The Community Settlement: a neo-rural territorial tool

The Israeli Community Settlements are small-scale non-agricultural villages that consist of a limited number of families and a homogenous character. This method began to be used by the Israeli government and its different planning agencies during the 1970s as a tool to strengthen the state's territorial and demographical control over the Israeli internal frontiers of the Galilee, the West-Bank and along the Green-Line. Unlike earlier settlement methods that relied on ideological values such as labour, agriculture, redemption, identity and integration, as part of the nation-building years, the Community Settlements promoted a more individual and neo-rural lifestyle. In this paper I ask to show how the Community Settlements formed the new leading tool for a national agenda, in correspondence with the changing ideals in Israeli culture, moving from a quasi-socialist society into a market-driven neoliberal one. Later, suburbanising the neo-rural phenomenon.