The State That Declare War But Cannot Build a Village: How Bureaucracy Paralyzed Israel’s Ability to Found New Communities
- J.P. Katz
- 1 hour ago
- 5 min read
Based on the interview with investigative journalist, Akiva Bigman.
For decades, Israeli governments of every political stripe have announced ambitious plans to strengthen the country’s geographic periphery. The Galilee and the Negev are repeatedly declared national priorities. Press conferences are held, ceremonial cabinet meetings convened in border towns, and official resolutions passed pledging new communities, demographic reinforcement, and strategic depth.
And yet, despite more than thirty government decisions over the past three decades, not a single new Jewish community has actually been established within Israel’s 1948 borders.
This is not a matter of ideology. It is not about Judea and Samaria, disputed territories, or controversial legal status. It is about something far more basic—and far more alarming: the State of Israel has lost the institutional capacity to execute its own settlement policy, even in areas that enjoy national consensus.
Investigative journalist Akiva Bigman has documented this failure in painstaking detail. His conclusion is stark: Israel’s elected government no longer governs in this domain. Power has migrated upward into an unelected bureaucratic and legal apparatus that can indefinitely block, delay, or neutralize policy—without ever formally vetoing it.
Thirty Decisions, Zero Results
Since the early 1990s, Israeli governments have approved plans for more than thirty new communities: in the Negev, in the Galilee, near Gaza, in the Golan Heights. Some were modest villages; others were planned towns of thousands of families. One proposed community, Chanun, was meant to rise near the northern Gaza Strip, facing Beit Hanoun—an area from which rockets have been fired for years.
None were built.
These were not fringe proposals advanced by ideological extremists. They were decisions taken by right-wing, centrist, and left-leaning governments alike—including governments that dismantled settlements elsewhere. The rationale was always the same: demographic balance, national resilience, border security, and economic development.
The consistency of the failure points to a systemic cause.
A Pyramid Turned Upside Down
At the heart of the problem lies a fundamental inversion of authority. In theory, Israel operates like any modern democracy: elected officials set policy, and professional bureaucracies implement it. In practice, the opposite has become true in the realm of land use and settlement.
The turning point came in 2004, with an Attorney General directive—Instruction 1.1800—issued by Menachem Mazuz during Ariel Sharon’s government. This directive governs how decisions to establish new communities must be made.
On its face, the instruction sounds reasonable. It emphasizes professional review: environmental impact, demographic considerations, infrastructure feasibility, planning alternatives. No serious person disputes the need for such analysis.
But the directive goes much further.
It explicitly bars the government from making concrete, binding decisions. Cabinet resolutions must be written only in general, non-specific language, expressing policy aspirations rather than directives. The government may not determine location, scale, or execution. It may not override planning authorities—even in the name of national strategy.
In the directive’s own language, the government may “express its policy,” but may not decide in place of the competent authority.
That “competent authority” is not the cabinet. It is the planning bureaucracy.
The Bureaucracy Decides the “What,” Not Just the “How”
This distinction is crucial. In a functioning system, professional bodies answer the question of how to implement policy. In Israel’s settlement regime, they have assumed control over the what.
Environmental officials, land authorities, planning committees, and legal advisors—none of them elected—possess effective veto power. Any one of dozens of considerations can stall progress indefinitely: a protected species, a planning alternative, demographic modeling, or the suggestion that expansion elsewhere might be preferable.
Security considerations—ironically—are not part of the formal calculus. Border reinforcement, civilian presence, and strategic depth fall outside the directive’s scope. These are deemed “political” issues, and therefore excluded from the professional assessment that ultimately determines outcomes.
The result is paralysis.
Temporary Camps as Political Leverage
In response, governments and activists have adopted a workaround borrowed from Judea and Samaria: temporary communities.
Places like Tel Arad and Ramat Arbel consist of clusters of caravans housing young families, established near—but not on—the intended permanent site. They are not legally recognized communities. They exist to create “facts on the ground” and apply pressure on the bureaucracy by introducing human consequences: children, schools, daily life.
That such tactics are required inside sovereign Israel is extraordinary.
Even these provisional arrangements often last years, sometimes decades, without transitioning into permanent settlements. They exist in a legal limbo, tolerated but not approved.
One Exception—and Why It Matters
There is only one notable exception: the town of Hiran in the Negev. Its development began before the Mazuz directive fully took effect and before key planning frameworks were locked in. By crossing several critical bureaucratic thresholds early, Hiran managed to survive the new regime.
Its uniqueness proves the rule. Since then, no new community has cleared the same hurdles.
Security Without Civilians
The implications extend far beyond housing policy. For generations, Israeli security doctrine relied on civilian settlement as a stabilizing force. Farmers notice intrusions. Communities delay attacks. Armed civilians provide resilience. Borders with people are stronger than borders with fences.
Yet under the current system, security logic cannot override planning inertia. Communities cannot be established as a security necessity. The Ministry of Defense cannot act as a developer. Civilian presence is treated as an environmental or demographic variable—not as a strategic asset. The result is visible today in the north and south, where communities feel abandoned, exposed, and frozen in place.
A State That Can Declare War—but Not Build a Village
Perhaps the most striking comparison raised by Bigman is this: it is institutionally easier for Israel’s prime minister to order a military strike hundreds of kilometers away than to approve the founding of a new village inside the country.
War is governed by executive authority. Settlement is governed by a labyrinth of procedures designed to ensure that no single actor—especially not an elected one—can act decisively.
This is not democratic accountability. It is administrative veto.
After October 7—Still Nothing Changes
One might expect that the trauma of October 7 and the exposure of Israel’s border vulnerabilities would trigger reform. So far, it has not. Public awareness has increased. Political rhetoric has sharpened. But the system remains intact. Appointments are rigid. Legal authority is entrenched. Instructions issued two decades ago still bind every cabinet decision today.
Communities in the periphery continue to wait.
Conclusion: Capacity Is Destiny
The inability to establish new communities inside Israel’s uncontested territory is not a marginal issue. It is a symptom of a deeper condition: a state that has lost the capacity to execute national decisions.
No amount of consensus helps if authority is diffused beyond reach. No declaration matters if it cannot be operationalized. Zionism, at its most basic, is not an ideology of speeches—it is an ideology of building.
A government that can express policy but not enact it is not governing. And a country that cannot build—even where it agrees it must—has a problem far larger than housing.
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