that of the adjacent regional authorities. I also consider the role of the Israeli planning system in creating such inequalities, its justifications for doing so, and various attempts to remedy the situation.

Acknowledgements

I thank the editor, John Lovering, and the anonymous reviewers for their useful and challenging comments. I also deeply thank Susan Fainstein, Gila Menahem, Ruth Schwartz and Tomer Gothelf for their insights.

Notes

Inbal Aviv, ‘34 local authorities have not paid salaries to their employees’, Hadashot nfc (10 March 2005). www.nfc.co.il/archive/001-D-65948-00.html?tag=18-48-00. Hanni Shai Pausner, ‘The withholding of salaries in the municipalities continues: sanctions in Kiryat Shmona’, Hadashot nfc, 15 February 2006, www.nfc.co.il/archive/001-D-94086-00.html?tag=12-56-58.

The term ‘industrial and business zone’ refers to areas zoned for all types of non-residential land use, including industrial, commercial, business, tourism, and office use.

Arieh Sharon (1952), Physical Planning in Israel (in Hebrew).

For the debate between libertarianism and communitarianism regarding justice (Barzilai, 2003).

Campbell and Marshall (2006) refer to the criticism of Rawls's theory and state that many question the grounds on which it could be assumed that free and equal citizens would choose the ‘original position’ behind the ‘veil of ignorance’, and even if this choice were made, how far it could be assumed that the priority of liberty would be chosen or that a low risk rather than a utilitarian option would be chosen (Barber, 1975; Daniels, 1975; Dworkin, 1975; Hart, 1975).

Rawls's approach to justice rejects utilitarian aggregation and its focus on welfare. According to the utilitarian streams of thought, based on Jeremy Bentham's writing, a good public policy is one which maximizes individual pleasure and which achieves ‘the greatest happiness of the greater number’. Hence, in this theory, the selection of the ‘best’ policy is a simple matter of calculation, and the difficulty of defining the values of pleasure and happiness becomes hidden and subsumed under the elegance of mathematical modelling (MacIntyre, 1985; O'Neill, 1993).

Some researchers emphasize the way in which power constitutes and manipulates planning outcomes (Huxley & Yiftachel, 2000; Flyvbjerg & Richardson, 2002), while others focus on matters of identity (Sandercock, 2003), or on the distorting capacity of socioeconomic processes (Harvey, 1996; Fainstein, 2000).

It includes all types of land (urban and agricultural, developed and undeveloped), and all kinds of land use, such as residential, commercial, and industrial, in addition to the traditional public land use such as parks, natural resources, and public infrastructure (Alterman, 2001, 2003).

Clause 3 of the Israel Lands Administration Law (1960).

That is because the local authority, in most cases, does not ‘make a profit’ on its residents. A local authority with a high proportion of low socioeconomic residents even ‘loses money’ on its residents. This is because a large part of the population receives financial assistance from the local authority's welfare agencies but is exempt from paying property rates and other municipal taxes (Hananel, 2007).

At the end of the 1980s (1987–1989), the government relaxed the conditions under which local authorities received grants and decided that the transfer of government funds, which until then had been in accordance with clear rules, would be at the discretion of the ministers (especially the interior minister and the finance minister) and would be given as part of the general state grant. As a result of this policy, significant inequality was created in the amount of resources transferred by the central government to the local authorities, so that in practice those who benefited most from government funding were the small local authorities (Arab towns and wealthy suburban Jewish towns). In contrast to this was the middle range, which included, among others, large Arab cities and the development towns, which did not receive greater funding (Blank, 2004).

In 2005, Israel's population was 6,809,000. Of this number, 91.5% (6,227,300) lived in urban municipalities, and 8.5% (581,600) lived in rural municipalities. Statistical Abstract of Israel, 2005-No. 56.

Jews from North Africa and Asia (Oriental Jews/Mizrachim).

Israel has three main types of local authorities/municipalities. The first two are cities and towns, that is, settlements with urban characterizes which differ in size. Cities are larger than towns (above 20,000 residents). The third type is regional authorities, which refer to non-urban counties.

Israel has three metropolitan areas, each defined by its central city: Beersheba in the south, Tel Aviv in the centre, and Haifa in the north. The Tel Aviv metropolitan area is the largest. Its southern border includes the city of Ashdod and the area around it (Shachar, 1997:305–319).

