E1 building plan: Officials say this time it’s for real After decades of attempts to build in E1, local leaders say the latest effort to expand Jewish presence in the area will succeed. David Isaac
https://www.jns.org/e1-building-plan-officials-say-this-time-its-for-real/
Israel’s government has approved the construction of more than 3,000 housing units in E1 (“East 1”), an area in Judea and Samaria whose geostrategic significance far outstrips its small size. Israel signaled its intention to build there 30 years ago. Previous attempts to realize that intention have failed. The question is: Will this time be any different?
Local government officials JNS spoke with say nearly all the obstacles are removed. Most important, they say the government’s involvement is nearly at an end, at which point the issue becomes a purely municipal matter. Once that happens, there’s no going back.
“The initial process is called ‘TABA’ [a Hebrew acronym for ‘Urban Building Plan’]. It’s the city plan. And it’s a very long governmental process,” said Israel Ganz, head of the Binyamin Regional Council and the Yesha Council, an umbrella group representing all the municipal councils in Judea and Samaria.
“It’s supposed to end this Wednesday,” he told JNS on Aug. 18, two days before the plan received final approval by a Defense Ministry planning committee. “When it’s finished, it goes to the municipality, Ma’ale Adumim. From that moment, the city can get a building permit.”
Guy Yifrach, mayor of Maale Adumim, is also optimistic. He told JNS on Aug. 27, that after the committee’s approval, there is one more stage in which the government is involved—“marketing approval.” The government signs off on letting the city plan go out to contractors who bid on the right to build and market the homes. He estimates that approval is only a month away.
“This is the last stage the government touches. As soon as it issues this approval and we put out a call for bids, it’s impossible to go back. Then it’s out of the hands of the government, including from a legal point of view, and it becomes a municipal commercial matter,” Yifrach said. “I believe that within six months, we will already see tractors working in the field.”
Ganz agreed, noting that while the home-building process would take longer, at minimum a year, the parallel “development” process, which involves building roads, sidewalks, sewers and so on, could start within six months.
Yifrach said he could think of only one case where the government prevented construction after approval had been given. International backlash over the Har Homa neighborhood in Jerusalem some years ago led to a request by the prime minister to the city’s mayor to delay releasing the plan for construction. It was built in the end.
“This is only time I remember the political echelon intervening at a stage when it no longer had the authority to do so. Even then, it was a request, not a reversal. After a few months, the plan was released,” Yifrach told JNS, adding, “You’re safe to assume I would not agree to such a request.”
International pressure is the main reason construction at E1 has not moved forward since it was first proposed in 1994 by then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. The plan enjoys national consensus support. It has been supported by every succeeding prime minister since Rabin.
The importance of E1 lies in its location. The 12-square-kilometer (4.6 sq. mile) area sits between Ma’ale Adumim, a Jewish city of about 40,000 in the Judean desert, and Israel’s capital.
Once built up, E1 would connect the two cities into a larger metropolis, serving as a countermeasure to Palestinian Authority efforts to surround Jerusalem with its own Arab metropolis, which includes Ramallah, eastern parts of Jerusalem and Bethlehem. (The P.A. intends to wrest from Israel eastern areas of Jerusalem for its own future capital.)
Israeli security analysts have long warned that Jerusalem will become a border town if the surrounding Arab settlement is allowed to continue unhindered. The answer, they say, is E1, which would protect Jerusalem, drive a wedge through the nearly contiguous Arab settlement stretching around it and ensure Jewish territorial contiguity eastward to the Jordan Valley.
Until now, the P.A. has been winning the contiguity battle, building illegally on Israeli-controlled land. Arab settlement snakes along the eastern side of Jerusalem north to Ramallah and south to Bethlehem.
Both sides agree E1 construction threatens Arab geographic contiguity. At an on-site press conference held in Ma’ale Adumim on Aug. 14 to celebrate the government’s historic announcement, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich declared that E1 construction “buries the idea of a Palestinian state.”
The P.A. said the same thing. Wafa, its official news site, described E1’s chief objective as “undermining the establishment of a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital.”
Whether it spells the end of a Palestinian state remains to be seen. Yifrach noted that the P.A. can’t complain that E1 construction cuts contiguity as Palestinian Arabs can travel north to south via a newly constructed, 335 million shekel ($99 million) highway, dubbed the “Fabric of Life Road.”
Yifrach said the building of that road, by answering a major P.A. complaint, eased the way for the Cabinet to approve E1.
Also explaining why E1 is moving forward now is a friendly U.S. administration, “which understands that the Jewish people have a right to build in their land and that settlement in Judea and Samaria is not a political problem, but rather the solution.”
Israel’s right-wing government is another. Yifrach credits Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz for their “courageous” decision to build up E1.
Smotrich holds dual roles in the government. He serves also as a minister at the Defense Ministry, a position he made a condition of his party’s joining the Likud-led coalition.
