Oren Yiftachel

Oren Yiftachel was born in 1956

Yiftachel was born in Haifa in 1956 and grew up on Kibbutz Matzuva in the Galilee. He finished high school at the Sulam Tzur regional school.

After serving in the Golani Brigade, he studied in Australia. He earned a BA in 1983, a graduate degree in planning from Curtin University in 1986, and a PhD in 1990 from the University of Western Australia together with the Technion.

He worked as a planner in Perth and later in Israel, including on the Israel 2020 national project. He became the planner of the Regional Council of Unrecognized Bedouin Villages and in 2013 produced an alternative plan for recognizing their localities.

Since 1993 he has taught in the Department of Geography at Ben-Gurion University, which he headed from 1999 to 2003. He founded the journal Hagar and edited it from 1999 to 2004. His research argues that Israel is an 'ethnocratic' regime and describes a process he calls 'creeping apartheid'.

He was a board member and later co-chair of B'Tselem from 2006 to 2017. In 2012 he co-founded the movement A Land for All. He received the Emil Grunzweig Human Rights Award in 2010.