How long Shall the Wicked Rejoice אדריכלות ישראלית Architecture of Israel #142 August 2025 | 60 | future-oriented decisions based on data inferred from previous circumstances, such as in medicine, agriculture, and obviously architectural efficiency. The danger becomes even more acute when AI is used to fabricate judicial precedents, leading to fictitious rulings that only a judge with a chip in his brain might proffer. Perhaps the clearest failure of using past data to plan the future is evidenced in urban planning. Modern cities, "obsessed" with a constantly changing reality, turn every city into perpetual construction sites. This, in contrast to organically grown cities which thrive for centuries as long as they avoid renewal plans, that at best, strip them of their soul. Ironically, the confusing and contradictory nature of current planning laws becomes a tool for authorities to trample individual rights in order to enrich their own wealth, driven by (in too many cases, corrupt) politicians fiercely protected by loyal “Legal Defenders.” To illustrate this, we issued a Public Call for architects harmed by malicious interpretations from planning departments. The responses were immediate. Architect Ilan Flint, who was one of the saviors of the Templar Colony of Sarona from a corrupt demolition plan, wrote: “All planning laws and municipal guidelines in Israel lack logic and result in uninspired, mediocre architecture. When the foundation is crooked, everything that follows is distorted.” Architect Nachum Cohen, a key figure in Jaffa’s planning and author of several international books on urban design, noted: "Paris has one master plan. Tel Aviv has over 4,000… and to design a neighborhood one must study at least 11 different master plans. You try to replicate something a fellow architect once did, only to be told it's forbidden. When you ask why it was approved for them but not for you, the answer is always the same: ‘That was a special case. But of course, these 'special cases' tend to always benefit the same lucky few." Architect Kipper who is an expert in permit procedures, shared in the "Sane Permit" Facebook group: "I tried to list all the hundreds of steps needed to get a permit, starting from requesting information, photographing the lot from every angle with marked viewpoints, renaming files for better indexing, signing corner-point forms with the surveyor… It’s enough to kill any desire to practice architecture...did I miss anything?" One active user reminded him: "Don't forget the countless unnecessary "asscovering" forms demanded by local authorities, like the so-called Tree Survey, requiring a certified agronomist, in many cases an ongoing mapping exercise costing thousands of Shekels. Astonishingly, in this vein, I was told by another resident of a city near Tel Aviv, that a 50-year-old home of one resident was approved by the local authority to be erased in favour of his neighbor…' And especially for such cases, it says in Psalms 94: "How long shall the wicked rejoice while the righteous weep?”
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