Ma'alot Dafna was built as part of the sequence of Jewish neighborhoods called the bariah or hinge neighborhoods connecting West Jerusalem to Mount Scopus. On July 1967, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol gave a clerk named Yehuda Tamir unusual authority to overlook governmental building license policy in order to speed up the establishment of the hinge neighborhoods (Ma'alot Dafna, Ramat Eshkol, Givat HaMivtar, and French Hill). The neighborhood was designed so that it could serve the adjacent neighborhood of Shmuel HaNavi, a poorly designed and problematic lower-class neighborhood, which until the Six Day War faced a large enemy fort.