Urban planning: Divisive road

Beit Safafa and Sharafat residents are protesting an extension to the Begin Highway that runs through their neighborhood.

By GIL STERN STERN ZOHAR
Begin posters Jerusalem 521 (photo credit: Gil Zohar)
Begin posters Jerusalem 521
(photo credit: Gil Zohar)
Newly hung posters across the city declare “Begin is dividing Jerusalem,” with a photo of Israel’s sixth prime minister bifurcated by the slogan and an icon linking to a Facebook protest page.
Behind the clever pun is the complex reality of the construction of a 2.5-km.-long section of expressway, which will fracture the south Jerusalem neighborhoods of Beit Safafa and Sharafat even as it links Route 4 with the tunnels road leading south to Hebron.
While severely impacting the residents’ quality of life, critics charge the southward extension of the Begin Highway is symbolic of how the Transportation Ministry uses opaque planning policies to systemically favor Jewish Israelis and discriminate against Palestinian residents.
On June 26, Supreme Court President Asher D. Grunis ordered the Transportation Ministry to reach a solution within 30 days accommodating the neighborhood residents. But Grunis did not issue a cease-work order. A visit to the site by In Jerusalem this week showed that bulldozers and construction crews are continuing to work at a rapid pace, preparing the roadbed and erecting acoustic walls.
Spokesmen for the Jerusalem Municipality and the Transportation Ministry both note that the freeway, officially known as Highway 50, was initially approved in 1985. When completed, the project will provide a traffic-light-free, high-speed link between Route 60 – the main thoroughfare for the Etzion bloc settlements south of Jerusalem – to Route 443, a highway that joins Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, cutting across the West Bank.
Lawyer Muhammad Gubara, who represented the villagers at last week’s hearing, told the court, “We say today, with all due respect and humility, that deception was used [by the government in the highway’s construction].”
Helen Wexler, a third-year architecture student at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, similarly objects that statutory procedures have not been followed to allow for residents to object to the proposed road and to seek compensatory damages.
“The detailed plans have never been published. It is not public knowledge. The public has never had an opportunity to see what’s planned.”
She asks: How can the residents object if the plans are secret? Prof. Ruth Cohen, who teaches architecture at Bezalel, concurs.
“It’s so blatantly appalling. There’s no law – it’s total anarchy.”
In an act of guerrilla protest, Wexler and fellow architecture students in Bezalel’s Activism and Art in the Community course created a composite photo of the construction site, utilizing a camera suspended from a kite flying 100 meters in the air. That photo, together with a map of future roads in the area created by Bimkom-Planners for Planning Rights, an NGO formed in 1999 by local planners and architects, reveals the scale of the NIS 1.1 billion project. At its biggest span, Begin South will be 12 lanes wide.
Residents of the two Arab neighborhoods will not have direct access to the road running though their olive groves and past their houses; residents will have to drive south to Gilo or north to Pat to access the new highway. The future intersection of Dov Yosef Road and Begin South will not have a full complement of on- and off-ramps, while the three other interchanges currently under construction at Rosmarin (Haminharot), Malha and Yitzhak Shamir (Golomb) will all require residents of the two neighborhoods to take long detours to reach their homes. While two bridges will link the newly separated neighborhood districts, children will find it hard to get to school, and the mosque will be cut off from the cemetery, charges Beit Safafa resident Alaa Salman.
Salman, who is heading the public campaign to reconsider the expressway, lives four meters from the construction site. He notes there is not a single illegal building in the two former villages. His four-unit family home was approved by the municipality in 2000, he says, asking: How could city hall have issued a building permit for his home knowing a major highway was planned next door? Similar planning blunders caused by the highway are rampant, he suggests. Across the twin neighborhoods are multistory dwellings whose driveways will be blocked off. In one case, the steps to the front door will be demolished.
Salman’s three-story family home faces a protest tent built beside the gash in the earth that delineates the highway’s route.
The hoardings are covered with graffiti, including one that reads “Highway 4 is racism.”
Salman hopes that the peaceful protests, meetings with municipal officials and the petition to the Supreme Court will lead to the highway being decked over, with the new surface returned to the residents. He is disappointed that not one of the 21 municipality officials, its Moriah construction arm or the Transportation Ministry accepted an invitation to attend a June 24 symposium about the road project held at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute.
“The city brought in bulldozers without detailed planning.
That’s illegal,” Salman insists. Comparing the municipality and Moriah to thieves in the night, he suggests that “the idea is to seize the maximum amount of village land.”
Prior to the War of Independence, which left Beit Safafa divided between Jordan and Israel, the village owned 540 hectares (about 1,334 acres), Salman says. Today its holdings have shrunk to 150 hectares. Much of the balance was seized in 1967 by Israel’s Custodian of Absentee Property, when residents of the Hashemite side of the village fled during the Six Day War.
Taxi driver Khalid al-Ayan explains that his neighbors sold their agricultural lands, in what was formerly a tight-knit community divided between the Salman, al-Ayan and Hussein clans, for development, turning the erstwhile village into today’s urban neighborhood. “Today there are many non-locals who have moved here, changing the dynamic,” he says of the newcomers who have come from the Galilee, the Little Triangle and east Jerusalem.
“They don’t care. It hurts me that the village has broken up.”
“By working with the community, we can generate better solutions,” hopes Wexler. “It’s much easier to carry out community collaboration through social media than it used to be having a town hall meeting.”
The Jerusalem Municipality said in a statement that extending the Begin Highway south “is of great importance to all the city’s residents. It will shorten the time needed to traverse the length of the city, without traffic lights, provide a solution to traffic jams and significantly ease traffic in the area.”
Yair Singer, the expressway’s chief project engineer, says the new southern extension will ease traffic congestion from Gilo and Har Gilo, two post-’67 suburbs in south Jerusalem which today house more than 60,000 people.