Posted on July 4, 2006
By Meron Rapoport
The first landmine appeared within the first minute of the interview with Yehud
Mayor Yossi Ben-David. Yehud was established in 1950, he began, żon the
foundations of the moshava [Jewish farming community] here, some of whose homes
were Arab houses from the period of the Turks and the English.
Moshava? There was an Arab village here, if I'm not mistaken.
"An Arab village? I don't like using that concept, Arab village. Tomorrow
all the Arabs will come here, you know how it is."
I didn't insist. You don't have to go to the Bible or the history books to see
that Yehud has existed at least since Joshua conquered the Land of Israel. It is
mentioned in the Book of Joshua as one of the cities given to the tribe of Dan.
Since then it has been settled by many different peoples, including Arabs. They
lived there for about 1,000 years, until 1948. According to the 1945 census
carried out by the British, Yehud had a population of 5,800, including 150 Jews.
The evidence of this is visible: The mosque and its minaret (apparently built in
the 13th century) are right under Ben-David's window.
Ben-David does not like it when people argue with him. It can be said, to his
credit, that his impatience is not reserved only for the press. When the door of
his office opened a few minutes into the interview and two men entered the room,
Ben-David was beside himself with anger. And ten minutes later, he showed me the
door.
"I see that you're a little antagonistic," Ben-David said. "The
interview is over, write whatever you want," the mayor said after I tried
to comprehend why he had decided to demolish the historic center of Yehud and to
replace it with the historic center of Lugano, straight from the Swiss Alps.
The center of what remains of the Arab village, or "Old Yehud" as
Ben-David called it during our short conversation, is Sa'adia Hatuka Street, now
a pedestrian promenade. It was named for the town's legendary mayor from the
1980s, who put Yehud on the national map. The street used to be called Kibbutz
Galuyot, and the town's old-timers remember it fondly as the place to be when
Yehud was a small town.
The old center and the surrounding area began to decline after a mall was built
in the new Kiryat Hasavionim neighborhood about a decade ago. Nevertheless, a
pleasant small-town feeling remains, with old-fashioned stores and a
"park-bench parliament" of old men speaking Judeo-Spanish. A large
portion of the Jews who settled in Yehud during the 1950s came from Turkey, and
according to local legend even the Ashkenazi and Yemenite Jews in the city had
to learn Judeo-Spanish in order to get by.
Eye on Europe
The idea of renovating the old center is not a new one: The Interior Ministry
began developing a master plan for the area 10 years ago. According to Yehud's
municipal engineer, Monica Har-Zion, formerly the engineer of the district
planning council, the plan aimed to reconstruct the ambience of the Arab
village's casbah, while calling for the destruction of many of the existing
buildings. Yehud's political leadership was unsupportive, however, so the
program stalled.
The change came a few years ago. The previous mayor, Uzi Meir, visited Lugano,
Switzerland, with his then-deputy Yossi Ben-David. Both men were excited by what
they saw, and a new plan was born to replicate Lugano in the center of Yehud.
Meir began the process; Ben-David took it over and ran with it. His offices look
like an advertising agency, with select Swiss pastoral photos and blueprints of
the plan to bring Lugano to Yehud.
Ben-David is drawn to all things Italian. Like a textile merchant, he travels
frequently to northern Italy. True, Lugano is in Switzerland, but it is the
country's Italian canton.
Why Lugano, of all places?
"There's a huge commercial center there," Ben-David said. "Like
in Florence. If you've ever been to Florence, then you've seen how busy it is
during the evenings and weekends. It's an alternative to a mall, with many more
elements. There's a commercial center, a shopping center, a residential center,
a tourism center. Here [in Yehud] there will be hotels like in Europe, small
ones with 25 or 30 rooms, because the city is close to the airport. Someone with
a flight can come here [the night before] and then go to the airport in the
morning."
Israel Rosio, the architect who drew up the plans for the Yehud municipality,
explained that Lugano was considered a suitable model because it and Yehud have
several aspects in common. Both the Arab village of Yehud and Lugano have
winding streets with squares. But there is nothing of the streets of an Arab
village in Rosio's plan. At its heart are four- to five-story apartment
buildings, with facades mimicking those in central Lugano: painted shades of
lemon, peach or apricot with neo-Classical columns and windows with
neo-Classical arches.
