Two crescents - Arab urban periphery around Haifa

Two crescents - Arab urban periphery around Haifa

photo: Google Maps

There are those who seek to squeeze more and more residential buildings in the city of Haifa, or oppose the development of metropolitan park in the Kishon River.

They apparently think that the city is surrounded by green mountains, and anyone who wants it can find abundant natural areas within a few minutes of driving from his home.

This is not so!

Apart from the Jewish cities and towns in the coastal plain, crowded yet designed, there is around Haifa, in less then one hour of driving, a very large periphery of Arab towns.

These towns were built without planning procedure, and therefore are not mapped properly. Only small parts of them appear in the maps.

Hence there is no proper reference to them in professional and academic organizations, in the media or in politics.

To the lack of public awareness for their existence contributes their traditional location, which is in hidden hills. These hidden hills are near major transportation routes, which make them very attractive as suburbs.

Due to the building style of these towns, of individual and spontaneous self-construction method, in mountainous and agricultural areas which are relatively inexpensive, Arab family houses are densely spread without order all around the western and southern slopes of the Galilee mountains, and the northern and western slopes of Samaria Mountains. 

They are still mostly called 'villages', but in fact these villages are today big towns, of tens of thousands of people each, which expanded their territory to create one urban continuum, where hundreds of thousands of residents live together.

In the western and southern Galilee slopes, the urban area, in the form of crescent, is consisted of the following towns:

Nazareth and more in the center.

Tamra, Iblin, Shfaram and more in the west.

Yarka, Kfar-Yasif, Gat and more in the north.

Daburia, Iksal and more in the east.

To understand fully the extent of this urban block one can visit this area of seemingly green Galilee, and drive in a dense Arab built urban sprawl, starting from a point east of Nahariya near the border with Lebanon almost to the Sea of Galilee.

In Samaria Mountains area, the urban towns, which are bigger thanks to the short distance to Tel-Aviv, are also intermingled together in a similar in the form of a crescent:

The central block is of the towns along Wadi Ara, with Um-al-Fahm in its center.

West of it, on the Carmel mountain, are the Druze towns Dalia and Osafia.

South of Wadi Ara are cities like: Tira, Taiba and Kalansawa.

East of Wadi Ara, beyond the Green Line, around the city of Jenin, are its surrounding towns in the edge of Izrael Valley.

The distance between the 2 crescents is only few kilometers, through the fields of Izrael Valley.

The people of Haifa who fight for a small garden near their house know that they will not find it elsewhere. North and central Israel became one crowded urban area. Illegal construction, unplanned construction, and construction in agricultural areas made it happen.