Har Homa

   Known to Arabs as Jebel Abu-Ghneim, the area is about 1 mile north of Bethlehem on the southern outskirts of Jerusalem. It is located between Kibbutz Ramat Rahel and the Arab neighborhood of Beit Shaur, just beyond the Green Line. A rocky promontory, it was a largely uninhabited hilltop in an increasingly dense urban landscape. At 2,500 feet above sea level and 3,900 feet above Dead Sea level, the site offers commanding vistas of Jerusalem's old city and of the Judean Desert. Good new roads make it a 10-minute drive to Jerusalem's main shopping districts.

   Israeli proposals to build residential communities at Har Homa predate the Oslo Accords, though the plans had been deferred by the governments of Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres for fear of upsetting the diplomatic process. The project required the appropriation of land from both Jewish and Arab landowners. Israel's Supreme Court upheld the government's right to appropriate this land in order to meet the housing needs of the public at large. After the initial groundbreaking for the project in March 1997, the Palestinian Authority angrily broke off peace talks, beginning an impasse that lasted until the negotiations at the Wye River Plantation in October 1998. The United Nations adopted resolutions of condemnation against Israel regarding the project, and under Arab pressure, the General Assembly used the Har Homa controversy as a pretext to call upon the government of Switzerland to convene an unprecedented meeting of the high contracting parties to the fourth Geneva Convention to discuss ways of forcing Israel to apply the convention in the Occupied Territories and in Jerusalem.

   Palestinians viewed the Har Homa project as part of an Israeli plan to encircle Arab sections of Jerusalem and to erect physical barriers between the city and areas of the West Bank transferred to Palestinian control under the Oslo process and in any future peace agreement. Along with other neighborhoods of Jerusalem, such as Ramot, Talpiot, and Gilo, Har Homa contributes to a ring of Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem. There were preliminary discussions within the Israeli government about the construction of additional residential housing units at Har Homa around the time of United States president George W. Bush's visit to Israel and the Palestinian Authority areas in January 2008.

   See also Arab-Israeli Conflict.