Towers mar Jerusalem skyline

Multi-storey hotels for 20th century pilgrims to the Holy Land are replacing church spires and minarets on the skyline of Jersualern, which has changed more in the past five years of Israeli rule than in any similar period of its 4.000-year history.
A dozen new commercial projects, begun since Israel captured the old walled city from Jordan in the 1967 Middle East war, threaten to blot out the belfries and red-tiled roofs which characterise the hilltop city.
Yehuda Haezrachi, a !cadet of the public campaign against building near the ancient city walls, said: "The 20th century arrived in Jerusalem only after 1967. If we are not very careful, the builders could obliterate the religious character of the Old City." Haezrachi's group, the Jerusalem Committee of the Council For a Beautiful Israel, fears that the half-mile-square
walled compound will be dwarfed by skyscraper hotels.
He asked: "Could you picture a 20-storey modern monster of an hotel outside the walls just opposite the 2,000-year-old Citadel of King David? Or how about an hotel so high that casts a shadow across the Jaffa Gate for much of the day?"
So far, the committee has successfully opposed government approved plans for five multi-storey hotels to be built on different sides of the walled city within-acity.
Planning authorities said they had given approval for more than 25 tower hotels and apartments to make room for thousands of people, especially Jewish immigrants, who want to live in the Israeli capital.
Mike Turner, head of the municipal planning unit, said: "We are growing more rapidly than in the entire history of the city. The population of 300,000 is burgeoning."
Mr. 1 urner said at./ per cent more buildings were under construction today than existed in all of the Israeli held half of the city up tei the 1967 war. Many of them were block apartment houses on the barren, oncepicturesque Judean Hills around the city.
Before his unit was created by the city government in 1970, in the midst of a "Save the skyline" hubbub, construction had begun on several now-completed buildings, including one which has eliminated the headquarters of the Rabbinate from the skyline.
Alleged political and security considerations are the reasons behind much of the building virtually all of it in areas of the city captured in the 1967 war.
One city official said: "We have got to have a Jewish presence in all parts of the city, just to prove our intention never to return East (Arab) Jerusalem."
Of the 24,000 housing units under construction since 1967, all hut 2.000 are on land across the former "green line" border separating the Israeli and Jordanian halves of the city. Thus come the accusations that Jerusalem is being "Judaised."
One government architect, Art Kutcher, 32, a graduate of Yale University, resigned rather than design projects he believed would mar the hillside of Mt. Scopus. the Mount of Olives and the Hill of Evil Counsel. He sail: "I wouldn't rest quietly in my grave if people said I ruined Jerusalem."
His personal battle against high-rise hotels encircling the Old City began when he "leaked" drawings of a proposed 23 storey hotel to two Israeli newspapers. Within four days, plans for the multi-million dollar tower were shelved