Existing Situation, Barriers, Needs and Future Policies

Editors: Dr. Rassem Khamaisi

Publisher: IPCC Jerusalem, 2006

ISBN: 965-7283-09-4

The publication is in Arabic with English summary.

Housing and spatial control in Jerusalem are used by Israel as tools to guarantee its demographic and territorial superiority. This situation causes housing to be an essential part of the ethno-national conflict in the city, and is used to achieve Israeli goals on the account of Palestinian national rights and daily life function.

Since the first days of the occupation of East Jerusalem, the Israeli government has been trying to change the demographic reality and to control the land. To achieve this goal, the Israeli government uses housing, among other tools like land use and expropriation, to limit and restrict the Palestinian existence and growth in the city. This is done by following a planning policy and imposing building laws and conditions that are almost for the Palestinians impossible to fulfill in order for them to obtain "legal" housing in Jerusalem.

The “Conflict over Housing” report describes in detail the situations of; the population growth in East Jerusalem, migration, projection for the year 2020, the housing density, the future needs and social trends related to housing types and community relations. It also describes the current housing conditions in Jerusalem, and illustrates the housing deficiency and the obstacles in the way of obtaining building permits for the Palestinians; the thing which forces them to build “illegally” and have their houses demolished later on. In this part of the report, house ownership and conditions in addition to housing density and provision are also discussed.

The Report analyzes the Israeli town plan schemes of the different Palestinian neighborhoods that were approved in the late eighties and early nineties. These plans do not respond to the minimal level of housing needs and totally neglect the public use spaces and the infrastructure. It also analyzes the Master Plan for Jerusalem 2020 and its impact on the Palestinian land use and building rights, and suggests a strategy and a policy to support a collective Palestinian housing in the city as one way to protect and maintain the Palestinian existence in Jerusalem.

The report presents different preliminary models for the Palestinian housing market and the need to establish a coordinated integrative model of the planning level, land ownership, a financial scheme to provide housing for the middle class and the urban recovery of slum areas. These models define the roles of the different Palestinian public, private and civil society institutions, to shift from individual housing initiatives of land owners and family members to a collective communal type of housing which also considers the use of public space and the contribution of housing and servicerelated sectors to the economic and community development in the short term of being under Israeli occupation, and on the long term of integrating East Jerusalem with the rest of the West Bank.