Can we imagine a future bi-national\shared cities by Israelis and Palestinians, Jews and Arabs, based on equal terms administered by a decentralized, urban federal-type, democratic regime?
In reference to David Harvey’s seminal work (1989), in this essay I would like to frame Palestine-Israel as an urban question, while looking at the process of urbanization through the dynamics of power relations. I would suggest that looking at Palestine-Israel as an urban question is important since the Palestine-Israel “conflict” is (too) often framed through macro-geopolitics, religious, or historical lenses, overlooking the everyday micro-spaces created within the colonial power relationships such as cities. In other words, one should understand the role of both physical and symbolic division and “mixing” of urban space in Palestine-Israel since as rightly suggested by Diane Davis (2011: 228), when urban conflicts were studied "it is almost always with the presupposition that identity conflicts are fuelled by, and most evident in, physical separation - that it is in the form of divided cities".
Urbanization in Palestine-Israel is deeply politicized, polarized along different attributes such as infrastructure, housing, land and distribution of urban goods, while despite of being contested, cities provide spaces of encounter between Israelis and Palestinians. While these are operating within inequal power relations, these might be the potential spaces for change, reconciliation and de-colonization. Indeed, cities are inherently sites of conflict over resources, identity, power and domination and the question that we need to focus on is how and why agonism - namely the ability of urban systems to articulate and include diversity – is transformed into antagonism, violence and exclusion. Wendy Pullan (2015) investigates the role of agonism in shaping urban life while discussing urban conflicts in highly contested cities such as Beirut, Jerusalem, Nicosia, Belfast and Sarajevo. However, she further (provocatively) suggests that conflicts and contestations should be understood as urban phenomenon (“agonistic practices”), accentuating their constructiveaspects in everyday life.