The story of Atarot in northern Jerusalem is an embarrassing one from a Zionist perspective. The Israeli-Zionist spirit finds it hard to accept losses, and even harder to acknowledge them. The Jewish national ethos remembers the heroic battle waged by the defenders of the small Jewish spot in the War of Independence, but the bottom line is that Atarot was lost in 1948. Its defenders, who withstood a siege, sacrificed their lives and repelled numerous attacks, and eventually obeyed the order to retreat. From the nearby Neveh Yaakov neighborhood, they watched as Arabs looted their community and set it on fire. The Palestinians beat us in Atarot again during the Second Intifada, when terrorist gangs shot at the runways of Jerusalem's international airport and shut down flights in the north of sovereign Jerusalem. Israel closed the airport, and hasn't opened it since.
The third Palestinian victory is an ongoing one that is no less painful for Israel, but it's still not final. It is mostly the result of Israel's cold feet and hesitation over the course of three decades. Almost miraculously, things can still change. The Israeli defeat can still be turned into a victory, in a way that will secure historic justice and even shed a different light on the earlier two losses to the Palestinians.
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For 25 years or more, Israel has given into American and European pressure and refrained from implemented plans to build a neighborhood of some 10,000 housing units on the Jewish-owned land of the old Atarot airport, which amounts to about 1,300 dunams (321 acres). Of course, the Palestinians are behind those dictates.
Their over-large appetite has kept the Palestinians from completely taking over the Jewish-owned land of Atarot, rather than merely stopping Israeli plans to settle the area. In 2000 and in 2008 the Palestinians rejected generous offers from the Barak and Olmert governments to co-manage the area with Israel. Back then, the Palestinian Authority news outlet Al Hayat-Al Jadida wrote: "The Kalandiya-Jerusalem airport is a captive waiting for the Palestinian return." Luckily for Israel, the government was sufficiently determined to keep Atarot free of illegal Palestinian construction, which has run rampant throughout northern Jerusalem for years. Atarot remains an island that Israel has defended.
A green light from Trump
Benjamin Netanyahu, who this week – years too late – finally released the construction tenders for the Givat HaMatos neighborhood in southern Jerusalem, is sadly part of the story of Israel's ongoing capitulation in Atarot. For a long time, Netanyahu has given into the European-American-Palestinian dictates there, but now he has a golden opportunity to change direction. These are the last days of the Trump administration. American Ambassador David Friedman and other senior officials in the outgoing US administration made it clear to Israel even before the US election that no matter how it turned out, as far as they were concerned, Netanyahu could move ahead with the plan to build a Jewish neighborhood in Atarot.
This strategic neighborhood is of vital importance to the capital. The question of whether or not it is built will decide whether or not the northern "finger" of Jerusalem remains Israeli and Jewish, or whether the Palestinians will take it over and even cut it off from the rest of Jerusalem, as they openly announce they intend to do, for the sake of their dream of a Palestinian state.
When Levi Eshkol, who was prime minister when Israel won the 1967 Six-Day War, decided with his ministers to include Atarot within the new borders of Jerusalem, we could still remember his as a young man, alongside Berl Katznelson and others form the first Labor group that moved to Atarot in 1912. Eshkol was still living with the pain of its fall. He remembered that this was Jewish-owned land purchased by Dr. Ruppin and included Atarot in greater Jerusalem, because he knew that its story was really no different from the story of the fall of Gush Etzion to the city's south.
Netanyahu now needs to finish the work. He has agreed to or accepted the "Atarot clause" that the Americans inserted into the Trump peace plan, which gives the Palestinians a tourism area of their own in Atarot to encourage "Muslim tourism to Jerusalem and [Islamic] holy sites." But he has already found other land near Atarot for that purpose, so that the Palestinian tourism area won't block the construction of a Jewish neighborhood in Atarot.
Now, two months before the friendly Trump administration exits the White House, Netanyahu needs to gather a little courage and make two decisions. First, to allow the Jerusalem District Planning Commission to post the plans for the public to review, to expedite the process of approving those plans. Second, he needs to instruct the Jerusalem Municipality to change the zoning of the Jewish-owned land in Atarot from land designed for an airport to land designed for a residential neighborhood.
The Biden policy
In the meantime, to keep Atarot from falling a third time, Israel has to be creative and establish an active civil Jewish presence in Atarot. It could be through archaeology or a farm, youth movement activity or a national heritage site, warehouses for the nearby industrial zone, or a combination of all these. The main thing is to create a civil Israeli hold on this land until a Jewish neighborhood is under construction that, if it is built, will not only keep Jerusalem's northern outcropping under Israeli sovereignty but also influence the demographics of the capital, whose Jewish majority has been shrinking and now stands at only some 59%. Atarot is now the biggest area in Jerusalem earmarked for Jewish settlement, and once fully populated will be able to increase the Jewish population of Jerusalem by 80,000 residents.
Anyone who waits for approval from US President-elect Joe Biden could discover that the damage his administration as president does to the settlement enterprise is much bigger than what occurred when he was vice president. Since he visited Israel in 2010, the "Biden policy" has mandated that the Prime Minister's Office approve any construction over the Green Line in Jerusalem. Netanyahu instituted the policy after clashing with the then-vice president over approval for 1,600 housing units in the Ramat Shlomo neighborhood. The permits were issued the day Biden arrived in Israel and angered him. It's a shame that the Biden policy wasn't cancelled under Trump. Now it might be too late, but it's not too late to gun the engines on the Atarot plan and move them toward implementation, and do the same on Givat HaMatos, which took a big step forward this week.
Building on Givat HaMatos is a key step in preventing Jerusalem from being divided in the south and preventing the Palestinians from disrupting the planned contiguity between Gilo and Har Homa on Jerusalem's southern border. The Palestinians and the European Union and pushing to continue the construction freeze in those neighborhoods in order to preserve the option of an urban and political connection between Bethlehem and Beit Zafafa, as part of a future "capital of a Palestinian state." That plan needs to stop in Givat HaMatos and Atarot.
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