Graduates of the joint change agents courses of the School for Peace and the Arab Center for Alternative Planning, who are now members of a Jewish-Arab planners and architects forum, met for an important meeting following the recent violent disturbances in the mixed cities.

The meeting, which took place Friday 21 May 2021, was attended by about 40 planners from the forum of graduates. We were also honored by the presence of MK Sami Abu Shehadeh – Chairman of the Balad party; Fida Shehadeh, a member of the Lod City Council; Ghassan Munayer, a social activist in Lod and a SFP planners course graduate; Prof. Ayala Ronal of Tel Aviv University; Prof. Oren Yiftachel of Ben Gurion University; Dr. Emily Silverman of The Hebrew University; Prof. Senan Abdelqader of the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design; and of Amir and Ahlam Aga, members of the SFP graduates mental health workers forum.

The meeting began with MK Sami Abu Shehadeh’s cogent lecture on the processes that led to the outbreak of recent events in the mixed cities of Acre, Jaffa, Lod and Haifa. Sami described how the religious Zionism settlement project, after the disengagement from the Gaza Strip, moved to promote Jewish settlement of Torah nuclei in mixed cities, with the aim of influencing discourse and public opinion within the Green Line, “colonizing hearts” and “saving” Jews in these cities from the Arab population. Sami asked the forum members to make our voices heard in the media, especially in these days, and to bring to the discourse a voice of sanity that tells the story as a whole, in addition to proposing a new vision for the cities involved that will form the basis of a Jewish/Arab political project in these cities.

We had a group discussion about the events of the recent days, thanks to the forum members who shared their work and feelings.

In addition, during the meeting, Fida Shehadeh, a city council member from Lod, was obliged to leave the meeting for her home due to the fact that municipal inspectors had come there to demand that she remove a tarpaulin she had hung to protect the house from stones thrown at it. Mayor Yair Revivo publicly threatened to transfer “treatment” of the case to the General Security Services.

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We held discussion groups to promote action on the following topics:

A. Shared living space project

This group will try to propose courses of action so that all citizens of the country can exercise their right to live wherever they choose, without discrimination.

B. Cooperative project with the Israel Planners Association

A project aiming to put on the agenda of the Israel Planners Association planning issues of concern to Arab society,  to influence the bodies responsible for planning and increase the representation of Arab planners in them.

It was decided:

1) To contact the Association in order to update the composition and participation of its meeting structure so that it will also deal with the planning issues that have been observed recently, especially in the context of the cities involved.

2) At the same time, we will work with the Association (at their request) to develop a dialogue and joint activity concerning the issues that are raised both in its sessions and in our discourse with them. Examples of such activities may include examining test cases, round tables of experts, or promoting a set of specific requirements determined by the the forum and the Association.

Creating a vision of a shared city – a city for everyone

Vision of a shared city; a city for everyone  – Drafting a conceptual planning vision for shared cities in order to allow the residents of these cities the prospect of living together. The aim of the project: to create a new planning vision for bi-national mixed cities that will allow the residents of these cities the prospect for coexistence and the formulation of a planning code for a new bi-national space in the mixed cities.