RAMALLAH, West Bank, 20 December 2007 — Israeli Housing Minister Ze’ev Boim has given the green light to the Israel Lands Authority (ILA) for planning a new neighborhood of 11,000 to 15,000 apartments for the ultra-Orthodox Jews near the East Jerusalem airport of Atarot (Qalandia).

The new neighborhood is to be built close to the separation wall near the Qalandia roadblock, which separates the Palestinian neighborhoods of north Jerusalem from Ramallah.

The area was annexed to Israeli control after the June 1967 War. If approved, it would be the largest building project over the Green Line in Jerusalem since that war.

Earlier this month, however, the United States objected to a plan to build a mere 307 apartments in another East Jerusalem settlement, Har Homa, with US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice saying it did not contribute to the peace process. Boim met last week with the head of the ILA, Ya’akov Efrati, and asked him for a permit to start the planning process.

The ILA told the daily Haaretz that Efrati plans to accede to Boim’s request, but is awaiting a formal application from the Housing Ministry before issuing the permit. The ministry said it intends “to examine the feasibility of the planning for the site,” but that no final decision has been made on how many houses will be built.

A source involved in discussions of the plan, which Arab News reported in February, said that it was shown to him by the head of the Housing Ministry’s Jerusalem District, Moshe Merhavia. According to the source, a major impetus for the plan was the fact that most of this land was “owned by Jews before 1948.”

Another reason, the source told Haaretz, was to “create a buffer” between the Palestinian neighborhoods in the area and the Atarot industrial zone, where “a growing proportion of the businesses are owned by Palestinians or Israeli Arabs.” The neighborhood would sit in the heart of one of the most crowded urban Palestinian areas in the West Bank.

Khalil Tafakji, a Palestinian expert of Israeli settlement in the West Bank told Arab News that the planned neighborhood in East Jerusalem is an alternative to the Safdie Plan (a plan by Israeli architect Moshe Safdie to build 20,000 units in West Jerusalem).

He said that the plan was rejected from western Jerusalem Jews and the plan has been shelved, but the need to build in East Jerusalem and adjacent settlements still exists.

The plan, according to Tafakji, proposes connecting the new neighborhood to the ultra-Orthodox settlement of Kokhav Yaakov east of Ramallah, and Giv’at Zion which is build on lands of Kufur Aqab and Burqa east of Ramallah. The two settlements are at present outside the planned route of the separation wall. To this end, a tunnel a few hundred meters long would be dug beneath the Palestinian village of Kufur Aqab and under the separation wall.