President Trump meets with Prime Minister Netanyahu, says embassy will be built for $250,000, considering attending May opening
When U.S. President Donald Trump met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House on Monday the name Arnona may have been brought up.
If not, it’s likely a name the President will be hearing at some point if he hasn’t already.
The Arnona neighborhood is an upscale suburb of Jerusalem, about a 15-minute drive from the city center. Local residents have been talking a lot lately about their prominent new neighbor moving in soon: The United States Ambassador to Israel.
“On the one hand it can raise up the value of the property, and it’s good for the reputation of the neighborhood. But I have some mixed feelings,” Arnona resident Noga Corcos told The Media Line on a recent afternoon while walking home from the grocery store. “I’m a little bit afraid that now it will be a little bit crowded or that people will now make protests here and there will be more tension.”
Corcos lives across the street from the U.S. Consulate building in Arnona, where American citizens can renew passports, replace lost or stolen ones, and Israeli citizens can apply for visas.
It’s also where a temporary U.S. Embassy will be located.
The Trump administration announced the embassy will be relocated from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in May, to coincide with Israel’s 70th anniversary.
The consulate compound, which sits just inside the 1949 Armistice Agreement Line (commonly referred to as the 1967 borders), is a fairly nondescript building along the hillside that could easily be missed if not for the large American flag on its roof.
“I never felt like I was actually close to the American consulate. People ask me where do I get my visa, how do I get to the American consulate? So in that respect I never felt it effected daily life here,” Corcos said, looking out over the consulate building’s iron fence. “Maybe it will now. I hope for the better.”
At Tomer’s Bread shop, a neighborhood cafe in Arnona where people can stop for a cappuccino before going to the hair salon next door, locals agree there has been a lot of talk about the embassy’s relocation.
“I definitely have mixed feelings about it,” said Shira Winther, who was having lunch with her mother Anat Zuria. “I don’t know if it [the embassy announcement] was done so elegantly. I’m not so sure it was the right way to do it.… It’s sad that it hurts somehow the process that we would like to get to some kind of compromise and some kind of peace.”
But she agreed it may ultimately be positive for the neighborhood and for regional diplomacy.
“I think it’s very important for all embassies to know Jerusalem, to come to Jerusalem, because you have a much better representation of Israel in Jerusalem. You have Jews, you have Arabs, you have ultra-Orthodox, you have some non-religious people,” Winther told The Media Line. “For us it’s more a question of if you can take this heated issue and turn it into something positive.”
Her mother agreed.
“From a local perspective it will be nice for the neighborhood,” Zuria told The Media Line. “Always when you have an embassy located in the neighborhood or area, you see more diplomats,” which, she noted, may, in turn, increase property values, politics aside.
The U.S. Consulate is split between two buildings in Jerusalem, the consular services building in the Arnona area, and the Consul General Residence building and offices along Gershon Agron Street in the city center.
During his meeting on Monday with Netanyahu, President Trump said he was considering attending the opening of the new embassy, adding it would be built for $250,000—a much cheaper initiative than the billion-dollar price tag he said was recently proposed.
“We’re going to have it built very quickly and very inexpensively. They put an order in front of my desk last week for a billion dollars,” President Trump told reporters. “I said, ‘a billion? What’s that for? We’re going to build an embassy.”
The State Department recently confirmed that office space will be set up at the current consulate building in Arnona for U.S. Ambassador David Friedman and a small staff. State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert revealed in February that “we have started the search for a site for our permanent Embassy to Israel, the planning and construction of which will be a longer-term undertaking.”
Another location that has been eyed for a permanent mission is a vacant lot on the corner of Hebron Road and Daniel Yanovsky Street in Jerusalem.
The property has a contentious history.
In a report for the Journal of Palestinian Studies, leading Palestinian scholar Dr. Walid Khalidi wrote that on January 18, 1989, “an agreement was signed between Israel and the United States according to which a plot of land in West Jerusalem, [7.7 acres] in size, was leased to the U.S. government for a rent of $1 per annum for ninety-nine years renewable.”
The property was known as the Allenby Barracks, the site of the British army’s Jerusalem garrison during the British Mandate. The site was also alleged to have been part of an Islamic Trust (Waqf) before it was requisitioned by the British High Commission of Palestine in September 1930.
Today, the property is littered with trash and surrounded by apartment buildings and may not be conducive to building an embassy, whereas the U.S. consulate services building is already a secure compound with an adjacent property that could be used for additional government space.
The U.S. government owns the Diplomat Hotel, also known as the Diplomat Home for Senior Citizens, next door. It currently houses some 500 elderly Russian immigrants.
Security guards prevented this reporter and a photographer from interviewing any of the residents, telling us to leave the property. Those we tried to speak with declined to talk, saying they were scared of government retaliation.
Israel’s Ministry of Absorption and Integration sent the residents a notice letter that they would be relocated by the year 2020. But so far, they have no idea where they will be going.
The daughter of one 78-year-old resident confirmed that people are indeed concerned. “I come every so often to visit my mom and people are very worried here and they don’t know where they will be transferred,” Tatiana Schum told The Media Line. “They [government] makes promises but nothing is for sure. Just hot air. And there is nobody to talk to.”
Israeli parliamentarian Ksenia Svetlova, who represents the Diplomat Hotel residents, has demanded answers from the government.
“My first priority is to know what is happening with these people. Where are they going to go? I want them to stay in Jerusalem,” Svetlova stressed to The Media Line. “They live in Jerusalem from the first day that they came to Israel. It’s just fair that these very old people will live in dignity until the end in the place where they know everything.”
A special parliamentary committee hearing is scheduled March 19th to discuss the relocation of the Diplomat Hotel residents, a story that, until this point, has received little attention.
“I’m afraid these 500 people will be dispersed through different facilities, maybe not even in Jerusalem and now we have two years, believe me it is not enough,” Svetlova concluded. “They want to know where they are going and when it is going to happen…. They are left in the cold. Nobody is speaking to them.”