These data are even more dramatic in the Arab municipalities in the same region. The mean area of industrial and business zones per resident in Kseifa, which is adjacent to the Tamar RA, is 0.00, and the same is true in Yafia, which is adjacent to the Jezreel Valley RA, and in Tuba-Zangeria, which is adjacent to the Upper Galilee RA.

These differences exist not only between development towns and the neighbouring regional authorities but also between large cities and the neighbouring regional authorities. For example, the mean industrial and business zones per person in Ramat Hanegev RA (0.514) is 10.7 times that of Beersheba (0.048), and in Emek Hefer RA the mean industrial and business zones per resident (0.148) is 7.8 times than that of the neighbouring city Netanya (0.019).

Such expressions reflect a Eurocentric view that accords a central place to European culture and knowledge and ignores various developments in other parts of the world. According to this view, the purpose of planning at the national level is to speed up the absorption of immigrants and to make them ‘modern’, as defined by the framers of the policy.

The plan's author provides historical and political explanations for the spatial imbalance created. He explains that one of the reasons for that imbalance is the ‘stifling political conditions that were created by the policies of the Mandatory government, for example, the White Paper of 1939, which allowed Jewish settlement only in a tiny part of the country and encouraged the dense and speculative development of the tiny areas around the big cities (mainly the three large cities, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Haifa)’ (p. 5).

The regional authorities, too, were created at first without industrial and business zones. But unlike the development towns, where poor and unaware immigrants from North Africa and Asia were settled in the 1950s, the regional authorities included veteran and better-off communities (particularly the communal villages) with an active and entrepreneurial population that established and developed industrial, commercial, and office zones within their boundaries.

The Central Bureau of Statistics, Table 1, types of local authorities and their ranking by socioeconomic level in 2003. Cluster 1 denotes the lowest socioeconomic level and cluster 10 denotes the highest. The ranking is based on various socioeconomic variables, such as mean per capita income (including pensions or benefits), motorization level of the residents, percentage of pupils eligible for matriculation, percentage of students in higher learning, percentage of job seekers, the dependency ratio, and the percentage of residents receiving an income subsidy. http://www1.cbs.gov.il/www/publications/local_authorities2003/pdf/t01.pdf.

There are also differences between settlements within a regional authority, but most of those differences are much smaller than those cited here.

See note 18.

The decisions were called the ‘Boeing decisions’ because their sequential numbers were 717, 727, and 737.

During the 1990s, 2 million immigrants were expected to arrive from the former Soviet Union. In fact, from 1989 to the end of 2002, 876,348 immigrants arrived. This was the largest wave of immigrants since 1948 and required a general mobilization of all government institutions (Tzfadia & Yiftachel, 2004:26).

HCJ 244/00 Association for a New Discourse for a Democratic Discourse in Israel v. The Minister of National Infrastructure, PD 56(6) 25.

Among them, the commercial area between Kibbutz Ga'ash and Shefayim in the precinct of Hof Hasharon RA, the Tradion industrial and business centre in the precinct of Misgav RA, the Hutzot Alonim commercial area adjacent to Kibbutz Alonim in the precinct of the Jezreel Valley RA, and the BIG business centre in the precinct of the Upper Galilee RA. The local authorities in Israel 2006, Industrial, Education, and Business Centres Outside the Municipalities, the Central Bureau of Statistics.

The reason for this, inter alia, lies in the Absorption Ministry's policy of ‘direct absorption’ in those years. Tzfadia and Yiftachel (2004:208–209) explain that according to this policy, instead of directing immigrants to a particular geographical area (as in the 1950s) and providing them with an apartment in a government project, the government gave each family upon arrival a one-time grant to cover the first year's rent anywhere they chose in the country. But the amount of the grant was so low that it enabled immigrants to rent only in peripheral areas and in development towns, areas with substantial levels of unemployment and a poor offering of employment opportunities. Consequently, many immigrants with higher education and professional training chose to live in places with greater employment opportunities, even if the rent was higher. Immigrants lacking higher education or professional training chose to live where it was cheapest and settled in development towns.

See Comptroller's report on Local Government for 2005, pp. 1–29.

In the decade 1990–1999, 131 committees were appointed to handle requests for boundary changes, when compared with 69 such committees in the 1980s and only 27 in the 1970s (Razin & Hazan, 1999).

The ability to impose cooperative arrangements on local authorities, including a division of revenue, as a condition for the approval of industrial and business zones under certain circumstances, was adopted by the state planning authorities and appears in various plans, including National Master Plan No. 35 (TAMA35).