The project, which was stopped Sept. 13 after The Post inquired about it, was undertaken not only to close the gap between Maleh Adumim and Jerusalem, but to provide a site for the new headquarters of Israel's police force in the West Bank. Were the agency -- called the Judea and Samaria police -- to move there, its headquarters in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Ras el-Amud would be available for conversion into apartments for Jews. Negotiations for the sale of that building, which is located in a heavily Palestinian area about 500 yards from the wall of Jerusalem's Old City, are underway.
The Maleh Adumim work is part of an expansion plan officially known as E-1, which anti-settlement activists said is the final step in sealing off north and east Jerusalem from Palestinians living in the West Bank. Moshe Merhavia, a senior Housing Ministry official, said that when E-1 is finished, it will double the size of Maleh Adumim, which has 30,000 residents. U.S. officials have opposed the plan for years.
Despite lack of permits, crews worked last year to expand the West Bank settlement of Maleh Adumim. The built-up area of Maleh Adumim is in the background.
(John Ward Anderson -- The Washington Post)
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Eitam, the former housing minister, said he initiated the plan to move the police force to Maleh Adumim and free its building in Ras el-Amud for Jewish housing.
"It's not a coincidence -- it's a state that moves a police station," he said. "It's all done above the table, even if there are private investors and private people who might buy the [existing] police station or build apartments there."
Eitam recently moved into a five-story, 51-unit apartment compound across the street from the Ras el-Amud police headquarters. The Maaleh Hazeitim (Olive Heights) complex, which is expected to grow to 119 units, was developed by Ateret Cohanim and sits adjacent to the famous Mount of Olives Jewish cemetery. Together, the apartment building, cemetery and police station straddle the old road to Jericho, a West Bank city about 14 miles east of Jerusalem.
Rabbi David Nisanov, the head of the Bukharan Jewish community of Jerusalem, which owns the police station and the three acres surrounding it, said he was negotiating to sell the property to the apartment complex's developers once the police relocate.
When the Judea and Samaria police move out, Eitam said, "the state will have to think about what will be the alternative function of the building, and I see no reason why the state would not allow more Jews to live there. I accelerated the process, and I think it's very legitimate."
Hotel Taken Away
Perched atop a small hill on the outskirts of Abu Dis, a Palestinian town just east of Jerusalem and south of Maleh Adumim, the 36-room Cliff Hotel was a popular venue for Palestinian parties and weddings because of its big garden and big views.
About two years ago, however, the Israeli government resurveyed Jerusalem's municipal boundary and ruled that the hotel was not in the West Bank but inside the city, said Walid Ayyad, a member of the family that built it in 1955. Ayyad said the hotel had always paid property taxes to the West Bank town of Bethlehem, never to Jerusalem.
Last April, as Israel was building a concrete wall through Abu Dis as part of a project to separate the West Bank from Israel, the Israeli Border Patrol seized the hotel to use as a security post and barred the family from going there, Ayyad said. Since the Ayyads had West Bank identity cards and were not residents of Jerusalem, they were declared absentee owners of the property, and ownership was transferred to the government, according to Shlomo Lecker, the family's attorney. No compensation was paid to the Ayyads, he said.
Five Border Patrol officers were indicted Sept. 28 for abusing Palestinians inside the hotel. One man was allegedly forced to jump from a second-story window and another man was allegedly burned with cigarettes and made to drink the officers' urine.
A few days after the Border Patrol took over the building, five Jewish families from Ateret Cohanim moved into two homes on an adjacent hillside several hundred yards away, just on the Jerusalem side of the 28-foot-high concrete wall. The Arab owner of one of the houses, Khalid Radwan, 62, said Ateret Cohanim gave him $650,000 and told him that the land he had bought and built upon 28 years earlier was, in fact, owned by Jews; the group would not confirm Radwan's account. The second house was constructed about 18 months ago without any building permits, in an area where there was no approved master plan and where no building was allowed, according to Gidi Schmerling, spokesman for the city of Jerusalem. Radwan's house was also illegal, he said.
Lecker, the Ayyad family's attorney, said he believed it was "quite clear from the timing of the hotel takeover and the new settlers taking over the other two buildings that this was the real motivation behind it: to give the hotel property to the settlers. The whole system here is very evil."
Luria, the Ateret Cohanim spokesman, said the two homes were to be part of a development called Kidmat Zion that has not yet been approved and is pending before the Jerusalem district planning council. The houses and the five families living in them are being protected by private security guards paid for by the Israeli government, he said.
