Master planner

Mayor Nir Barkat is playing for high stakes in his extremely ambitious game plan for Jerusalem.

By LESLIE SUSSER
garden (photo credit: coutesy of jerusalem municipality)
garden
(photo credit: coutesy of jerusalem municipality)
IN MID-NOVEMBER, ALMOST two years to the day of his election as mayor of Jerusalem, Nir Barkat presented an updated version of his master plan for the city’s Arab neighborhoods.
Addressing the Knesset’s State Audit Committee, Barkat explained how he proposed to deal with the jumble of illegal building, unregistered structures, unexecuted demolition orders and inadequate urban planning.
According to the mayor, after “40 years of neglect” since Israel’s capture of the eastern part of the city from Jordan in the 1967 Six Day War, he had inherited about 20,000 illegal buildings, 27,000 unregistered structures, tens of thousands of residents with no official address, thousands of pending lawsuits, a fastrising slew of demolition orders and a leaden bureaucracy curtailing the number of building permits to around just 130 a year – all of which was fueling a vicious cycle of more illegal building, more unregistered structures and more demolition orders.
To cut the Gordian knot, Barkat returned to the radical solution he had first mooted a year before: new planning and rezoning of Arab neighborhoods that would legalize, register and upgrade housing, install quality infrastructure, streamline permit bureaucracy and develop money-spinning and job-providing tourist attractions. In the meantime, he called for a deferment of all demolition orders, since the rezoning scheme would render around 95 percent of them moot.
“I could have allowed things to go on the same way, which would have been irresponsible.
The alternative, to bring 20,000 law suits to court, would not have been smart. So I decided to rezone neighborhoods, to be as liberal as I possibly could in weighing realities on the ground against public needs,” Barkat tells The Report in a special interview (see page 10) a few days after the Knesset meeting.
The heart of Barkat’s master plan (Town Plan 11555) is the pilot planned for the neighborhood of Silwan, a sprawling cluster of tiny villages just south of the Old City. Silwan is home to 31,000 Arabs and about 400 Jews concentrated in the Wadi Hilweh area around the excavated “City of David,” which archaeologists say was once biblical Jerusalem, although they have yet to find any trace there of King David himself.
In Wadi Hilweh, where only six of around 658 buildings are legal, the rezoning scheme would permit buildings of four stories, as opposed to the current legal limit of two, legalizing 90-95 percent of current structures at a stroke.
Far more ambitious, though, is Barkat’s plan for the al-Bustan area of Silwan, a small impoverished village between the “City of David” and Jerusalem’s Old City. There he wants to build the “King’s Garden,” a biblical theme park along the Kidron stream, where, according to the glossy city brochure on the development, “it is commonly believed that… King Solomon planted his garden, and where, sitting in the shade of its trees, he wrote the book of Ecclesiastes.” Most leading archaeologists maintain that there is no hard evidence to support this claim. Nevertheless, for Barkat, the King’s Garden has become the priority project through which he hopes to leave his mark on the city. “I said let’s take the waters of the Kidron from the Shiloah [Silwan] pool, restore them the way they were 2,000 years ago, right in the center of the valley, maintain this as an open wooded area for the benefit of tourists and anyone else who wants to walk through the valley,” he tells The Report. According to Barkat, the plan, which allows for the building of hotels, gift shops and restaurants, “will create one of the most dynamic tourist spots in the city, very close to the City of David on one side and to the Temple Mount on the other. The Arabs who live here could benefit big time from the economic boost it will bring.” Barkat talks of a “win-win situation” in the King’s Garden in which he clears al-Bustan slum dwellings and creates a major tourist attraction with a luxury residential annex, providing jobs and quality housing for the slum dwellers.
Trouble is the Palestinians aren’t buying.
They oppose the planned demolition of around 22 of the 88 homes in al-Bustan and the construction on most of their land of a park with Jewish national significance.
“IT’S A TOTALLY PALESTINIAN neighborhood and they want to allocate 60 percent of it for a Jewish national garden. They want to plant Jewish history in a neighborhood where it doesn’t belong,” says Ziad Qawar, a lawyer who represents the al-Bustan residents. Qawar points out that the planned garden and new buildings will abut the City of David settlement and says residents are afraid the development will allow for its extension into the heart of their village.
To preempt the King’s Garden project, the residents submitted an alternative plan earlier this year. Drawn up by architect Yusuf Jabarin of the Haifa Technion, it provides for the same boutique hotels, restaurants and gift shops, but without the biblical garden. It also leaves all the current village houses intact and adds a line of new buildings clearly demarcating a border between the village and the adjacent City of David settlement. When the municipal planning committee, which passed the King’s Garden plan, refused to discuss the Palestinian alternative, Qawar invoked amendment 43 of the building code and submitted it directly to the next phase of the authorization process, the regional planning committee, which has yet to rule on either plan.
