The story of Prof. Rasem Khamaysi deserves wider attention. An investigation by “HaKol HaYehudi” pieced together his public and political activity in the Islamic Movement, his views on the ‘Palestinian’ national struggle for the land, and his standing as one of the most prominent professionals in Israel’s planning world. The picture is troubling, but the question isn’t just who Khamaysi is—it’s what his story reveals about the professional system in which he operated.
2+The legal and security establishments, academia, and the media are familiar to the public—especially in recent years—as power centers where worldviews aren’t just ideas but become reality. The planning and construction systems, by contrast, are absent from this conversation. We almost never examine who trains the people in whose hands we place the determination of the land of Israel’s character, its resettlement, and the future of our ancestral inheritance—or which political side the planning systems lean toward (spoiler alert: the one you were expecting).
Starting in the 1990s, parallel to the post-Zionist discourse of the New Historians, a new discourse about the land took root in Israel’s world of architecture, planning, and geography. Professional vocabulary absorbed concepts of power, hegemony, exclusion, ethnocracy, and “civilian occupation,” while concepts of building the land of Israel, resettling it, and holding it were pushed aside. The change wasn’t limited to criticism of this or that planning policy. Gradually, Jewish construction and planning themselves became an indictment. A community, neighborhood, road, fence, archaeological site, or even a monument could be read as evidence of Judaization, control, and dispossession.
2+Meanwhile, ‘Palestinian’ planning thought developed in those same years, making an almost opposite move. It didn’t distance itself from the connection between planning and nationalism—it harnessed planning tools to questions of land, population, and national development. Khamaysi’s writings since then illustrate this well. He wrote then about the transition “from restrictive planning to developmental planning in Arab settlements in Israel,” about Israeli use of planning as a tool for controlling ‘Palestinians’ in Judea and Samaria, and about an urbanization strategy to strengthen national development of the ‘Palestinian’ state. In 1994, a year after the first Oslo Accord was signed, he published research titled “Issues in Planning and Development of Settlements in the Emerging ‘Palestinian’ Entity.”
The two processes—the Jewish post-national and the Arab national—moved toward each other. The irony was sharp: ‘Palestinian’ thought didn’t give up the connection between profession, nationality, and land, while part of Jewish professional discourse learned to suspect that connection precisely. One side established its supposed national claim to the land, while the other gradually lost moral confidence in the Jewish national claim to it.
This meeting didn’t stay in the world of ideas. Khamaysi was a partner in “Israel 2020,” the large-scale strategic planning project that developed a spatial vision for Israel in the 1990s for the 2000s and profoundly influenced the formulation of National Outline Plan 35, the master plan that largely shaped Israel’s development and construction principles in recent decades. Three decades later, he’s now also a partner in “Israel 100,” an initiative for strategic planning of Israel toward 2048, including research on transformations in planning discourse. He was a member of the Planning Association’s committee, received its “Planning Luminary” award, and, following the “HaKol HaYehudi” investigation, has also won the association’s full support in recent days.
2+Professional ideas don’t stay within academia’s walls. Over recent decades, architecture schools and departments of geography and planning studies have been the training grounds for people who now staff planning offices, authorities, and state institutions. There they learned not only how to plan, but in what terms to read the land they’re planning today. Academia isn’t a footnote to the planning system. It’s its assembly line.
And there’s a more fundamental question: What history of building in the land does an architect receive when trained for the profession? Even when the history of architecture in the Land of Israel is taught in these training tracks, the center of gravity is usually the last hundred years. Thousands of years of Jewish construction, from Jerusalem to Hebron, don’t stand in the same way at the foundation of the professional canon. This way, you can complete architectural training in Israel without the profession requiring you to seriously grapple with a basic question: What does it mean to build in a land that is your ancestral inheritance?
Meanwhile, that language lives. In a segment from a speech MK Mansour Abbas delivered in Kafr Qasim in September 2023 and recirculated this week, he says: “We want this land to be inherited by our righteous sons.” Linger on the words: the land, inheritance, sons. In the opposing national and religious discourse, there’s no embarrassment about viewing the land as an inheritance passing from fathers to sons. Whoever speaks to us about inheriting the land should remember: Jews also have fathers, and this land is our ancestral inheritance.
Architecture isn’t interior design and planning isn’t real estate. These are professions of sovereignty. They determine where a community will rise, where it will expand, what will connect to what, which land will be built and which will remain open. Ideas become lines on a map, and lines on a map become reality that’s hard to change a generation later.
Therefore, a fundamental examination of the teaching of architecture, geography, and planning in Israel is needed. Not to silence criticism, but to restore to these professions concepts that have been pushed out: building the land, resettling it, and holding it. A Jewish state doesn’t need to apologize for planning as a Jewish state, and a Jew building in the Land of Israel doesn’t need to learn to see his very construction as an indictment. This land isn’t just the place where we live. It’s our ancestral inheritance, and our duty is to build it, resettle it, take hold of it, and bequeath it.