Congestion and overcrowding due to a lack of approved local plans Although planning laws and policies are often understood as neutral and objective mechanisms designed to improve the quality of life of the people, Israeli planning laws, as with many settler-colonial regimes, are guided by a set of objectives, policies and cultural norms that actually disguise structural and overt discrimination against Palestinians.321 The highly centralized planning system developed by Israel and governed by the Planning and Building Law 1965322 allows the state to manage the mass increase of Israeli-Jews and simultaneously restrict expansion and city planning in Palestinian communities. The progressive relaxation of the planning system to encourage local decision-making in Israeli-Jewish areas has not been applied to Palestinian communities and has enabled their ongoing tight regulatory control. This has resulted in a discriminatory and severely detrimental planning environment for Umm al-Fahm. • No approved local structural plan: Attempts to develop a Local Master Plan have persistently failed from the 1970s onwards, until they were shelved in the 1990s. Since 2011, attempts to develop a Local Comprehensive Plan for Umm al-Fahm have met the same fate.323 This is because approval for these plans by the Haifa District Planning Committee is required, on which no Palestinian sits, allowing for the opportune prioritization of Israeli-Jewish interests over Palestinian needs. Eventually, this leads to a deadlock where Palestinian planners are not able to fully yield to the Committee’s conditions for approval because their requirements are wholly inadequate in meeting the needs of the Palestinian people.324 In January 2020, the Fathmal Committees in Jerusalem emanating from the Council for Organization and Building approved the deposit of a detailed map for some areas in the city of Umm al-Fahm, mainly Ayn Jarrar, Abu Lahim and Al-Arayesh.325 The map named Tamal 1077 approved construction of new houses on 2200 dunums, including the licensing of 3,000 housing units based on private 321 See “Introduction: Culture, Colonialism and Planning,” in Libby Porter, Unlearning the Colonial Cultures of Planning (Burlington & Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 1-19, available at: http://periferiesurbanes.org/ wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Libby_Porter_Unlearning_the_Colonial_Cultures_ofBookFi.org_1.pdf 322 Planning and Building Law, supra 49. 323 OECD, supra 282, 131-132. 324 Engineer, supra 321. 325 See Umm al-Fahm, Municipality Website, available at: http://www.umelfahem.org/index. asp [accessed 28 February]; See also “Umm Al-Fahm: Approval of building 4122 housing units” [Arabic], Arab 48, 15 January 2020, available at: https://d2c6av74oz68c3.cloudfront.net/-‫أخبــار‬/‫محليات‬ ‫علــى‬-‫المصادقة‬-‫الفحم‬-‫أم‬/2020/01/15/‫محلية‬- [accessed 28 February 2020]. 82