Summary
The term Israeli planners and politicians use, on Makdisi’s account, for the fact that only half the residents of the land under Israeli control are Jewish — the problem of keeping the land Israel wants without the people who come with it (Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation, PDF p.47).
Details
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“Israel does not want the people of the occupied territories, but it does want their land. That is the nature of the demographic “problem” facing Israel: how can it keep the land that it wants, without the people that come with it” (PDF p.47).
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Separation policy under Arik Sharon and Ehud Olmert is presented as the official answer, and pressure inducing emigration as its mechanism (PDF p.47-48).
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In Jerusalem the problem is administered as a target ratio: planning policy since 1967 has aimed to preserve 72 percent Jews against 28 percent non-Jews — the planning laws “rest on a policy that calls for placing obstacles in the way of planning in the Arab sector” to preserve that balance, in former mayor’s advisor Amir Cheshin’s words, and the 1978 Master Plan proposed squeezing non-Jewish growth to hold it (Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation, PDF p.152).
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In the Drobles Plan of 1978 the Palestinians of the West Bank, though the majority of its population, are named a “minority” — their minoritization, in Makdisi’s word, as a disenfranchised group within a greater Israel (PDF p.172).
Related pages
Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation, Transfer, Baruch Kimmerling, Arnon Sofer, Teddy Kollek, Drobles Plan