Projects at Atarot, Pisgat Ze’ev, Katamon and Rehes Lavan linked to Trump’s recognition of capital
By RAOUL WOOTLIFF and SUE SURKES, TOI
The Atarot industrial zone, with the Ramallah suburb Kafr Aqab seen in the background. (Miriam Alster/Flash90)
Bolstered by US President Donald Trump’s declaration recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, the government is reportedly planning to build around 14,000 units in the city, some 6,000 of them in East Jerusalem.
As part of the plan, being advanced by Housing and Construction Minister Yoav Galant (Kulanu), 5,000 units are planned for Atarot, north of Jerusalem and just outside Ramallah, and a further 1,000 units for the East Jerusalem Jewish neighborhood of Pisgat Zeev, Hadashot news reported Thursday.
In West Jerusalem, 3,000 apartments are to be built in the neighborhood of Katamon and 5,000 on Rehes Lavan, a slope bordering on the Green Line to the south of the city, between Moshav Ora and the Givat Masuah neighborhood, close to the Biblical Zoo. Rehes Lavan will be an entirely new neighborhood.
“Following President Trump’s historic declaration, I intend to advance and strengthen building in Jerusalem,” Galant was quoted as saying.
Housing Minister Yoav Galant speaks at a signing ceremony for an agreement to build thousands of new apartments in the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of Ramat Beit Shemesh, outside Jerusalem, April 3, 2017. (Hadas Parush/FLASH90)
In June last year, the Jerusalem municipality denied it was planning to build a new neighborhood in Atarot.
Atarot is the site of a large industrial zone, where the city opened a recycling plant in 2015.
It also had an airport that stopped operating in 2001, after the outbreak of the Second Intifada. The airport was built by the British on land expropriated by a Jewish village and was completed in 1936. The Jewish village of Atarot was destroyed in the 1948 War of Independence.
My typo. The British expropriated the land in the 30s. The PNC purchased the land in 1912. See Wikipedia article. It’s good.
unfortunate typo at the end. The British expropriated land for an airport from the Palestine Land Development Corporation in 1912 who had purchased the land from a neighboring Arab Village to construct Aterot and then went on to lease land to Arabs, in addition to building Jewish settlements. Expropriated by Jordan during the War of Independence in 1948 who made it part of their airport until it was reunited with Jerusalem during the six day war. There as a novel written about it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atarot
All of the land acquired before 1948 was purchased. The only land that was expropriated, was the land of the Arabs who left in 1948 on the instructions of the Arab Higher Committee to make way for the Arabs to kill all the Jews. The IDF is compiling a list of property transactions in Turkey to be published when complete. That’s a key component of the big lie of land theft.
a plague upon those using ‘East Jerusalem, West Jerusalem, Green Line.’