Tomorrow, the Local Planning and Building Committee is scheduled to discuss building permits for two Elad settler managed projects in the area of the Jerusalem Peace Forest in Abu Tor:

1. A recreational zip-line cable course to run from the  Haas Promenade in Armon Hanatsiv to the Peace Forest

2. An additional story for a one story building in the vicinity of the Promenade currently serving as an operations center for Elad’s tourist activities.  The building, conveyed to Elad by the Israel Land Authority, is located on land zoned as green space on the area master plan; awarding of a building permit should therefore stand in violation to the master plan.

The Peace Forest is one in a chain of Elad managed national parks and touristic settlement operations around the Historic Basin, including the popular City of David archeological park.  The Israel Nature and Parks Authority (INPA) transferred daily management responsibilities to Elad – a private settler organization working systematically, over the past three decades, to take over Palestinian properties in Silwan – without a transparent tender process.  Elad is also responsible for promoting the Kedem Compound, a massive visitor center that will stand opposite City of David and across the Old City walls on 16,000+ square meters of land.  Despite the residents of Silwan, Ir Amim, Emek Shaveh and a panel of 35 professional city planners, architects and other experts winning an appeal to limit the scope of the project, the ruling was summarily overturned this past spring when the director general of the Justice Ministry, in a highly anomalous move, intervened to reopen discussion.  Ir Amim has since obtained documents from a freedom of information (FOI) request verifying that the ELAD settler organization took demonstrable steps to influence the Justice Ministry in overturning the June 2015 National Planning Council Appeals Committee’s decision to limit the scope of the Kedem Compound.

The privatization of national parks and tourist sites to settler organizations is an integral component of the settlement enterprise, serving as an effective and sophisticated instrument for the de facto takeover of land, limiting building and development of Palestinian neighborhoods, and rewriting the historic memory of the area.  Under the guise of tourism and recreation, these developments reduce available public space for Palestinian residents while enabling the use of national parks to subordinate history and archaeology to the service of the Jewish narrative. Along with the mounting uptick in settler initiated evictions of Palestinians (see Batan al-Hawa report for most significant example) and demolitions in the Historic Basin, privatization of parks and tourist sites to private settler organizations contributes to the consolidation of Israeli control of the Historic Basin, further complicating opening conditions for a political resolution on the city.

Please address all inquiries to:

Betty Herschman

Director of International Relations & Advocacy

Ir Amim (City of Nations/City of Peoples)

betty@ir-amim.org.il

054-308-5096

www.ir-amim.org.il

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Twitter: @IrAmimAlerts