With Eyes on Gaza, City Fast Tracks New Settlement That Will Foreclose Future Palestinian Capital in Abu Dis

Just two days after Hamas launched Operation al-Aqsa Flood and Israel declared war on Gaza, the Jerusalem municipality’s District Planning Committee quietly approved the fast-tracked Kidmat Tzion settlement plan (Plan 101-0120709) for deposit with conditions. What this means is that the committee allows the plan to be published in newspapers for public review and objections, after which 60 days will be allocated for the hearing of any objections. Meanwhile the conditions identified must be resolved. According to Haaretz, “the proposal is being pushed forward with exceptional speed.”1

The decision was not made public until October 16.

The new settlement is set to be built in the heart of Ras al-Amud, a Palestinian neighborhood at the eastern edge of East Jerusalem, inside the municipal boundary and the Separation Wall. Its location is on a mountainside ridge that faces the Old City and the Mount of Olives, abutting the Jerusalem side of the wall.

Currently, 11 Jewish families with some 70 children occupy seven units on the site in two buildings and three more “makeshift” buildings.2

The planned settlement is within eyeshot of the unfinished building that was supposed to become the Palestinian parliament, which lies just on the other side of the wall, in the Palestinian town of Abu Dis, outside the municipal boundaries, on land designated as Area B in the Oslo Accords. Just down the road is Al-Quds University.

When the building’s construction began in the 1990s, its location was a compromise between Palestinian leaders who wanted proximity to the al-Aqsa Mosque and Israeli leaders who insisted it had to be located outside the municipal boundaries. Placing the Palestinian capital there was an imposed compromise plan that Palestinians were supposed to accept in the event that a Palestinian state was established within any part of East Jerusalem. It only made sense, if at all, at that time, when Abu Dis was a suburb of Jerusalem and movement into and out of the city was open and free. Construction was suspended in 2003, around the time the wall was being built. The building stands unfinished, a testimony to “statehood, interrupted.”

Today, Abu Dis is severed from Jerusalem by the wall and the permit regime.

According to Daniel Seidemann, executive director of Terrestrial Jerusalem, an Israeli nonprofit tracking political developments in Jerusalem, Kidmat Tzion will consist of 384 housing units, making it the largest settlement enclave in East Jerusalem.

“The settlement is part of a government plan to encircle the Old City with biblically motivated settlers and settler-related projects,” Seidemann wrote on the social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter).3

“The lightning speed with which the District Committee is promoting a plan to build a Jews-only, gated village in the heart of a Palestinian neighborhood in [East] Jerusalem raises the suspicion that this is a political ploy,”4 Bimkom’s Sari Kronish told Haaretz.

The “conditions” attached to the plan and its final approval relate to transportation and security. The road leading to where the settlement will be built is too narrow for incoming traffic. Additionally, the settlement’s planned location along the wall raises security concerns for Israelis. These matters will be discussed in future meetings.5

To address the anticipated security issues, the plan calls for the settlement to be built as a fortified compound—complete with an electric fence, patrol road, guard station at the entrance, cameras “with day and night vision, facial recognition and investigative capabilities,” and spotlights on all units.6 Four armed security guards will patrol the area at all times, and a security chief and armored vehicle will also be stationed at the settlement.7 According to a security addendum prepared by the Israeli regional command of the Jerusalem area, the neighborhood must be surrounded by an electric fence and a patrol road, with a concrete guard station at its entrance.8

The settlement plan was introduced in April 2023 when Bahorim Ltd., a private company affiliated with the settler group Ateret Cohanim and founded by its members to promote Kidmat Tzion’s development, filed documents with the planning committee. The documents indicate that Bahorim only owns 10 percent of the land. The rest of the land is owned by Jews who may have been involved in purchasing the plots before 1948 or their descendants, the Jewish National Fund, other settler groups, including the foundation belonging to the late US millionaire and settlement financier Irving Moskowitz, a few Palestinians, and the Israeli General Custodian. Jerusalem-focused nonprofit Ir Amim notes, however, that because the land is unregistered, it’s impossible to verify its owners (see Land and Space).9

According to Ateret Cohanim, the land designated for the settlement spans about 180 dunums.10

The idea of building a settlement deep in the Ras al-Amud neighborhood reportedly originated in 2004, when the first Jewish families moved to an area just outside the Palestinian community.11 Today, a few houses—built within the last three years—stand directly inside the Palestinian neighborhood along the wall.

