L’introuvable déségrégation ethnique des villages communautaires juifs de Galilée

Résumé 0

The Constant Segregation of the Galilean Community Villages.In August 1978, while the Israeli settlement policies tended to focus mostly on the occupied territories, the settlement department of the Jewish Agency succeeded in obtaining a governmental green light to implement in Galilee a Mitzpim Program also known as Yihud haGalil. In that frame, 52 mitzpim, small rurban communities, were settled on the Galilean hilltops. Most of them transformed into community villages (yichouv kehilati), residential settlements where lives, on average, a few hundred families. While the political leadership was prompt in describing those communities in very nationalistic terms, they mostly attracted an urban, secular and Ashkenazi middle-class, uncomfortable with this rhetoric, but sensitive to the quality of life which could offer those settlements. Driven by a will of social separatism, those new settlers organized resident screening procedures to judge the social compatibility of applying families.Mitzpim were mostly settled in central Galilee, i.e. in a region which had then mostly been populated by Palestinians citizens of Israel. This spatial proximity did not prevent a continued separation: both Arab and Jewish villages remained strictly segregated. At the end of the 1990s, the screening procedures set by the Jewish villages were contested in front of the Supreme Court by an Israeli Arab whose request to join the community village of Katzir had been rejected. Following the 2 000 ruling (Qaadan vs Katzir), new procedures – with a greater involvement of the regional councils were set, but, until now, to no effect as far as the integration of Arab families is concerned. Their applications are still inevitably turned down by integration committees.To understand the mechanism of this segregation of the Galilean community villages, this article first deals with the members of the Israeli Arab minority able to set in motion a desegregation process, i.e. the Arab families willing to join a Jewish community village. Though they have to cope with the hostility of their own ethnic group, Arab families ready to pioneer into segregated Jewish communities do emerge from the integrated Israeli Arab elite. Our researches show that most of them are not politically motivated (the number of those turning to the judicial system – in order to appeal against the refusal they faced – is very low,) but rather underestimated the hostility of the inhabitants of the Jewish community villages. This miscalculation partly stems from their interactions with the leftist militant fringe of the Jewish population. Those Israeli Arabs indeed have the opportunity to work and meet with Israeli Jews trying to initiate cultural and educational cooperation (for example the bilingual Galil elementary school,) fighting for the development of the Arab sector (the association Sikkuï baMisgav,) or even promoting the desegregation of the Jewish community villages (another local association: Kol Aher baGalil,) and consequently tend to overestimate the ethnic-blind state of mind of their liberal neighbors.In a second part, this article tries to uncover the basis of the Jewish villages’ refusal to integrate Arab families. While, in the tradition of Herbert Blumer’s Group Position Model, the Galilean Jewish settlers could be apprehended as actors consciously involved in the reproduction of the Israeli ethnocratic system which theorized Oren Yiftachel, this article puts forward the fact that the incentives of the settlers may not be primarily politically motivated. By protecting their villages against Arab applicants, they also defend their own real estate investment, whose value could drop if the presence of an Arab were to limit the attractiveness and curb the development of their village.