Although he is adamantly against the King’s Garden project, Qawar is not entirely negative about Barkat’s wider master plan for Arab East Jerusalem. He, too, speaks of decades of neglect and is pleased that Barkat now says he wants to do something about it. “I welcome his initiative to ease the hardship of the residents of East Jerusalem. And I accept some of the plans he is promoting, like those for the villages of Wadi Yasul and Ein a- Luzeh,” he tells The Report.
In other words, Palestinians like Qawar are open to genuine housing and development plans, but reject anything that smacks of an attempt to impose a Jewish national narrative on the city.
Barkat, for whom the Silwan project is a model for all the rest, is encouraged by this muted Palestinian support and he says that by the end of his term he aims to have started the planning process for all neighborhoods in Arab East Jerusalem. Besides Silwan, he has already started planning for Issawiyeh in the north, Ein a-Luzeh and Wadi Yasul in the center and Sawahra in the south. He claims that every time he goes into an Arab village, the residents come up to him and ask for the same deal he plans for Silwan.
BARKAT’S THINKING ON EAST Jerusalem stems from the basic premise that for both ideological and practical reasons the city should never be divided. “There is not one example of a divided city that has worked,” he says. “I come from the high-tech world. There, when you have a product you know will never work, you say ‘dead on arrival.’” In Barkat’s view, given this vision of an open, united city under sole Israeli sovereignty, it makes no sense to freeze building anywhere within its confines. “Freeze whom? Freeze Arab building, freeze Jewish building? People own land. They ask for building permits. Who am I to tell them they are not allowed to build if they build according to the zoning code and the law?” he declares.
But there is another side to Barkat’s open city vision. At least on the declarative level, it means no discrimination between the Jewish and Arab neighborhoods, equal budgets and services, equal housing developments, equal taxes, equality before the law, full legalization and registration of all property.
In other words, all the elements Barkat says inform his new planning policy for East Jerusalem.
In October, Barkat wrote to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Interior Minister Eli Yishai spelling out these ideas, which, if implemented, would constitute nothing less than an urban revolution.
So far, however, Barkat has been extremely vague on financing for his ambitious scheme.
For example, where will evicted Palestinian slum dwellers get the money to buy luxury apartments in al-Bustan/King’s Garden? More importantly, where will Barkat get the money for a total makeover of the city’s Arab neighborhoods? He has called for a one billion dollar international fund, but so far there is no sign of any part of this having materialized.
The funding lacuna has fueled suspicion on the Israeli left that Barkat’s plans for Arab Jerusalem are not serious and are intended only as a smokescreen to advance an ultra-nationalist right-wing political agenda: helping Jewish settlers strengthen their grip on the sensitive holy basin around the Old City and making the political division of Jerusalem into two capitals in the context of a two-state solution – Jewish Jerusalem for Israel and Arab Jerusalem for Palestine – virtually impossible.
ONE OF BARKAT’S MOST vociferous critics is Ir Amim, an NGO dedicated to equality and stability in Jerusalem based on an agreed political solution.
It argues that the biblical theme park planned for Silwan is not an isolated case and that there are plans for a cluster of archaeological parks in the holy basin, “to gain control of the Palestinian territories that surround the Old City, to cut the Old City off from the urban fabric of East Jerusalem, and to connect it to Jewish settlement blocs in northeast Jerusalem and the E-1 area [between Jerusalem and the West Bank town of Ma’ale Adumim].” For Ir Amim founder Danny Seidemann, Barkat’s master plan for East Jerusalem is nothing but “disingenuous nonsense” and he claims that the mayor is concerned solely with the promotion and protection of radical settler interests. For example, he asserts that Barkat’s call for a general suspension of demolition orders in areas slated for rezoning is really intended to save Beit Yonatan, an illegal seven-story settler building in Silwan, which the Supreme Court and the Attorney General have repeatedly ordered evacuated and sealed.
“Mayor Barkat’s interest in East Jerusalem is exhausted by his attempt to serve the agenda of the extreme settlement organizations in East Jerusalem. He is focused exclusively on areas, which will allow him to do their bidding. Why are the only really serious planning preparations in East Jerusalem taking place in al-Bustan and Wadi Hilweh? Because Barkat has this vision of a settler Disneyland in the area. There is no serious effort, not in Silwan nor anywhere else, to address the housing needs of almost 300,000 Palestinians. It is all high-tech double-speak spin,” Seidemann tells The Report.
