Sometimes, a bill is enough to shake up the system, even without the legislative process being completed and it becoming law. This is what happened with a bill authored by Kulanu MK Rachel Azaria, designed to solve a crisis surrounding church-owned lands in Jerusalem. The bill was frozen before it could be presented to the Ministerial Committee for Legislation but wound up serving as a kind of loaded gun trained on everyone involved.
The government, which for years ignored the distress of thousands of Jerusalem residents who were living under the threat of evacuation because their homes were built on land the church leased to the Jewish National Fund realized that a) it could no longer ignore the legal reality that when the lease is up – 17 years from today, in some cases – the land and the buildings will revert to church ownership, and b) that the sale of some of the leased land to private developers complicates the residents' situation still further. At least according to Azaria, some of these developers are demanding that the residents pay them hundreds of thousands of shekels.
This demand could have effectively pulled the land out from under the residents' feet and left them homeless.
Azaria's bill shook up the various churches who own land in the capital, particularly the Greek Orthodox Church, which is entangled to the largest degree. The bill would give the finance minister the authority to transfer ownership of the leased land the churches sold off to developers after 2010 to the state. The developers would be compensated. The fact that 61 MKs signed such an unconventional bill, one that harms property rights, led the churches to understand that negotiations with the government about the future of the land and the fate of the occupants of apartments built on it cannot be a mere business deal.
For the third side – the residents themselves and the developers who bought the land on which their homes stand form the churches – the church's unprecedented step of locking the gates to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher for three days starting on Feb. 25 in protest of the city's attempt to collect property taxes has driven home the fact that this is not merely a legal or a human interest issue, but rather an international story about how politics and religion play out.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat made this very clear in a joint statement in which they effectively froze Azaria's bill, which had the support of the Justice Ministry, and announced that a team of municipal and government experts was being established to find a solution to the problem.
The church's vulnerability
Church-owned land in Jerusalem, particularly that belonging to the Greek Orthodox Church, was first mapped in the 19th century, when the Jews of Jerusalem were still living within the walls of the Old City. Churches acquired thousands of dunams of the open land outside the walls and inside the Old City itself. The economic distress of the churches following World War I forces them to sell and then lease a considerable amount of the land to Jews. The Jewish parts of the new city of Jerusalem, outside the walls, were built to a large extent on that crisis. The weaker a church was financially, the stronger Jewish Jerusalem grew. Pilgrims stopped coming, as did the donations on which the churches lived.
In 1921, the church sold the area every Jerusalemite today knows like the back of their hand – the trio of streets Jaffa Road, King George, and Ben Yehuda, and the land surrounding them – to the Israel Land Development Company. After the state was founded in 1948, the Greek Orthodox Church held lengthy negotiations with Dr. Yaakov Herzog, then manager of the Christian Division in the Religious Affairs Ministry (and the elder brother of future President of Israel Chaim Herzog). The negotiations resulted in the agreement to lease land to the government and the JNF for a period of 99 years. According to the terms of the lease, at the end of 100 years, the land and the buildings on it are supposed to revert to the church, which will pay nothing.
Dr. Amnon Ramon, author of the book Christians and Christianity in the Jewish State (2012) explains that the church leaders' vehement opposition to Azaria's bill stems from their concern that if the bill were to become law, "It will harm their ability to deal in real estate, which comprises a large part of the churches' income."
In a new position paper, Ramon writes that the churches think that "a law like this will scare off any potential purchaser or lessee who would want to do business with them, and put them at a disadvantage against other land owners."
Ramon explains that the churches are also "worried that the law would endanger business deals that have already been made and would expose them to lawsuits from the buyers."
Nothing to leave the children
Most of the land the Greek Orthodox church owns in Jerusalem lies in the Rehavia and Talbiyeh neighborhoods, near Keren Hayesod, Jabotinsky, Ahad Ha'am streets and the areas of Nayot, Neveh Granot, Givat Oranim, the old Jerusalem train station, the Valley of the Cross, the Mount of Olives, and the Gan Hapaamon (Bell Park). Many of the capital's famous buildings, such as the Inbal Hotel or the YMCA on King David St. stand on church-owned land. Despite reports these past few years, neither the Prime Minister's Residence on Balfour St. nor the President's Residence are on church-owned land. According to assessments conducted by Israel Kimhi, director of Jerusalem research at the Jerusalem Institute for Policy Research, various churches own a total of 1,170 acres of land in Jerusalem, with the lion's share in the hands of the Greek Orthodox Church.
As the leases are due to expire (anywhere from 17 to 51 years from now) the homes built on this church-owned land lose value, and will be worth close to nothing the year the lease is up. So in recent years, the most expensive areas of Jerusalem – like Talbiyeh or Rehavia – have seen apartments sold at rock-bottom prices, sometimes less than 30% of the value of nearby homes that are not on church-owned land.
Poet Haim Gouri, who recently passed away, told Haaretz journalist Nir Hasson last September that his own apartment on Pinsker St. was one of the homes that had been purchased form the church by private development companies.
"The thought that this property, and it's no palace, will vanish is an awful feeling," Gouri said. Other residents are saying that they have nothing to leave to their children. As long as the church still owned the land and the buildings on it, many legal scholars who examined the issue believed that the government would eventually find a way to "handle" the issue.
The moment that real estate companies and developers started closing deals to buy up land from the church, the situation got a lot more complicated.
If Azaria's bill ever becomes law, it will certainly be challenged in the High Court of Justice, and it's not clear what the chances are of it being stricken down. It's not clear how successful the new team of experts, under the leadership of Regional Cooperation Minister Minister Tzachi Hanegbi, will be in resolving the issue, either. Hanegbi's mandate is to delve into the question of the church-owned land and negotiate with the churches about collecting municipal taxes on their property. It won't be easy.
