East Jerusalem's planning trap

This week a new mayor and city council took office in Jerusalem. Also this week, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel published its annual report. The report shows that the capital's new municipal government has its work cut out for it, if it has any intention of correcting the city's discriminatory policies in East Jerusalem.

According to the ACRI report, 67 percent of Palestinian families living in East Jerusalem are impoverished. It also notes that there has been an official and declared Israeli policy to preserve a Jewish majority in Jerusalem, and that the bureaucracy has been enlisted to advance this goal. In what is supposedly a unified city, west and east are worlds apart, in terms of both human rights and development opportunities. One of the best examples is embodied in municipal planning procedures.

One third of Jerusalem's population lives in the Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem. These residents suffer from residential congestion, a lack of suitable infrastructure and mountains of obstacles on the path to obtaining building permits. Neither existing plans, nor the new ones currently being touted by City Hall, meet the minimal housing needs of the city's Palestinian residents. Their population may grow, but strict limitations on construction in Arab neighborhoods and the difficulties they face in obtaining permits ?(for which procedures are straightforward and relatively easy in West Jerusalem?) are a direct cause of illegal construction. There is no alternative. And because the city responds far more efficiently to illegal construction on the Arab side than it does to requests to build, they face penalties that include not only heavy fines but also demolition of illegal structures, a practice very rarely employed in Jewish neighborhoods.

Indeed, 20,000 unauthorized housing units have been built in East Jerusalem since 1967, most of them during the 1980s and 1990s. And the city has often responded by bringing in the bulldozers, a measure that qualifies as a severe violation of the rights of the Palestinian residents, considering their lack of alternatives.

There are additional restrictions that fall only on Palestinian residents. For example, in the rare cases when they do receive building permits, this is contingent on their submitting evidence of land ownership and registration. Indeed, proof of land ownership is required everywhere in Israel, but whereas Jewish land titles are documented and organized, making it relatively easy to establish one's title to a parcel of land, a considerable segment of East Jerusalem's land is not regularized or recorded in the land registry. It should be stressed that in 1967, when Israel took control of East Jerusalem, the state decided that it would not continue with the initiative, in place during British and then Jordanian rule, of registering lands in East Jerusalem, leaving many landowners without proper proof of their ownership. This is one of the main causes of the grave difficulties experienced by the city's Palestinian residents in providing proof of land ownership.

Another seemingly arbitrary restriction relevant only to East Jerusalem: If one wishes to apply for permission to change the designation of a parcel of land, say from non-residential to residential, it must cover a minimum area of 10 dunams ?(2.5 acres?). This means that land owners in those neighborhoods whose plots are less than 10 dunams in size - and this applies to nearly everyone - are unable to advance specific plans that would allow them to build on their land.

City Hall proudly announced several months ago its intention to promote construction plans for 10,000 new housing units in East Jerusalem. One might see this as a positive change of policy or a new ray of hope for East Jerusalem's residents. However, most of these plans are still preliminary and lack detail, so they cannot be used as a basis for issuing building permits. Many years will pass before these plans reach the stage of final approval, and one can expect that this period will be followed by several years of attempts to acquire building permits. Unless a new municipal mechanism is created soon that will allow rapid authorization for building permits and would cancel the need to demolish illegal construction, it is clear that it will be a good long time before any of those 10,000 housing units for the residents of East Jerusalem can be built.

Israeli legal precedent recognizes that no resident can be punished for breaking the law if there was in fact no way for him or her to have behaved legally. When it comes to residents of East Jerusalem, unauthorized construction is virtually the only way to meet the necessity and distress of circumstances. For this reason, it makes sense to freeze existing law-enforcement procedures until the needs of the population are met with proper planning solutions.

Alongside the advancement of long-term planning procedures, the municipality has the power to find an immediate solution to the current situation, by easing the process of attaining building permits, and by establishing a mechanism for rapid, retroactive authorization of houses that have been built without a standard permit. With a new government in place, Jerusalem's local authority has the opportunity to lead, and indeed contribute, to a change that has been necessary in the neighborhoods of East Jerusalem for many years.

Efrat Cohen-Bar is an architect in the community planning department of Bimkom: Planners for Planning Rights. She will be a keynote speaker at a seminar on planning issues in East Jerusalem on December 18, in the old Bezalel building, 1 Bezalel St., Jerusalem, at 6:30 P.M.