Friday, September 30, 2011

Building new housing units in Jerusalem - so what?

From an interview with PM Benjamin Netanyahu, published in JPost, 28 Sept 2011, by Herb Keinon:

[regarding] a project to build 800 new units in Gilo...

... I think people now understand that in a metropolitan area like Jerusalem, with three-quarters of a million people, there is planning that takes place for new projects.

People have families, families have children, and communities grow: they grow in the Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem and they grow in the Jewish neighborhoods of Jerusalem.

I have to say that this is one of the areas where Israel’s massive planning bureaucracy gets full international attention. We have so many planning stages, so many phases of approval that every time a plan moves through one of these stages, it gets world headlines. It shouldn’t in the first place, and I want to tell you that I am streamlining the planning so there will be fewer stages.

...I don’t think there is anything new. We plan in Jerusalem. We build in Jerusalem. Period. The same way Israeli governments have been doing for 44 years, since the end of the 1967 war. 


We build in Jewish neighborhoods, the Arabs build in Arab neighborhoods, that is the way the life of this city goes on and develops for its Jewish and non-Jewish residents alike....

No comments: