Foundations
The West Side Story
Jerusalem’s Palestinians were not always concentrated in its east side as they are today. Before 1948, Palestinians built and developed the emerging New City, and they enjoyed a cosmopolitan urban life. Here we explore how the area that is today called West Jerusalem was violently and forcibly emptied of Arabs and reincarnated as exclusively Jewish from 1947 onward.
Featured in This Topic
In the face of rising Jewish immigration, Jewish self-separation, and the looming end of the British Mandate, Jerusalem began to implode, placing the New City in peril.
“All we talk about is the house”—A timeline showing how a Palestinian home in what became West Jerusalem was confiscated and passed to Jewish ownership and its origins erased
An educator, political and social figure, and intellectual whose diary of over 3,000 pages covers 45 turbulent years in Jerusalem and Palestine in the early 20th century
A Palestinian educator and writer who wrote an iconic, vivid narrative recounting her family’s exile from Qatamon and Jerusalem in 1948
Jacob Nammar, whose family established the al-Nammamreh neighborhood in al-Baq‘a, shares the trauma his family went through in what became West Jerusalem.
While looking at family photos, siblings Teddy and Nadia Theodorie recall their displacement from Talbiyya in 1948.
A thorough historical study based on meticulous archival research debunks founding myths. A book review.
How the first mixed district to develop outside the Old City was emptied, divided, and used to warehouse Mizrahi immigrants
The author attempts to reclaim her family’s history in the Mamilla area of Jerusalem before the Nakba scattered them.
A vivid memoir attesting to what it was like to live through the violent transformation of the New City of Jerusalem into West Jerusalem in 1947–48
Who lived in the New City Palestinian neighborhood of Qatamon, which ceased to exist as such after 1948?
The author recalls his father’s memories of his longed-for Qatamon home.
The American resident of a cherished Palestinian family villa called Villa Harun al-Rashid gives his glossy version of the house’s history, completely erasing its real story.
One Jerusalem family’s story: The Nakba and its aftermath
Huda Imam is banned from entering the home her father built in Qatamon before 1948, but that does not stop her from standing outside it weekly.
Ibrahim Matar has made it his mission to record the history of the Palestinian properties in West Jerusalem, as he recently shared with friends on a walk there.
Mounir Kleibo, former ILO Special Representative, tells the story of his mother’s family home in Lower Baq‘a in today’s West Jerusalem.
The Story in Numbers
73,256
The estimated number of Palestinians who were expelled or fled temporarily to safety from Jerusalem's New City (45,000) and from surrounding villages (28,256) throughout 1948. [1]
200
The approximate number of Palestinians who remained in Jerusalem’s New City after the 1948 War, which is less than half a percent of the original Palestinian population there. [2] They were forcibly confined to a military “security zone” known as Zone A in the Lower Baq‘a neighborhood for two and a half years, living in destitution. [3]
40
The total number of villages and towns surrounding Jerusalem that were depopulated by Zionist forces during the 1948 War. [4] Of those, 55 percent were completely destroyed. [5] Villages nearer to Jerusalem such as Deir Yasin, ‘Ayn Karim, and al-Maliha were not destroyed. [6]
28,256
The estimated number of Palestinian Arab villagers who were forcibly depopulated from these 40 villages [7]
300,000
The number of dunums that were depopulated by the Zionist forces in Jerusalem and its western region during and after the 1948 War [8]
16,324
The total area of property (km sq) classified as abandoned Arab land in Jerusalem. This was out of a total area of 26,320 km sq and included approximately 280 km sq of rural land surrounding Jerusalem. [9]
84.12
Percentage of the area of 1947 municipal Jerusalem that was conquered and annexed by Israel to the state, becoming West Jerusalem [10]
246,342
The number of Palestinians from Jerusalem and its surrounding villages and towns who were exiled in 1948 and were still registered as refugees with UNRWA nearly 50 years later, in 1997 [11]
Notes
1. Salim Tamari, “The City and Its Rural Hinterland,” in Jerusalem 1948: The Arab Neighbourhoods and Their Fate in the War, ed. Salim Tamari (Jerusalem and Bethlehem: Institute of Jerusalem Studies and Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights, 2002), 79. See Palestinian Villages Depopulated in 1948 for more up-to-date information reflecting the names of two more villages, though excluding their populations. Data collected by Zochrot
2. Terry Rempel, “Dispossession and Restitution in 1948,” in Jerusalem 1948: The Arab Neighbourhoods and Their Fate in the War, ed. Salim Tamari (Jerusalem and Bethlehem: Institute of Palestine Studies and Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights, 2002), 218.
3. Jacob J. Nammar, “Confined to Prison Zone A,” Born in Jerusalem, Born Palestinian: A Memoir (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press), 61–72.
4. See Palestinian Villages Depopulated in 1948.
5. Rempel, “Dispossession,” 217.
6. Rempel, “Dispossession,” 217.
7. See Palestinian Villages Depopulated in 1948.
8. Dalia Habash and Terry Rempel, “Assessing Palestinian Property in West Jerusalem,” in Jerusalem 1948: The Arab Neighbourhoods and their Fate in the War, ed. Salim Tamari (Jerusalem and Bethlehem: Institute of Palestine Studies and Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights, 2002), 173.
9. Habash and Rempel, “Assessing Palestinian Property,” 173.
10. Ahmad Jadallah and Khalil Tufakji, “Documenting Arab Properties in West Jerusalem,” in Jerusalem 1948: The Arab Neighbourhoods and Their Fate in the War, ed. Salim Tamari (Jerusalem and Bethlehem: Institute of Palestine Studies and Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights, 2002), 255.
11. Tamari, “The City,” 80.