Jerusalem’s ‘Silicon Wadi’ plans might be just a pipe dream

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East Jerusalem’s Wadi Joz Street, between Mount Scopus, the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood and the Old City, has been lined with car repair shops going back to Jordanian times. The street is also home to car accessory and building supply shops and restaurants.

Like most of the streets in East Jerusalem, Wadi Joz has no sidewalks and the buildings are a hodgepodge of Jordanian structures, tin shacks and improvised shelters interspersed with modern buildings. The street that leads to it from Sheikh Jarrah, Othman bin Afan, usually makes headlines because of Jews’ efforts to evict the Palestinian families who live on the street or over clashes between Jews and Palestinians. But according to the plan approved by the Jerusalem municipality last week, the two streets will change unrecognizably.

The plan, whose designers call it the greatest revolution since 1967, calls for 230,000 square meters (2.5 million square feet) of new construction, mainly for offices, hotels and commercial activity. Wadi Joz Street, according to the plan, will become a modern urban thoroughfare with dozens of office buildings between eight and 14 stories tall and be transformed into the beating heart of the East Jerusalem economy.

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Othman bin Afan Street will become a promenade and a park. Jerusalem Mayor Moshe Leon calls it “Silicon Wadi.” For Leon, it embodies the hope that the neglected garages will be replaced by glittering high-tech companies. But the road to making the plan a reality is a long one, and like everything in East Jerusalem, it prompts suspicion and fear.

The Jerusalem Municipality and the Jerusalem Development Authority are promoting two plans simultaneously for the area: a master plan, prepared by the architect Ya’ara Rosner, who has set out the planning principles for the area, and a detailed plan prepared by Michael Wind of the Ari Cohen Architecture & Urban Planning firm. The detailed plan is designed to permit landowners, a number of whom are Palestinian families, some of whom are refugees from the village of Lifta, to submit applications for building permits and begin to demolish the old structures and build new ones.

The plan envisions a street wide enough for the light rail to pass through (the Brown Line, planned for East Jerusalem but not yet finalized). The municipality hopes that the area will attract companies that will jump-start East Jerusalem’s economy. The city is also planning a college to be located on the street, where young East Jerusalemites can learn a profession that will pave the way for them to obtain jobs in the new quarter. But until the ribbons are cut, many obstacles threaten the vision.

The first and perhaps greatest problem is that contrary to similar plans in West Jerusalem, almost all the land in East Jerusalem is privately owned. That means that after the plan is approved by the building committees, the landowners themselves will have to raise the capital to realize the project.

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For one thing, it’s not clear whether all the landowners will want to leave at the same time to have their premises demolished and new buildings built there. It’s also unclear where the financing will come from, because like 90 percent of the land in East Jerusalem, the land in Wadi Joz is not registered with the land registry because Israel stopped land registration in East Jerusalem beginning in 1967. That makes it almost impossible to put up land as collateral and raise funding from banks. People involved in the planning say that for the plan to succeed, the municipality and various agencies will have to intervene on a massive scale.

One of the solutions suggested by Palestinian residents and landowners is to increase the number of residential units in the area. At present, the plan earmarks no more than 10 percent of the area for residential construction. Considering the housing shortage in East Jerusalem, residential building would ensure profits for developers. The problem, many people say, is that Jerusalem’s local planning and building committee has continually opposed approval of housing for Palestinians.

“Politically, this won’t work. We’ve done the maximum with the local committee,” a city official involved in the planning conceded. “There’s a huge housing shortage in East Jerusalem, and from the point of view of the developers too, to realize the project, it can’t only depend on offices and tourism,” he said.

Another problem with the plan is the future of the hundreds of businesses and their workers now in Wadi Joz. The businesses employ some 500 people, some of whom have been working there for decades. Alternative employment will have to be found for them, say people on the street.

A simulation of the planned development in East Jerusalem, which Jerusalem Mayor Moshe Leon has dubbed Silicon Wadi. Jerusalem Development Authority

“This comes at the expense of the weak, people who inherited the garage from their grandfather through their father. They want high-tech and development. That’s the future, but not at the expense of the weak. They need to be taken into consideration,” says Yunes Yaman, who owns a vehicle accessory store on the street. Social activists have suggested to the city that it start to find alternatives for the workers and the business owners.

Another question about the feasibility of the project is which companies will want to locate between Sheikh Jarrah and the Old City. Beyond the violent image that the area suffers from, foreign firms and Israeli companies that work with them could encounter political opposition from governments or shareholders if they locate beyond the 1967 Green Line that separated East Jerusalem from West Jerusalem. The municipality says the area is open to all companies, foreign, Israeli and Palestinian.

“We don’t have a lot of alternatives when it comes to employment. If I want to raise the percentage of women in the workforce, I have to do it in the neighborhoods or it won’t happen at all,” says the mayor’s adviser on Arab affairs, Uri Yakir. “When we prepared the program, we said East Jerusalem has to have the same potential as West Jerusalem. And so we went for maximum employment. Mixed use between employment and residential doesn’t even work in Tel Aviv,” he said.

As far as the current workers go, Yakir said: “The municipality has to find a place where cars can be repaired. The mayor’s father worked in a garage. He’s talking to us about this and he cares about them. But without discounting the workers’ pain, the overall good has to be considered.”