The Letter (H)On 21 July 2005, Adalah and Bimkom – Planners for Planning Rights submitted a request to the Ministry of the Interior's Northern District Supervisor, Mr. Herzl Gedj, to include the western Al-Mal neighborhood of Wadi Salameh village within the master plan for the village. The request was submitted by Adalah Attorney Suhad Bishara, Adalah Urban and Regional Planner Hanna Hamdan, and Bimkom Urban and Regional Planner Nili Baruch.
Adalah and Bimkom included a planning advisory opinion prepared by Bimkom in the request submitted to Mr. Gedj. The advisory opinion describes the current situation in the neighborhood, its strong connection to Wadi Salameh, the planning background of the village and the planning considerations behind the request to have the neighborhood incorporated within the borders of the village. The request also included a conceptual sketch of the proposed expansion.
Wadi Salameh, which is located in the Galilee in the north of Israel and falls under the jurisdiction of the Misgav Regional Council, has a population of approximately 3,000 Palestinian citizens of Israel, living in 11 neighborhoods. The western neighborhood, known also as Al-Mal, is one of the oldest neighborhoods in the village. The 150 residents of Al-Mal have geographical, social, planning, and functional connections to Wadi Salameh. Wadi Salameh is central to their lives in terms of social relations and access to health, educational, welfare, religious, commercial and employment services. Nevertheless, the neighborhood has been excluded from the village's master plan since its approval in 1990.
In the request, Adalah and Bimkom argued that the exclusion of Al-Mal from the master plan of Wadi Salameh prevents the neighborhood from developing effectively, and denies its inhabitants the ability to connect their homes to infrastructural services such as water or electricity. As a result of their neighborhood's exclusion from village's master plan, inhabitants of Al-Mal are also denied permits when they want to carry out structural work on their houses or build new apartments, in accordance with their demographic growth.
Moreover, as Adalah and Bimkom emphasized in the request, when the district master plan (Tamam 2/9) was prepared, a committee was established in order to decide how to deal with the unrecognized villages in the area. The committee, which included representatives of the Ministry of the Interior, the Israel Lands Administration (ILA), the Jewish Agency and the security agencies, stated that the neighborhood should be merged with an existing recognized settlement; i.e. Wadi Salameh. The decision, however, has yet to be implemented.
Adalah and Bimkom further argued in the request that the current planning situation severely harms the neighborhood's residents' constitutional right to property, as well as their rights to a home, adequate living conditions, and development. Furthermore, excluding the neighborhood of Al-Mal from the borders of the master plan constitutes a severe violation of the principle of equality and discriminates against its residents. Although Al-Mal enjoys geographical proximity to the rest of the village, and boasts many fundamental characteristics found in other neighborhoods which have been included in the existing master plan, it remains the only neighborhood to have been excluded from the master plan's prospective borders, without any practical justification.