Oren Yiftachel

Yiftachel has worked as an urban and regional planner in a range of institutions, including the Perth City Council in Australia, the Kibbutz Movement and "Israel 2020" project in Israel. He specialized in advocacy planning and land consultancy. Recently he has worked on an Israeli-Palestinian plan for a bi-national Jerusalem, an alternative plan for the unrecognized Bedouin villages in southern Israel, and a plan for a multicultural Beersheba. Yiftachel has worked as an urban and regional planner in a range of institutions, including the Perth City Council, the Kibbutz Movement, and "Israel 2020" project in Israel.

Yiftachel is also an activist, and has been a member of several notable organizations, including Faculty for Israel-Palestine Peace (FFIPP), PALISAD, The Negev Coexistence Forum, Adva (centre for social equality), and Habitat International Coalition. In recent years Yiftachel served as a board member and chair of B'tselem – the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories; and has co-founded a new Israeli-Palestinian peace movement – "A Land for All - Two States, One Homeland". He is an occasional op-ed contributor to leading Israeli newspapers, including Haaretz, Ynet and Ma'ariv.

Yiftachel was born in Haifa and grew up on kibbutz Matzuva. He did his service in the Israel Defense Forces in the Golani Brigade. During the 1980s and early 1990s, Yiftachel studied in Australia and Israel, specializing in urban studies and political geography. In 1990, he received a Doctor of Philosophy from the Department of Geography, the University of Western Australia, Perth, and the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning, the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa. He returned to Israel, where he did his post-doctoral studies on regional planning at the Technion from 1991 to 1992.

Palestinians are relegated to the status of 'unwanted' indigenous peoples resisting the ethnocratic project.[3] Yiftachel uses a multidisciplinary approach, inspired by Neo-Gramscian thinking and by a range of Marxian, post- and neo-colonial theorists. In the study of Israel/Palestine he was one of the first to break the traditional scholarly divisions between analysis of Arab-Jewish relations and internal Jewish dynamics, and one of a handful of scholars to question whether Israel acts as a democratic state within the Green Line (Israeli pre-1967 borders). The Israeli regime, according to Yiftachel, has presided over the entire historic Palestine for over five decades, and should be analyzed according to the power structures he claims it imposed over the entire territory. Yiftachel developed the 'settler-ethnocratic' model to highlight the regime's main historical-material logic, and the concept of 'creeping apartheid' to describe its recent manifestation and the development of four different 'separate and unequal' types of citizenship under the Israeli regime..

Yiftachel is highly critical of the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories and its continued occupation and colonization of the West Bank in the wake of the 1967 Six Day-War. By that time, Israel had, he argues, a homeland and therefore the takeover of those territories lacks any moral justification. In the long run he envisages as an ideal resolution of the conflict a unified state with consociational power sharing.

Oren Yiftachel (Hebrew: אורן יפתחאל ‎, born 1956) is an Israeli professor of political and legal geography, urban studies and urban planning at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, in Beersheba. He holds the Lynn and Lloyd Hurst Family Chair in Urban Studies.