NGOs slam J’lem city plan for harming Palestinians

Two human rights groups on Sunday petitioned the Jerusalem District Court to prevent Jerusalem City Hall from using a non-approved plan as a formula for rejecting new building and development plans, specifically in East Jerusalem.

The petition was submitted by The Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) and Bimkom.

It stated that the Jerusalem District Planning Committee improperly uses what’s known as the Jerusalem 2000 Outline Plan — a plan the groups charge was never submitted for public review or officially approved.

The petition charged that using the Jerusalem 2000 Outline Plan as a de facto policy document bypassed the statutory procedures that were enacted to ensure transparency and public review.

Attorney Keren Tzafrir of ACRI said that the use of the unapproved plan exacerbates planning issues that plague East Jerusalem.

“The already limited opportunities faced by East Jerusalem residents in developing their neighborhoods and receiving building permits are being further restricted by the decision to consider the unapproved outline plan as a ‘policy document,'” Tzafrir said. “Instead of alleviating the ongoing planning crisis and allowing for improvements in public services, the authorities have chosen to further violate the residents’ rights to adequate housing, education, health, and employment.”

In a media statement issued Sunday, Bimkom and ACRI stressed that the “unreasonable state of affairs has caused particularly severe harm to the rights and living conditions of Palestinians living in East Jerusalem.” For over 45 years, the organizations added, “Palestinian residents face extreme limitations on building and planning, and suffer from acute shortage of housing, crowded living conditions, and an across-the-board lack of public spaces and institutions such as schools, medical centers, postal offices, etc.”

Palestinians constitute some 39 percent of Jerusalem’s residential population, whereas the total area total area designated for building in their neighborhoods covers 14% of East Jerusalem, or 7.8% of the entire city.

The unapproved Outline Plan creates further limitations for Palestinian residents wishing to build and develop their homes and neighborhoods, the organizations added. By bypassing the stage of submitting the plan for public review, the Jerusalem municipality avoided its legal obligation of giving the public an opportunity to object to it or seek compensation for damages it would cause.

“The committee’s actions contradict the rules of good governance, the principle of legality, the obligation of transparency, and the requirement of including the public in planning procedures,” the two groups said.

Architect Efrat Cohen-Bar of Bimkom said that the lack of planning in Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem has created a situation in which residents took it upon themselves to make up for the lack of building resources, furthering the chaos in their neighborhoods.

“Because of the limitations of planning in Palestinian neighborhoods, the residents took it upon themselves to solve the problems resulting from lack of adequate planning and, for a decade or so, prior to the freeze caused by the Jerusalem 2000 Outline Plan, they initiated building plans, for themselves and by themselves,” he said. “Unfortunately, the Jerusalem District Planning Committee decided to ‘freeze’ many such plans, on the basis of an Outline Plan that lacks validation, resulting in an even greater planning chaos in East Jerusalem.”

Israel has recently been the subject of other building disputes, notably the administrative plan to build 3,000 new housing units in the area known as E1, the tract of land that connects East Jerusalem and the settlement Ma’aleh Adumim. Israel’s announcement of the plan came 24 hours after the UN voted in favor of granting the Palestinian Authority non-member observer state status last November. Israel’s housing plans drew ire from world leaders who called them obstacles to Israeli-Palestinian peace.