Within a decade, Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport will reach its maximum capacity. Only recently, after years of postponements, committees, reports and decisions, did the government approve a planning budget for the construction of an airport in Ramat David in the Jezreel Valley in northern Israel, or in Nevatim near Beersheba in the south.
But now Interior Minister Moshe Arbel is seeking to promote the idea of building an airport near Beit Shean in northeastern Israel, a possibility that has already proven impractical.
In 2011, the government recognized the “urgent national need” to build an additional airport in Israel to complement Ben Gurion Airport. In 2014, the government settled on Ramat David as the preferred site, subject to the judgment of planning institutions. The National Council for Planning and Building began examining the possibilities in 2016, and issued the Shafran Committee Report in 2017. The committee recommended moving forward with planning for Nevatim and Ramat David, but stressed that “Ramat David is clearly preferable from an economic and aviation standpoint, while Nevatim suffers from aviation restrictions but is preferable from an environmental impact standpoint in the noise aspect. Since dealing with noise is solvable, the recommendation is to move forward initially with a detailed plan for a supplementary airport in Ramat David.” Other possibilities were examined, but were determined to be impractical.
Opposition to building an airport in Ramat David was very strong. The heads of local authorities near the planned airport objected, while the heads of local authorities in the south demanded that plans for a new airport be implemented in Nevatim, which is close to them, an alternative that the Defense Ministry opposed.
When the previous government was formed in 2021, it decided to cancel the previous decisions and conduct another comprehensive survey of potential sites. Once again, a committee headed by the Transport Ministry was formed, but its final 600-page report was not signed or distributed, perhaps because the recommendations again included Ramat David.
In the current government, the controversy erupted again, as Transportation Minister Miri Regev supported the alternative “Nevatim” project, along with the heads of local authorities in the south, while the Ministry of Defense opposed it, and the Ministry of Finance pushed for “Ramat David.”
Sources in the sector explained that the local elections held this year mean that Regev will not back down from her decision, because the promotion of Ramat David was a blow to the heads of local authorities in the south. In any case, the government decided in January to promote the Ramat David and Nevatim sites in parallel, and 20 million shekels were allocated for planning.
“Cheap demagoguery”
Now the decisions are in the hands of the National Planning and Building Council. In the meantime, according to sources in the sector, Erbil has instructed that the possibility of building an airport in Beit Shean be examined. His staff say they merely sought to understand why the possibility of building an airport near Beit Shean was ruled out. This is thirteen years after the need for an additional airport was identified, and eight years after the decision was made to build it in Ramat David.
Meanwhile, emotions ran high last week at a meeting of the Knesset’s Internal Affairs and Environment Committee, when the committee, at the request of MK Matti Sarfati-Harkavi (Yesh Atid), discussed the planning implications of building an airport in Ramat David. The heads of the neighboring local authorities argued that they are already required to observe planning and construction restrictions in 23 local authorities. At the same time, the mayor of Dimona called for the construction of an airport in Nevatim.
The head of the Interior Ministry’s planning department, Rafi Almalah, rejected the allegations, saying that the department is continuing to promote two additional airports for Ben Gurion, in Ramat David and Nevatim, after examining all the possibilities professionally. “It is inconceivable that the State of Israel will remain with one airport, when the forecast is 75 million passengers in 2050. If you want us to have to reserve a place at Ben Gurion Airport a year in advance, then the situation can be left as it is,” Almalah said.
He added that “the planned airport in Ramat David is located on the site of the existing military airport, and therefore the restrictions on construction today are almost identical to those that will be applied in the future. Therefore, the claims of harming agriculture in the Jezreel Valley or stopping the projects are nothing more than cheap demagoguery.”
“Minister Arbel sought to know the reasons for the rejection of building an airport near Beit Shean, and did not seek to promote any airport in addition to what the government decided at this time,” a statement from Interior Minister Moshe Arbel’s office said.
This article was published in Globes, Israeli Business News – en.globes.co.il – on August 6, 2024.
© Copyright Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd., 2024.