The Begin Highway in Beit Safafa: Literally Tearing a Neighborhood in Two January 15, 2013

Beit Safafa is a neighborhood in southern Jerusalem with 9,300 residents. Most of the neighborhood is located in East Jerusalem. Until 1967, Beit Safafa existed as a divided neighborhood, its southern part in Jordan and its northern part in Israel. The two sides were separated by train tracks, which also served as the border (Green Line) between Israel and Jordan determined under the 1949 Armistice Agreements. Most of the residents of the neighborhood maintain the status of permanent residents. A minority are Israeli citizens.

Without the residents of the neighborhood being given an adequate opportunity to present their objections as required under city planning procedures, massive construction is currently underway in the middle of the neighborhood to transform an internal road into a six-lane highway. The new road will slice the neighborhood in two, cut off its internal roads and completely alter the character of this quiet community while creating a grave environmental threat for its inhabitants. The residents of the neighborhood itself will not be afforded access to the highway despite having to endure its injurious effects.

Road 4 is also known as the Begin Highway, a Jerusalem ring road expediting north- south travel and linking to Tel Aviv via road 443. Major construction work to link Road 4 to the Tunnel Road (which connects Jerusalem to the Gush Etzion settlement bloc, located south of Jerusalem in the West Bank) is already well under way in Beit Safafa. Once connected, Gush Etzion will be directly linked via continuous highway to the center of Jerusalem, through Beit Safafa, up to the northern perimeter of the city and to Tel Aviv via Road 443. Road 4 would therefore have the effect of easing access to Jerusalem for settlements in Gush Etzion as well as expediting passage to Tel Aviv by linking the two most controversial roads in the West Bank, the Tunnel Road and Road 443. Once the road is completed, the three dominant settlement blocs in the Jerusalem area (Gush Etzion in the south, Givat Ze'ev in the north and Ma’ale Adumim, via Highway No. 1, in the east) will be joined to a network of highways that will cut through the city from three sides—part of a comprehensive strategy to employ housing and road construction to consolidate an expansive vision of a “Greater Jerusalem”.

Despite the gravity of the plan’s political consequences, at no time was a public debate held on a policy that will radically change the character of Jerusalem; instead, decisions were made in small, closed government forums. The Jerusalem Municipality and other governmental bodies are implementing the plan while bypassing requisite procedures for public inclusion—completely contrary to the interests of the residents of Beit Safafa, who find themselves trapped by political decisions wholly indifferent to their welfare.

Road construction works in Beit Safafa

After Beit Safafa’s bifurcation by the Green Line in 1949, the two halves of the village remained separated for 19 years. In the 1990s, the building of the Dov Yosef Road, from the Pat intersection to Gilo, further divided the village, separating the Sharafat neighborhood from the rest of Beit Safafa on its western side. The road had a profound impact on residents’ quality of life. The current plan will bisect Beit Safafa once again by paving a high-speed road through the neighborhood—implying that the neighborhood is a transportation resource for greater Jerusalem rather than a residential neighborhood.

The width of the road planned to cut through the neighborhood ranges from 33 meters to 78 meters. Part of the road will exist as a six-lane highway (as compared to trans-Israel Highway No. 6, which has fewer lanes) and other parts will have as many as 10-11 lanes. The Municipality says nothing of the road's impact on the neighborhood through which it will run or the municipal logic behind its placement. There is no existing precedent to building such a wide highway through the middle of a residential neighborhood.

The Jerusalem Municipality is unambiguously supporting the execution of a controversial political maneuver that will cause significant harm to its residents.

The Resident’s Petition against the Road

On December 12, 2012, on behalf of Alaa Salman and another 15 residents of Beit Safafa, Attorney Kais Nasser submitted an administrative petition to the Jerusalem District Court against the Jerusalem Municipality and its development company, Moriah, responsible for carrying out the road construction.

Salman has lived in his home with his parents, his siblings and their families—including their children—since 2000. The family received a permit from the Municipality to build the house shortly before that time. Today, it is anticipated that an acoustic wall will be built within a few meters of Salman’s house, purportedly to block the noise from the planned highway. Such a wall would also block the air, the view and passage to other

2 parts of the neighborhood: the children's school, the health clinic, the cemetery and the mosque.

View of the work from Salman’s home

Residents of the neighborhood learned about the plan only in November, 2012, after receiving statements of claim demanding that they surrender possession of the land designated for the road. Salman states that representatives of the Municipality separately informed him and other residents that according to the plan, the road would run through their plots, necessitating demolition of their homes. Municipality representatives explained—as if out of sensitivity to the residents—that the road would be redirected to avoid demolitions, in exchange for which they asked for residents’ support of the road. In reality, demolition of the homes was never an option, given all of the homes in question were built with permits and the original route of the road did not require demolitions. Issuance of the permits—some obtained only in the several last years— proves that the plan that has existed since 1990 was intended for an internal road to benefit the neighborhood as opposed to the highway planned today, to which the very residents of the neighborhood will be denied access.