Seidemann sees three serious dangers in the mayor’s conduct: “I think that the prime minister is scared of the mayor here. He feels very vulnerable on the subject of Jerusalem and every time he is tempted to act responsibly, he lives in fear of being depicted by Mayor Barkat as soft on Jerusalem. Second, Barkat appears to have little inkling of the international and regional sensitivities of his job. So he can have a very unpleasant altercation with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and walk out of it as if he came out of the shower. Third, if events in Jerusalem careen out of control, it will undermine the very possibility of the two-state solution, and ultimately it could transform the conflict from a national-political one that can be solved or managed into an intractable combination of religious fanaticism, holy war and approaching Armageddon,” he warns.
BARKAT HAS ALSO COME under severe criticism from the international community. In late June, he had a sharp exchange over his plans for Silwan with UN Secretary General Ban Kimoon.
“The Secretary General is deeply concerned about the decision by the Jerusalem Municipality to advance planning for house demolitions and further settlement activity in the area of Silwan. The planned moves are contrary to international law and to the wishes of Palestinian residents,” Ban wrote.
“My plan gives the municipality the ability to legalize hundreds of Arab homes built without permits, some of them on public lands with complete disregard for safety codes, endangering the lives of the residents and making municipal services difficult to provide, while at the same time allowing for a thousand new apartments to be built legally in the neighborhood for the Arab residents,” Barkat retorts.
Worse for Barkat was his falling out with leading American officials, like Secretary Clinton and US special Mideast peace envoy George Mitchell. This came after announcements on new building in Jerusalem the Americans saw as designed to derail the Israeli-Palestinian peace process they were trying so hard to revive. For example, in March as the Americans were preparing to announce the launching of Israeli-Palestinian “proximity talks,” plans for 1,600 housing units in Ramat Shlomo, a Jewish neighborhood on the Arab side of the 1967 Green Line, were announced, leading the Palestinians to retract their agreement to renew the peace dialogue. The Americans blamed Barkat and when he went to Washington in April, both Clinton and Mitchell refused to meet him.
Suspicion that Barkat was working against the peace process and serving a settler agenda sparked serious altercations inside City Hall. In June, the dovish Meretz party pulled out of the municipal coalition after voting against the King’s Garden plan. And in September the city’s legal adviser Yossi Havilio resigned after repeated clashes with Barkat, including several public rows over the mayor’s persistent refusal to evacuate and seal Beit Yonatan.
Meretz municipal head Yosef (Pepe) Alalo, who worked closely with Barkat as his deputy for around 18 months until his resignation last June, characterizes the mayor as a “messianic right-winger” and claims the thinking behind the King’s Garden plan is to create a strip of contiguous Jewish territory from the Old City through the King’s Garden to the City of David to bolster Israeli claims of sovereignty.
As for the rest of Barkat’s master plan for East Jerusalem, Alalo dismisses it as idle talk and charges that in actual fact the mayor is doing absolutely nothing for the Arab part of the city. So much so that in October, Meretz, together with the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), petitioned the High Court of Justice over an “intolerable discrepancy” between city budgets for Jewish West Jerusalem and the Arab eastern side. “The difference between the budgets for the western and eastern parts of the city is catastrophic.
Eventually it will cause an explosion. Seventyfive percent of the Arab residents of Jerusalem live under the poverty line. Some 10,000 children are not in school because there are no classrooms for them. There are 25 mother and infant centers on the western side of the city and only four on the eastern side. There are very few playgrounds or access roads. There is not a single traffic roundabout,” Alalo tells The Report.
The High Court decreed that there was a case to answer, but asked to see the 2011 city budget before ruling. That is still in the process of being prepared. But, says Alalo, “now that Barkat knows he is facing a court case, he has started allocating funds for East Jerusalem.
That’s the way he works.” Barkat rejects the charges against him as “politically motivated spin.” He paints a picture of a city moving confidently towards a string of positive goals under his stewardship: 10 million tourists by 2020, the city’s long-hapless light rail finally up and running by mid-2011, a steady increase in the percentage of high-school graduates, more cultural events, new businesses opening and young secular people no longer leaving the city in droves.
Many secular people on the center left, however, are bitterly disappointed in Barkat’s performance so far. Alalo claims that in the last election 90 percent of Meretz supporters voted for Barkat as mayor, but will not do so again.
Indeed, Alalo is already actively searching for an alternative candidate. He says he is deep in talks with a very well-known personality he refuses to name who, he claims, will almost certainly be able to defeat Barkat next time around.
On paper, Barkat’s plans for Jerusalem are extremely ambitious. If he gets new housing into East Jerusalem he may pull off a wholly unanticipated success. But he is working in a highly sensitive environment, where false moves in trying to extend Jewish national hegemony over the city could have catastrophic consequences.
The stakes could not be higher.