Yet Ir Amim researcher Aviv Tatarsky told Jerusalem Story the Kidmat Tzion plan goes back even further—to the 1980s—and wasn’t conceived by Ateret Cohanim. Tatarsky discovered Israeli Ministry of Construction records from the 1980s indicating the government agency considered building a settlement in the area.12

While the idea was abandoned for unspecified reasons, Tatarsky explained that the government found a way to privatize the initiative through Ateret Cohanim.

“So from the start to the end, it’s a state project that Ateret Cohanim is just the front for,” Tatarsky told Jerusalem Story.

About 30 Palestinian families live in Ras al-Amud, with their heritage originating long before the State of Israel was established in 1948. Ras al-Amud resident Usamah Qunbar explained that the community is Bedouin and lived in tents before beginning to build houses after 1967, when Israel occupied East Jerusalem.

Today about seven buildings have standing demolition orders from the city for being built without permits. Palestinians often face a prohibitive bureaucratic maze when it comes to applying for construction permits, and even then, almost none are approved.13

Ras al-Amud residents have tried to obtain zoning plans so they can build legally, but Qunbar explained the municipality blocked their efforts by deeming their ownership documents invalid or designating the land as “green space.”

The municipality did not respond to requests for comment on building the Kidmat Tzion settlement and on establishing zoning plans for the Ras al-Amud neighborhood.

Now, piles of rubble are scattered throughout the short strip of land where residents were forced to self-demolish their homes rather than pay state fines.

The remains signal what this community’s fate could be if Kidmat Tzion is approved.

“We will be afraid that demolitions and the property ownership claims will go up, and maybe they will enter people’s houses by force to get them out,” Qunbar told Jerusalem Story.14

Qunbar also noted the planned settlement’s geopolitical ramifications. Ras al-Amud is adjacent to the large Palestinian town of Abu Dis, which has often been cited by Israel and its allies—including its mention in the Trump administration’s so-called Peace to Prosperity plan—as the capital of a future Palestinian state.15 Building Kidmat Tzion would squash that possibility.

“You are just killing the idea of a Palestinian state,” Qunbar said.

Yet this seems to be the intended goal of settlers, as they themselves explain.

“Palestinian institutions in Abu Dis were built with the vision of turning the town into the capital city of Palestine and building a corridor and passage to the center of Jerusalem, and thus promoting the takeover of the entire city . . . The significance of establishing and developing the neighborhood is to create a shield for Jerusalem against Palestinian ambitions,” Ateret Cohanim wrote when filing documents with the planning committee.16 “The neighborhood will disturb the contiguity [of the area] and protect us from dividing the city.”

In a new promotional video, Daniel Luria, Ateret Cohanim’s executive director, called Kidmat Tzion “the last frontier of Jerusalem.” He also called it “this future Jewish neighborhood, the most significant, the most symbolic, and the most strategic built in Jerusalem since 1967, creating a physical shield, defining Jerusalem with this neighborhood, from here, going towards the Old City.”17 This is all part of what Ateret Cohanim refers to as “the very special and unique ‘shield’ of Jerusalem.”18

This year, Israeli settlement building and expansion in Jerusalem has moved forward with unprecedented speed (see Judaizing Jerusalem: Jewish Settlements Are Soaring in and around the City).

And that pace doesn’t appear to have slowed against the backdrop of Israel’s assault on Gaza.

“State-assisted settler organizations are using the current crisis to create more facts on the ground,” Tatarsky said. “While attention is drawn to the war, we must also be aware of what is happening in East Jerusalem.”