 Hey guys, welcome back to my YouTube channel. This is Daniel Rosel here and bringing you this video today from a place I've come up before on my video making expeditions in Jerusalem. This place is called Mavina Park but this place is actually in the news at the moment as the probable site of a future US embassy in Jerusalem. Now even people who live in Jerusalem, I've been living here for seven years, probably if you told them have you heard of Mavina Park, they would give you a blank look. It's known in Hebrew as Makhanei Alembi, Alembi Camp and I'll get to how that name came about just in a little bit here. It's this little box of land located between Derech Hebron, which in English is Hebron Road. One of the main traffic thoroughfares running through Jerusalem. On this side where my hand is, we have Daniel Yanovsky Street and Terim which is a sort of urgent care facility and then just up there on the left is Hanuk Albeg. So it's basically this little box and it's basically a wilderness and there's really not much to do here. As you can see I'm sitting on a sort of makeshift campfire. There's bottles of Heineken. It's in pretty bad condition, which is a pity because it's a lovely park besides all the debris and the dirt. There's lovely beautiful tall trees behind me. But this is believe it or not the site that has been earmarked for a future US embassy in Jerusalem. I've talked in past videos about how controversial the whole business of establishing embassies in Jerusalem and that the practice of most nations unfortunately has been to put their embassies in Israel literally anywhere except in Jerusalem. But this place has a pretty interesting history and I'm just I printed out the news coverage of this at the moment and what's going on. So the main embassy building is going to be 10 meters high and they expect that construction if this goes ahead is going to take more than a decade. So I wanted to make this video today because it's going to be interesting to see if in 15 years into the future if I'm still around. Hopefully I will be. This will be a highly, highly secure guarded US embassy facility and it's just kind of hard to imagine looking around at this emptiness now that that's going to be the case. So what we've had now is we're coming into a 60 day objection period and the district planning and building committee is then if there is if the objections aren't don't sway the planning committee then it's the US is going to be giving green light for construction. Now it's interesting because the US already has a couple of embassy and diplomatic buildings located in Jerusalem. When the US moved their embassy to Jerusalem quite controversially a few years ago they put it in what was formerly a consul building in Talbiot, Mizrach and there's also in downtown on a grown street there is a Palestinian affairs unit called the PAU. A lot of people aren't sure what that is it's now used to be a consulate general. I've talked in a previous video about how the consulates and consulate generals in Jerusalem are actually representations to the Palestinian Authority and that was also the case for the US building. It was basically a self-administering representation to the PA. However since the US embassy was moved to Jerusalem it's now part of the embassy. So what's probably going to happen is that that's going to continue serving as a sort of liaison service with the Palestinian Authority the PA. The building in Talbiot, Mizrach I believe is probably going to be continued as a consulate because when the embassy was moved there I read in the news that you know it wasn't really ever intended to be an embassy in terms of the level of security needed for a US embassy. But this place has been actually earmarked for a very very long time. One more interesting detail before I wrap up this video. In the last days of the Reagan presidency, January 18th 1989, just literally less than a month before I was born, US ambassador to Israel William Brown and Israel's land Israel lands authority deputy director Moshe Gad signed an agreement according to which a plot of land in Jerusalem this is from the times of Israel would be leased from Israel to the US for 99 years for the sum the token sum of one dollar per year. The 15-page land lease and purchase agreement referred only to the Jerusalem property but almost immediately report surfaced later confirmed the land in question was located in what was known as the Alambi Barracks the site of the British Army's Jerusalem garrison during the mandate period. Palestinian scholar Walid Khalidi wrote in a 2000 article for the Journal of Palestine Studies. So this place not a lot of people are the history and that's why it's called the Alambi compound that during the British mandate period there was actually you can see some historical aerial photos incredible Tal Piot located just off that way hadn't even been built yet and you can literally see the tents of the British Army were based literally where I'm sitting and what is now a wilderness. So this little inconspicuous park Mavina Park today located wedge between Derech Havron and Yanovsky is if all plans go to come to fruition will be a US embassy building in probably a little bit over a decade.