This new airport serves as Israel's principal gateway and represents the country's most optimistic aspirations. A landside complex accommodates ticketing, customs, immigration, and baggage claim; Safdie's airside complex includes a glazed connector and rotunda accommodating food, retail facilities, and passenger services, with concourses radiating outwards to landing gates.

More than 16 million passengers per year travel through this entry to the nation, which is expressed in a clean palette of glass, warm stone, and metal. Departing passengers check in and descend through the connector into the rotunda, then down the concourses to their gates. Arriving passengers ascend through bridges at the gates to a mezzanine level that overlooks the concourses and the rotunda, then descend toward passport control through the connector.

Traversed by arriving and departing visitors, the glass-enclosed scissor-shaped ramps dramatize the ideal of open borders and serve as a ceremonial gateway in both directions.

The airport's rotunda features an inverted dome pierced by an oculus through which a waterfall flows. Falling rain drains toward the dome's center, entering the rotunda through the oculus. In the dry season, a continuous flow of water washes the roof, helping to cool the rotunda and create a fountain through the oculus.

Block 38 is one of several parcels located in the once destroyed Jewish quarter, overlooking the Western Wall precinct, forming the outer edge of Jerusalem's Old City. Moshe Safdie was retained to plan the restoration and reconstruction of 7 buildings to be made suitable for 37 modern apartments totaling 6,144 square metres. Characteristic architectural details included large arched windows, terraced enclosures and roof gardens covered by convertible domes. The domes were partially opaque, partially transparent, and rotated on a track which slid open to form roofless terraces, or closed to form greenhouse solariums.