Understanding the need for a coordinated effort by neighborhood residents, Salman enlisted the legal representation of Atty. Kais Nasser to jointly petition the court. The petition was submitted three months after roadwork began in September, 2012, after which it was revealed that discussions between the village administration (community administration) of Beit Safafa and the Jerusalem Municipality had been transpiring since July. This is not the first example of such conduct by the Municipality—creating the appearance of advanced negotiations and attentiveness to the needs of residents of Palestinian neighborhoods, who then invest their time and money into preparing documents and plans in response to the Municipality’s frequently changing demands.

3 Only afterward does it become clear that the Municipality has been promoting plans in complete contradiction to their stated goals. Such was the case with the plan for the Mount Scopus Slopes National Park, when after long discussions with the Municipality residents of Issawiya and a-Tur discovered that parallel to its ongoing negotiations, the Municipality had recommended the promotion of a plan detrimental to their needs. The same was true for the residents of Al Bustan, who developed an alternative plan to the proposed King’s Garden project. In Beit Safafa, residents discovered that in the midst of negotiations with the village administration, the Municipality had already submitted applications for building permits to construct the road in its expanded form. During negotiations, the Municipality made the concession of offering to lower the road and build a roof over a small section of it, satisfying neither the village administration nor its residents.

According to the petitioners from Beit Safafa, unlike other segments of the Begin Highway, the section of the road planned to run through Beit Safafa is the only piece for which the Municipality has not yet submitted a detailed plan nor provided residents an opportunity for objections. The Municipality has based its argument on a plan from 1990 which, according to the residents, designated a local neighborhood road and not the six- lane highway the Municipality currently intends to build. In the past, residents of Givat Mordechai and Katamon were given the ability to object to segments of the Begin Highway, despite the fact that in these cases the route ran adjacent to the neighborhoods rather than through them. Even though the planned road confiscates hundreds of dunams of the neighborhood’s land and fatally compromises its residents' quality of life, the residents of Beit Safafa were given no such opportunity to present their arguments against the road. Further, the Municipality maintains that the residents have forfeited their right to demand compensation for the lost value of their homes and land because of the time that has elapsed since the plan was submitted in 1990, regardless of the plan having undergone significant revisions in the meantime.

Writes Haaretz correspondent Nir Hasson:1

"The Begin Highway does not cut through Beit Hakerem or any other neighborhood in Jerusalem. It delimits Jewish neighborhoods but cuts the Palestinian neighborhoods to pieces."

"The residents of Beit Safafa erred all the way through the process. They entered negotiations over the size of the band aid they would be given after their village was destroyed instead of demanding to prevent the destruction of the village and to receive the same rights as the other neighborhoods along the road. I believe that the Municipality, which wishes to claim it is defending the residents, exploited that weakness and took shortcuts in order to build the road quickly."

1 Nir Hasson, "Beit Safafa being ruined," December 20, 2012, http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/new- jerusalem-highway-to-cut-arab-neighborhood-in-half.premium-1.486018, and update from December 25, 2012, http://blogs.haaretz.co.il/nirhasson/66/.

4 On December 25, 2012 a first hearing was held in the court on an interim order in response to residents’ request to stop work on the road. Many senior city officials attended the hearing, the most prominent among them City Engineer Shlomo Eshkol.

In its response to the petition, the Moriah Company argued that "more than anything, the Begin Highway is noteworthy as an element that unites the residents of Jerusalem and not one that separates them." It went on to add that the residents' objection is of the “NIMBY” (not in my backyard) variety, which is to say that based on selfish motives, the residents are refusing to give their fair share to the public effort to build the road.

The Municipality's legal advisor, Atty. Amnon Merhav, who admitted to being alerted to the hearing by the mayor, claimed at the court hearing that "this is not a drama. The drama is for the court and the press. The truth is different." He added that "in addition to the roof…the residents are getting the advanced planning of a primary school", implying that while the Municipality has been so good as to build a school for the residents of Beit Safafa, the latter have the audacity to complain about the road.

The Municipality proceeded to argue that each day construction is delayed results in the loss of NIS 600,000. It therefore demanded that the petitioners deposit huge guarantees in order to have an interim order imposed. Since the residents are clearly unable to deposit such daunting sums in guarantees, the judge ruled that the next hearing would be expedited, while noting the petitioners' request not to continue the work at full force. In the absence of an order, Moriah has accelerated work at the site.

The next hearing will be held January 23, 2013 9:30 AM Jerusalem District Court Judge Ben-Or presiding

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