That position puts him in charge of Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria and gives him authority over COGAT, the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, the Defense Ministry department responsible for civilian affairs in Judea and Samaria, which had until then answered to the minister of defense.
Smotrich not only focuses on construction, but also destruction, specifically of illegal Arab building. Under his watch, oversight has improved dramatically. Israel Hayom reported on Sunday a 40% leap in the number of illegal Palestinian structures demolished in the first half of 2025.
“If 2024 was a record year for demolitions, 2025 will be the first year since 1967 where we will destroy more than they build,” Smotrich said.
Some of that unrestrained Arab construction falls within Jerusalem’s city limits. Looking down from the slopes of Mount Scopus, the Jerusalem Arab neighborhood of Issawiya appears bereft of city planning. Buildings go up in haphazard fashion. The main road is an unpaved dirt street.
Naomi Kahn, director of the international division at Regavim, an Israeli NGO calling attention to illegal land seizures, described Issawiya as a “no-go zone” dangerous for Jews to enter.
Kahn said the P.A. encourages Arabs within areas it controls to move to places such as Issawiya. She said the Arabs of eastern Jerusalem don’t participate in city elections yet but will do so when the P.A. gives the word, presumably once it perceives the Arab population has reached the necessary critical mass to influence elections.
According to Regavim, it’s part of the Fayyad Plan for the establishment of a Palestinian state. In 2009, then-Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority Salaam Fayyad announced a scheme to establish “an independent Arab state with full sovereignty over all the territories of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip within the 1967 borders, with Jerusalem as its capital.”
Fayyad called for massive building to create territorial contiguity between settlement blocs throughout Judea and Samaria, especially in Area C, which falls wholly under Israeli control as stipulated by the Oslo Accords.
Regavim estimates there are 100,000 illegal structures in Area C. Explaining the negligence of Israeli authorities, which has allowed Arab construction to go on for decades with little pushback, Kahn allots much of the blame to COGAT, the IDF’s civil affairs department recently taken over by Smotrich.
“Illegal construction was low on the list of COGAT’s order of priorities and they figured those buildings would become part of a future Palestinian state anyway, so why bother knocking them down,” Kahn told JNS.
The main thing holding up E1, though, has been international pressure, she said. It’s the reason Israel hasn’t yet succeeded in relocating the Bedouin encampment of Khan al Ahmar, purposely placed by the P.A. in the heart of E1. Every time Israel has tried to remove the squatters, who live in ramshackle huts, the event rises to the level of an international cause célèbre. (Worth noting is that the E1 plan leaves Khan al Ahmar in place for the time being.)
Kahn says there are some 80 “Khan al Ahmars” scattered over the area. Bedouin are encouraged to plant themselves at strategic sites by the P.A., which provides water tanks. After water tanks come schools, which attract still more Bedouin.
Europe proudly contributes to illegal construction, displaying blue donor signs on buildings its funds helped to erect, even though it is interfering in Israel’s internal affairs, she said.
Will international pressure again produce the same result?
In an Aug. 22 joint statement, 25 foreign ministers from Europe and other countries condemned Israel’s decision, calling for its “immediate reversal.”
Israel pushed back, with the Foreign Ministry issuing a statement the same day rejecting the joint statement as an attempt to “impose foreign dictates.” It also said it was “racist,” given that the foreign ministers placed no restrictions on Arab construction.
“The historic right of Jews to live anywhere in the Land of Israel—the birthplace of the Jewish people—is indisputable. There is no other nation in the world that has a stronger, longer-standing and better-documented connection to its land than the Jewish people has to the Land of Israel, and this connection and right do not require the affirmation of foreign governments,” the Foreign Ministry said.
Both Yifrach and Ganz said they felt that international pressure would be nullified by the support of a friendly Trump administration.
The possibility that Israel’s Supreme Court, known for its activism, would interfere seemed to them far-fetched. “There are no legal grounds here for intervention,” Yifrach said.
Ganz agreed, saying that E1’s approval followed the letter of the law, with exhaustive hearings where objections were heard and answered, making it difficult to see how a petitioner to the court could find a pretext for complaint.
Yifrach said his biggest concern is more mundane. According to the plan, a sewage treatment facility must be built, which will cost 600 million shekels ($178 million). It’s not clear where the money is going to come from to pay for it. “That’s the only problem I can see,” he said.
Regavim’s Kahn pointed out that building E1 is precedent-setting, smoothing the way for Jewish construction throughout Judea and Samaria.
The Israeli opposition to E1 concurs. Peace Now posted to its website on Feb. 25, 2020, during an earlier, failed attempt by the government to build there: “It is likely that if moving on E1 is not met with deterring action domestically or abroad then it will further encourage settlement activity, seeing as E1 is the most recognized red line on settlement construction.”
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