JERUSALEM — Residents jokingly refer to “Lower Ramat Shlomo”: In the parking area beneath apartments, instead of cars, wood-veneer doors mark homes fashioned illegally to accommodate a bursting population. Elsewhere in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighborhood of East Jerusalem, courtyards and porches are enclosed by wood, glass, even burlap — every available space, it seems, transformed into makeshift shacks by a community whose growth has been stymied by the fraught politics of this contested city.
“It’s not too far from Delhi or Bombay,” Ezra Berger, the head of Ramat Shlomo’s Community Council, said with admitted exaggeration as he showed sidewalks dotted with racks of drying laundry. “It’s like a ticking time bomb in the neighborhood — it’s a social bomb, and it’s also a health bomb.”
Built two decades ago on land captured from Jordan by Israel in the 1967 war, Ramat Shlomo has become a prime symbol of Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians and, especially, its diplomatic confrontations with Washington and the rest of the world. On Monday, after an Israeli committee approved about 500 new apartments in Ramat Shlomo, the Obama administration condemned the measure — for at least the sixth time since expansion plans were unveiled during a 2010 visit to Jerusalem by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
“It would be unfortunate at this sensitive time that after the unequivocal and unanimous position last week of the United States and others in the international community opposing construction in East Jerusalem, Israeli authorities are actively seeking to move these plans forward,” said Edgar Vasquez, a State Department spokesman. “We continue to engage at the highest levels with the Israeli government to make our position absolutely clear that we view settlement activity as illegitimate and that we unequivocally oppose unilateral steps that prejudge the future of Jerusalem.”
But for all the international outrage that Ramat Shlomo has engendered, not a single new home has been built there in a decade.