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.
Author: Daniella Cheslow
Daniella Cheslow grew up in a car-dependent suburb in New Jersey, where she noticed strip malls and Wal-Marts slowly replacing farmland. Her introduction to nature came through hiking trips in Israel. As a counselor for a freshman backpacking program at Northwestern University, Daniella noticed that Americans outdoors seemed to need to arm themselves with performance clothing, specialized water bottles and sophisticated camping silverware. This made her think about how to interact with and enjoy nature simply. This year, Daniella is getting a Master’s in Geography from Ben Gurion University of the Negev. She also freelance writes, photographs and podcasts. In her free time, she takes day trips in the desert, drops off compost and cooks local foods like stuffed zucchini, kubbeh and majadara. Daniella gets her peak oil anxiety from James Howard Kunstler and her organic food dreams from Michael Pollan. Read more at her blog, TheTruthHerzl.com. Daniella can be reached at daniella (at) greenprophet (dot) com.
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.