You heard it here when Jenin got a mall-ish furniture superstore. Now East Jerusalem is also joining the trend. According to Danny Rubinstein at YnetNews, the Nusseibeh family has started work on the A-Dar Mall on Salah-a-Din Street, right outside the Old City in the Sheikh Jarrakh neighborhood (Photo of Salah-a-Din Street from Wiki Images)
This is a recycling project, as the ten-story building has been in Nusseibeh hands since the Ottoman rule. In the past it was a children’s home, an infirmary and a school.
The first floors of the building will be for shops, while the higher storeys will house offices. According to Ynet, it’s “the first commercial enterprise in East Jerusalem since its [1967] annexation to Israel.”
I highly support building a commercial site in the center of town. Rather than a suburban-type shopping center at the edge of a city, which sucks out the business of small local merchants, more shops and offices in the middle of downtown can bring people to the area and help the storekeepers around it.
It’s a good question, and maybe it is worth taking the Ynet claim with a grain of salt. Maybe they mean large-scale.
This sentence has perplexed me since I read on Ynet the other day:
“the first commercial enterprise in East Jerusalem since its [1967] annexation to Israel.”
East Jerusalem will certainly benefit from investment, but it’s fair to say that the Damascus Gate area is brimming with businesses and commercial activity – many of which are less than 42 years old.