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The Civic Coalition for Defending Palestinians Rights in Jerusalem (CCDPRJ) is a non-profit NGO, "dedicated to the protection and promotion of Palestinian rights in Jerusalem." In December 2009, it published a report titled, "Aggressive Urbanism: Urban Planning and the Displacement of Palestinians within and from Occupied East Jerusalem," accessed through the following link:
Since 1967, Israel has pursued a systematic home demolition/expropriation/displacement policy, illegally affecting thousands of Palestinian residents on the pretext of "unlicensed construction," to achieve a "demographic balance" to consolidate Israel's control of the city, taking it then to the next level, Judaizing all Jerusalem to make it exclusively Jewish.
To accomplish it, the Jerusalem Municipality and Interior Ministry "drafted, adopted and vigorously implemented a series of discriminatory laws, policies, and practices that collectively constitute the Israeli planning regime in occupied East Jerusalem," authorizing confiscation of Palestinian land, restricting construction on the remainder, reducing building density, imposing a Kafkaesque building permit process, the result being to deny Palestinian rights on their own land, impose severe hardships, and force them to move and lose more, including their residency permits to return.
Without Israeli permission, those building new homes or extending existing ones risk demotions, fines, and displacement, a patently illegal process. Yet the Municipal authority "dictates where and when Palestinians can build," as well as whether they can do it at all under the 1965 Israeli Planning and Building Law, providing "a thin veil of legitimacy" by systematically denying permits, prohibiting construction, and demolishing homes in violation.
This law, others, and official policies constitute Israel's discriminatory, illegal planning system, implemented ruthlessly against Palestinians, given no recourse but to object and be denied nearly always. As a result, East Jerusalemites face an acute housing crisis, their right to live freely on their land denied, many forced to relocate or build without permits, risking recrimination and dispossession.
Amir Cheshin explained more about her experience under Teddy Kollek, saying:
"Israel has transformed urban planning into a tool in the hands of the Government whose object is to prevent the spread of the non-Jewish population of the city. This was (and remains) a cruel policy, if only by reason of the fact that it disregards the needs (and rights) of the Palestinian residents. Israel regarded the institution of a stringent urban planning policy as a way to restrict the number of new houses being constructed in Palestinian neighbourhoods (sic), and thus ensure that the percentage of Palestinian residents in the city's population - 28.8% in 1967 - would not increase."
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