Palestinians Feel Cheated in Housing Plan

Anwar Jayusi waved an arm toward the garbage cascading down a slope near his home and said he could not help but be skeptical of Israeli promises to improve neighborhoods like his in East Jerusalem.

In nearly 30 years of Israeli occupation, said Jayusi, a Palestinian house painter who lives with his family near the trash-strewn hill, “we have not received anything from Israel. We should believe them now?”

Jayusi lives in Abu Tor, a neighborhood of rundown Arab apartments near luxurious Jewish enclaves that is one of 10 mostly Arab sections of Jerusalem designated to receive government funds to repair rutted roads and aging sewer lines. The work will pave the way for construction of thousands of new homes, the government says.

The government made the announcement Feb. 26, pairing the pledge for Arab areas with its approval of a new Jewish neighborhood in East Jerusalem, the historically Arab side of the disputed city.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu even visited Abu Tor last week, declaring his commitment to upgrade the area as he stood beside a pile of unloaded building materials. “It’s not a ploy,” the Israeli leader said of the promise.

But Palestinians, and some Israelis, say it is--or that, at best, it represents an extremely rosy view of the realities of Arab housing in East Jerusalem.

The reasons, they say, include history, politics and bureaucracy, all of which indicate that Abu Tor and other mostly Arab areas of Jerusalem will remain much as they are today, even as groundbreaking for the new Jewish neighborhood takes place within weeks.

“Let’s assume that there really is the political will and intention to go forward with these plans,” said Sarah Kaminker, a former Jerusalem City Council member and veteran city planner. “But there are so many ways we prevent Arabs from building in Jerusalem [that] it just won’t happen.”

The Netanyahu government has repeatedly linked the Jewish and Arab projects, portraying them as a model of a “peaceful coexistence” within the city, both aimed at alleviating housing shortages for their target populations.

At the news conference to announce the decisions, Netanyahu said the government plans to construct 2,500 Jewish homes--the first phase of a 6,500-unit project--and “to build a total of 3,015 apartments” in 10 Arab neighborhoods, including 70 in Abu Tor.

Government officials went to some lengths to portray the decisions as parallel, or to argue, as Netanyahu did in an interview with David Frost, that Israel was building “a greater number of Palestinian houses” than Jewish units.

But the government later acknowledged that it was not actually planning to build the Arab homes but to spend about $40 million to prepare the areas for private construction--paving roads, building sidewalks and installing sewage and water lines.

A spokeswoman for the Jerusalem municipality said last week that she did not know whether the permit process will be expedited for Arabs wishing to build once the infrastructure is complete.

For the Jewish project, on a hill known as Har Homa to Israelis and Jabal Abu Ghneim to Arabs, the government has taken ownership of the land, divided it into parcels and drawn up a plan for the neighborhood. Each step of the zoning and permit process is likely to be expedited, with financial incentives to contractors and future residents, former city officials said.

Equating the plans for Har Homa and for the Arab districts is “like throwing dust in the eyes,” said Amir Cheshin, who worked as an advisor on Arab affairs to former Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kollek. “The leaders are misleading the public. There is nothing the same in these two proposals.”

To understand the realities of East Jerusalem, Cheshin said, it is necessary to understand the various ways Israel has sought to consolidate its hold on the eastern half of the city since capturing it from Jordan in the 1967 Six-Day War.

Through the years, Israel has expropriated more than one-third of East Jerusalem, mostly from private Arab owners, according to Palestinian and Israeli human rights groups. The land, about 5,800 acres, was expropriated for “public purposes,” according to government records researched by the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem.

Since then, Israeli governments representing both the Labor and Likud parties have built more than 38,500 housing units for Jews on the expropriated land. None have been built for Arabs--despite an Arab housing shortage estimated in a 1992 study for the Jerusalem municipality at 21,000 units.

Through a series of regulations, Israel also has severely restricted the ability of Arabs to build within the city and has demolished hundreds of homes built without permits.

Cheshin and others said the building restrictions are part of a municipal strategy intended to keep the Palestinian population from growing at a rate faster than that of the Jews.

Israeli leaders, including Netanyahu and Jerusalem Mayor Ehud Olmert, make no secret of their intention to hold on to all of Jerusalem as the eternal, undivided capital of the Jewish state--a position most Israelis say they share. And even Palestinian officials acknowledge that Israel has now succeeded in achieving a small Jewish majority in East Jerusalem.

Within Arab neighborhoods, Israel restricts growth through zoning plans that shrink the available land by designating large “green areas” where owners cannot build. Other areas are marked on “town planning schemes” as available for building, but only if all who own the land within the boundaries agree to set aside a certain parcel for a school or other public purpose.

About 170 building permits are granted for Palestinian housing each year, Kaminker said, compared with about 3,000 for Jews.

In Issawiya, an Arab neighborhood of about 8,000 near the Hebrew University campus on Mt. Scopus, residents say an average of three building permits has been granted each year since 1990, when Issawiya’s planning scheme was finally approved. Under the government’s latest proposal, an additional 500 homes are to be allowed, but no one seems especially hopeful.

Instead, local leaders like Darwish Darwish reminisce about the days before the Israeli occupation, when Issawiya’s land area was recognized by the Jordanians as about 2,500 acres. By 1990, Israel had expropriated all but 500 acres. Now, “we have only 660 dunams”--about 165 acres--where building is permitted, lamented Darwish, a member of the local building committee.

Across a narrow valley, on land once owned in part by Issawiya residents, stands the Israeli community of French Hill, its eight-story hillside apartment buildings and landscaped streets a stark contrast to the low-rise homes and mostly unpaved roads of Issawiya.

“We pay our taxes too, but what do we get?” Mohammed Mahmoud, another building committee member, asked as he gazed across at French Hill. “We don’t get the same services.”

Kaminker and Cheshin said the current Israeli promises to improve conditions for Jerusalem’s Arab residents remind them of two neighborhoods in northern Jerusalem.

In the early 1980s, Israel expropriated about 1,000 acres from the Arab neighborhood of Beit Hanina to build the Jewish community of Pisgat Ze’ev. In exchange, Israeli government officials promised to allow the construction of 18,000 homes in Beit Hanina, roughly the same number that it planned for Pisgat Ze’ev.

But over the years, Kaminker said, as Pisgat Ze’ev went from blueprints to reality, the regional planning commission gradually reduced the number of additional apartments allowed for Beit Hanina--from 18,000 to 11,000, and then to 7,500.

More than 15 years later, no apartments for Arabs have been built.