Summary
The Israeli Acceptance to Communities bill of 2011, which in Chapter 11 of Rethinking Statehood in Palestine formalized admission committees for small communities in the Naqab and Galilee, its central intention being to prevent Palestinians from settling in Jewish communities (Rethinking Statehood in Palestine, PDF p.307).
Details
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The law formalized the establishment of admission committees to review potential new residents of communities of up to four hundred family units in the Naqab and Galilee regions, where the Palestinian population in Israel is largely concentrated (PDF p.307).
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It is presented as part of an explicit discourse, translated into recent legislation, about “saving” Jewish towns and settlements from further Palestinian “invasion”, against a movement of Palestinians into what were meant to be exclusively Jewish towns — approximately seventy thousand Palestinians are estimated to live in either officially Jewish spaces or traditionally Jewish neighborhoods in mixed towns (PDF p.307).
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In Chapter 2 of Stateless Citizenship (2013), the law — there called the Admissions Committees Law, passed March 24, 2011 — provides for admission committees in almost 700 agricultural and community townships, 68.5 percent of all towns in Israel and around 85 percent of all villages built on state land in all of the Naqab and Galilee, with full discretion to approve or deny applicants housing units and plots of land; the committees include “a representative from the Jewish Agency or the World Zionist Organization,” may refuse applicants “unsuitable to the social life of the community… or the social and cultural fabric of the town,” may adopt criteria chosen by the communities themselves, and encompass townships self-defined as maintaining a “Zionist vision” (PDF p.73). The two accounts differ in scope as printed: Farsakh’s committees are for communities of up to four hundred family units in the Naqab and Galilee; Molavi’s figures are as above.
Related pages
Rethinking Statehood in Palestine, Ilan Pappe, Indigeneity, Judaization, Naqab, Stateless Citizenship (2013)