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What Do the Residents of Har Homa Say?
(Ha'aretz) Nir Hasson - In less than a decade, Har Homa (officially Homat Shmuel - "Samuel's wall") has 20,000 residents, wide streets, modern infrastructure, and plans to build another 2,000 housing units. The neighborhood was set up in the face of strong Palestinian and international protests during Benjamin Netanyahu's first term as prime minister. Attorney Herzl Yechezkel, one of the first residents of the new neighborhood, has been the head of its residents' committee since its inception. "I remember the fight that accompanied the birth of the neighborhood....Then everyone threatened that there would be a third world war. The bottom line was that [Faisal] al-Husseini made some noise and some headlines but when we started to actually build, the whole world was quiet." "It's our right to build up Jerusalem...the capital of the Jewish people....The demands of the world are hallucinatory. It's as if I were to say: Don't build in Washington."