The Sharon Plan reconsidered: how Eliezer Brutzkus’ pre-1948 separatism shaped Israel’s New Towns

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the Sharon Plan, Israel's celebrated New Towns programme and a central ethos of early statehood. Conventional wisdom unequivocally identifies it with the renowned Bauhaus-graduate Arieh Sharon and the progressive spirit of architectural modernism. I reveal, by contrast, how the plan drew on an obscure blueprint devised by an urban planner, Eliezer Brutzkus, in the context of the Peel Partition Plan in 1937. The Peel Partition Plan proposed, for the first time, to divide Palestine into separate Arab and Jewish states, based on population transfer. Brutzkus reacted to the new horizon of a Jewish-only statehood by devising proto-national mass urbanization plan, based on the ‘comprehensive planning’ of a land emptied of its Arab majority. In 1948, this plan was updated and canonized as the Sharon Plan. This previously unexplored thread re-situates Sharon's modernist feat within the longer-term history of Zionist colonization and dispossession. Further, Brutzkus drew on geoeconomic and demographic planning policy tools, rather than on architecture and design. As such, this case demonstrates the importance of attending to disciplinary multiplicity as a vital part of the period's legacy, rather than collapsing it under the blanket term of architectural modernism.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments. Special thanks to Laila Parsons and Alon Confino for their support of this project at crucial moments; Adi Livny, Eli Osheroff, and Tamar Novick for reading earlier drafts, and Neil Wilkof for his editorial assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Hall and Tewdwr-Jones, Urban and Regional Planning; Meller, Towns, Plans.

2 Meller and Porfryiou, Planting New Towns; Geertse, “Cross-Border”.

3 Wakeman, Practicing Utopias, 112; Spiegel, New Towns in Israel; Strong, Planned Urban Environments.

4 e.g., Sharon, Kibbutz + Bauhaus; Efrat, The Object, 59-87; Neumann, Arieh Sharon

5 Rotbard, White City, 27.

6 Parsons, “The Secrete Testimony”; Lin, “The Arithmetic or Rights”; Shumsky, Beyond the Nation State, ch. 5.

7 Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, A Survey of Palestine, 141, Table 1.

8 E.g., compare Morris, The Birth, ch. 2 vs. Karsh, ‘Resurrecting the Myth”; and Masalha, The Expulsion vs. Divine, “The Expulsion.”

9 El-Eini, Mandated Landscape.

10 Hasan, “Palestine's Absent Cities”, esp. 11; Seikaly, Men of Capital; Radai, “The Rise and Fall.”

11 Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, A Survey of Palestine, 142, Table 3.

12 Brutzkus, “Aims and Possibilities,” 32.

13 Gonen, “How was the Centre of Israel Formed.”

14 Gorni, From Rosh-Pina.

15 Cohen, “The City in the Zionist Ideology,” esp. 2-8.

16 Ibid, 4.

17 Ibid, 4, 13. Exceptions are the establishment of Afula in 1925 and in Graicer, “Ideological Disputes.”

18 Gelber, A New Homeland, 375-475; Helman, Young Tel Aviv.

19 E.g., the townships of Kefar Saba, Bat Yam, Rishon Le’Zion, and Holon. The Joint Committee of the Jewish Members of the Local Town Planning in the Lydda District, “Minutes of Sixth Meeting.”

20 Razin, “District Plans in Israel; Crookston, “Echoes of Empire”; Norris, Land of Progress.

21 Brutzkus, “On the Question,” 13.

22 E.g., Kahana, Not a City; Gilbert, Bauhaus on the Carmel; Epstein-Pliouchtch, Levin, and Feinholtz, Richard Kauffmann; Nitzan-Shiftan, “Contested Zionism.”

23 E.g., The Symposium on the “Problems of Planning and Development,” Journal of the Association of Engineers & Architects in Palestine.

24 Universitätsarchiv der Technischen Universität Berlin, Matrikel Bd. VIII (1923-1928), S. 262, elfte Zeile (über die Doppelseite): Eintrag zu Leonid Brutzkus.

25 Brutzkus, Planning Thought, 132.

26 E.g., Brutzkus, “The Dreams.”

27 Cohen, “The City,” 7 and 61.

28 Brutzkus, “Aims and Possibilities”; Ibid, “On the Question”; Ibid, “A Semi Urban Structure”; Ibid, “Regional Planning.”

29 See footnote 2.

30 E.g., Brutzkus, “A Semi Urban Structure,” 39.

31 Brutzkus, “On the Question,” 14.

32 Pfannschmidt, Standort.

33 Brutzkus, “A Semi-Urban Structure,” 254.

34 Ibid.

35 Recent exceptions containing brief discussion are Leendertz, “Vom Anfang,” 77; Kegler, “Landesplanung Mitteldeutschland,” 90-92.

36 E.g.,Trezib, Die Theorie; Golan, “Central Place.”

37 Golan, “Central Place”, 45-47.

38 Sharon, “And Thus”, esp. 140-154.

39 Krampf, “Reception.”

40 Troen, “Calculating the ‘economic absorptive capacity’”; Reichman, Katz, and Paz. “The Absorptive Capacity”; Halamish, “Immigration.”