The entire area will be a pedestrian mall, with ground-level shops and public
squares. Ben-David prefers to call them piazzas.
Rosio has about the same affection for Arab Yehud as Ben-David does. He wants to
get rid of it all. The sole remaining signs would be the minaret (the mosque
itself would be destroyed), the old municipal office building and a Mamluk-era
tomb that the Muslims associated with Judah, the son of Jacob, and which has
become a Jewish prayer site. The grave is also the source of Yehud's Arabic
name, Yahudia.
"We didn't think there was anything to preserve in these houses,"
Rosio said. "The only thing left of the Arab houses is a lot of junk.
There's no reason to preserve the mosque, either, it's just an ordinary Arab
house. As a native of Yehud, I have no problem getting rid of it. These remains
don't do anything for me. This is a new country."
But even Rosio, who describes himself as a friend of Ben-David, has reservations
about the name "Lugano Plan."
"I told Yossi not to call it the 'Lugano Plan,' because that would attract
criticism, people would say Switzerland is being transplanted to Yehud,"
Rosio said. "But Yossi has all sorts of fantasies, he thinks the houses
will look like they do in Lugano. The people on the district planning council
were turned on by it, and the planner said it should be the model for other
cities. She suggested calling it 'The Yehud Casbah,' but no one would want to
come if it were called the casbah."
"'Lugano Plan' is a bombastic name," said Meir, the former mayor.
"Lugano has one million tourists a year, but Yehud has no lake, no snow and
no mountains." Meir recommends a little modesty. He also thinks the plan is
unlikely to be executed. The cost of the project has been estimated at up to
$250 million. Meir does not believe that developers will invest that kind of
money in Yehud.
Other motives?
Detractors are convinced that Ben-David's eagerness in promoting the plan has a
single motivation: making Ben-David even richer than he already is. Ben-David,
as he has admitted on the "Bulldog" investigative television program,
owns "five or six stores" on Yehud's pedestrian mall. He leases the
shops in a key-money arrangement, but if they are demolished as part of the
Lugano Plan he will receive a handsome compensation package. Experts say the
value of the properties would be tripled. A 100-square-meter shop on Sa'adia
Hatuka Street is currently worth about $100,000; the math is easy.
One of the leaders of the fight against Ben-David is attorney Uriel Ben-Assouli.
He was born on Kibbutz Degania Bet; his wife Tova was born in Yehud.
"Yehud was a little village, where everybody knew each other, and Ben-David
is trying to turn it into a big city," Tova Ben-Assouli said. "We had
local pride, and we weren't ashamed of the Arab past, either. Ben-David is
selling [storeowners] on the pedestrian mall [the idea] that they will get a
bigger shop. But people don't believe him. It doesn't suit us."
Yehud's Arab past is of interest to Michael Jacobson, an architecture student at
Jerusalem's Bezalel Academy of Art and Design whose final project is on an
alternative plan for Yehud. Jacobson actually agrees that the remaining Arab
houses in Yehud are of no real aesthetic value.
"What I am proposing is not to restore the houses, with the exception of
the public buildings, but rather to preserve the urban texture, the street
layout of the Arab village," Jacobson explained.
Jacobson's project spurred Zochrot ["Remembering"], an Israeli
organization that aims to preserve the memory of the Palestinian Nakba
("catastrophe" - the founding of the State of Israel), to oppose the
next phase of the Lugano Plan. Zochrot recently petitioned the local planning
committee over the planned destruction of the remnants of the pre-1948 Arab
settlement in Yehud, as dictated by this part of the plan. Jacobson said that
when he spoke to Yehud residents about the city's Arab past, they panicked. But
when he coached it in terms of preserving Yehud's character, they understood
immediately.
Ben-David, however, has no intention of giving up on his plan. He does not even
insist on the name Lugano Plan anymore, and is willing to replace it with the
Ramblas Plan, after the famous avenue that leads to the port in Barcelona.
And it doesn't bother you that you are replacing Yehud's history with that of
another place?
"Some people study history and others make history," Ben-David said.
"I am one of those who did not study history but who made history."
Click here, to
view the article at Ha'aritz Daily.
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