The nonprofit organization Ir Amim and several intellectuals and activists
petitioned the High Court of Justice on Sunday, demanding that the National
Parks Authority annul an allegedly secret agreement allowing right-wing
Jerusalem settlement movement El-ad to manage the City of David national park in
the capital’s Silwan neighborhood.
According to the petition, filed by
attorneys Michael Sfard and Neta Patrick, “there is no other example of a
national park being run by a private nonprofit organization with a clear
political orientation.
Thus, we will argue that no other instance of
managing a national park in Israel raises a heavy suspicion of conflict of
interests as does the management of the site which is the subject of this
petition.”
The secret agreement between the National Parks Authority and
El-ad was allegedly signed on March 7, 2005, after the government had agreed to
annul earlier agreements granting the settlement organization authority over the
archaeological sites in the park and the right to manage the entire
area.
The petitioners charged that the National Parks Authority had
repeatedly refused their requests to see a copy of the agreement.
To the
best of their knowledge, wrote the petitioners, the agreement grants El-ad “the
right to manage the site, to sell entrance tickets, to operate the visitors’
center, to prepare the information about the site with overall responsibility
for the contents of the material, for training the guides, for managing the
library and preparing the educational material, and for drafting the official
guide program for visitors to the site.”
The petitioners charged that
these rights gave El-ad power, among other things, to shape the opinions of
Israeli schoolchildren and soldiers who were routinely brought to the site for
educational tours.
This, the petitioners added, was coming from an
organization whose primary purpose was to “Judaize” Silwan by actively involving
itself in the “repatriation” of houses that may have belonged to Jews in the
past and by purchasing homes belonging to local Arabs.
“The delegation of
authority from the NPA to El-ad over this important historic and
religious site
has given the group a political advantage and allowed the politicization
of the
messages circulated in the park,” Ir Amim wrote in a press communiqué
announcing
the petition.
“Moreover, it has affected the lives of Palestinian
residents of the area,” it added.
“We believe that the issue of making
the story of east Jerusalem the story of the Jewish nation, and only the
Jewish
nation, will be shown in the material El-ad will present to visitors,”
said
Patrick.
Patrick added that if the state thought it best to privatize the
City of David park, it was obliged to have acted according to the
law.
“This includes holding a tender and having competition with other
organizations,” she said. “Also, in this case, the private organization
that was
chosen is a very problematic one.”