Israeli Settlement Harish A Dismal Failure
Twenty years after it was first planned and built, Harish radiates despair and neglect, with no one to manage it or bring it alive.
I popped into Harish for a visit on July 3 and left with a strange feeling about the place. This new city, which was planned 20 years ago as an Israeli success story, quickly became a resounding urban failure. It looks absolutely dismal, and my visit left me with the impression that this is what the “Tower and Stockade” settlements must have looked like before the establishment of the state of Israel.
In those days, whenever the leadership of the Yishuv — the Jewish community in Mandatory Palestine — wanted to establish “facts on the ground,” they would send people out in the middle of the night to grab a piece of land. Within hours they would put up a few walls, so that when Arab residents living nearby woke up the next morning, they would discover that another Jewish “settlement” had been established while they were asleep.