41 This attitude later fed into Ben Gurion’s “one-million plan”. HaCohen, From Fantasy to Reality, 40-48, esp. 42.

42 On Ruppin, Penslar, Zionism and Technocracy, esp. 80-110; Bloom, Arthur Ruppin, 2011.

43 Krampf, “Reception,” 86.

44 The biographical information largely draws on Wilhelm, “The Soviet Economic Failure;” and E. Brutzkus, “Boris Brutzkus.”

45 E.g., E. Brutzkus, “Boris Brutzkus,” 6; B. Brutzkus, “Economic Planning.”

46 E.g., B. Brutzkus, “The Problem.”

47 Krampf, “Reception,” 114.

48 Compare E. Brutzkus, “A Semi Urban Structure”, esp. 41; Ibid, “Regional Planning”; B. Brutzkus, “The Problem”; Horowitz, “Objections to the Theory of Productization.”

49 Palestine Royal Commission, Report, Ch. XXII.

50 Golani, “The Meat.”

51 See footnote 6 and 8.

52 Brutzkus, “Aims and Possibilities.”

53 Bigon and Katz, Garden Cities; Epstein-Pliouchtch, Levin, and Feinholtz, Richard Kauffmann.

54 Klein, New Town Planning Methods.”

55 Bevilacqua, “Alexander Klein”.

56 Brutzkus, “Regional Planning,” 48.

57 Ibid.

58 E.g., Brutzkus, “Aims and Possibilities,” 32.

59 Ibid, 31.

60 Lin, “The Arithmetic,” 946.

61 3.8 of approximately 4.9 million dunums belonged to Arabs. Palestine Partition Commission, “Report,” 48, 50.

62 Except for several major cities located on the national highway system, for purposes of orientation.

63 Brutzkus, Planning Thought, 133; Brutzkus to Ruppin, Notwendigkeit und Durchführbarkeit.

64 However, a major benchmark for its reception was the 1945 Zionist Postwar Reconstruction Planning Committee, which drew on the influential British Barlow Report. Wilkof, “Urban Arcadias”, 144-152; Troen, “New Departures.”

65 See footnote 2.

66 E.g., Reichman From Foothold; Bar-Cohen, “Legislative Process.”

67 Schechter, “Planners, Politicians, Bureaucrats,” 48; Tischler, “Lecture (Conversation) List”; “The Reform Settlement Circle,” n.d., LIA/V-203; Tischler, “The Members”; Brutzkus, “Three Documents”.

68 Wilkof, “Urban Arcadias,” 166.

69 Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 382, 589.

70 Kedar and Yiftachel, “Land Regimes and Social Relations in Israel,” 138.

71 Hashimshoni, The Path, 141.

72 Ibid.

73 Reichman and Yehudai, “Survey,” 53; Brutzkus, “Founding New Cities.”

74 Sharon, “Planners”, 51-53.

75 Reichman, “Three Dilemmas," 51-52, footnotes 17-18.

76 Sharon, Physical Planning.

77 Abercrombie himself served as a consultant for the Zionist movement from the 1920s through the 1950s, during which he advised on the Israeli New Towns. Kolodney and Kallus, “From Colonial”; Abercrombie, “Report on Visit to Israel.”

78 On Kahane see Wilkof, “An Ordinary Modernist.”

79 Kahane, “Twenty-Five Years,” 256; Brutzkus, Planning Thought, 215-17.

80 Kahane, 256.

81 Reichman and Yehudai, Survey, 63-83. It was preceded by a plan authored by Glikson and Heinz Rau in mid-1949, Ibid. On Glikson see Wilkansky, “Regional.”

82 Compare Sharon, Physical Planning 5–6 vs. Brutzkus, “Semi Urban,” 255-56; Ibid, “On the Question,” 13-14;

83 Sharon, Physical Planning, 5–6 [English supplement].

84 Brutzkus, “The Origins of Subdivision,” 75.

85 Kamen, “After the Catastrophe,” 457.

86 Sharon, “Planners,” 44.

87 E.g., Sharon, Physical Planning, 17.

88 Yiftahel, Ethnocracy, Jabareen, “The Politics of State Planning”; Yacobi, Architecture, Orientalism.

89 Confino, “Miracles and Snow,” 36.

90 Wolfe, “Purchase by Other Means” 159; Porter and Yiftahel, “Urbanizing Settler Colonial Studies.”

91 Makdisi, Palestine Inside Out, 212;

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Shira Wilkof

Shira Wilkof is a lecturer at the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning, Technion, Haifa where she teaches modern history of landscape, urban planning, and the environment. She specializes in transnational history of spatial knowledge; environmentalism and sustainability in design thought; and Palestine/Israel spatial production. Trained as a geographer, urban planner and architectural historian, she is especially interested in the intricate relations amongst the design disciplines, understanding how these dynamics, often overlooked, have shaped enduring spatial realities and professional legacies.