Between 1948 and 1967, Jerusalem was divided in profound ways, with its core physically reorganized into a front line known popularly as the Green Line and formally as the 1949 Armistice Agreement. Later described by observers as a “cartographic monstrosity,”1 the crudely sketched line cut awkwardly through the city’s neighborhoods, leaving behind an irregular seam of barricades, observation posts, and fenced corridors where the two sides faced one another but remained out of reach.

The division ran through staircases, courtyards, shopfronts, and streets where children once played. Barbed wire replaced sidewalks. Sandbags leaned against stone houses. Snipers watched from rooftops. A zone designated almost accidentally by negotiators as “no-man’s-land” stretched through ancient courtyards and verdant villages, basically hugging the line where the western and eastern sides of Jerusalem touched, but also creating an enclave deep in the eastern side for Hebrew University and Hadassah Hospital, both Israeli institutions that remained on the side that fell to Jordan after the war. A city that had always folded into itself became two separate urban realities pressed against each other but forbidden from touching.

Before the city was formally divided in 1948, Jerusalem had already begun to fracture from within (see The West Side Story). In the final years of the Colonial British Mandate, key parts of the city were carved into fortified security zones known as Bevingrads—militarized areas that were sealed off with barbed wire, checkpoints, and other barriers to protect British administrative and military installations. These zones, which were primarily located in the center of the city near the Russian Compound (al-Moskobiyya), interrupted the urban fabric, turning streets into controlled corridors and movement into a regulated act.

While limited in scope, the so-called Bevingrads—named as such sarcastically by Jews as a combination of Ernest Bevin, British foreign secretary at the time, and Stalingrad, the Russian city known for its fortifications during World War II—introduced forms of separation and surveillance into everyday space. Israel chose to retain them for some time after the British withdrew in 1948. When the Green Line was drawn in 1949, it therefore did not emerge in a vacuum; it was imposed onto a city where barriers, restricted zones, and fragmented movement had already begun to reshape how residents lived and navigated their city2 (see The West Side Story, Part 3: From Bourgeois Comfort to Untenable Peril: The Emptying of the New City).

The 1949 Armistice Agreements formalized what the 1948 War had already imposed:3 West Jerusalem came under Israeli rule, and the rest of the city, including the Old City, was annexed and ruled by Jordan. The Green Line did not follow natural geography or municipal planning, but rather, military positions; it cut where soldiers had stopped. And in a dense, layered, and intimate space like Jerusalem, the line sliced directly through people’s lives.

On November 30, 1948, Israeli and Jordanian military commanders Moshe Dayan and Abdullah al-Tal, respectively, sat in an abandoned house in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Musrara with a map and translated the ceasefire into inkless geometry, tracing where each force had stopped. Using wax pencils, Dayan marked Israeli positions in green and al-Tal marked Jordanian positions in red, following immediate reference points, street edges, building clusters, corners, and the seams between adjacent properties. The city’s density left no clean frontier to follow. The Green Line was laid down.4

The result was a division defined by the map’s own blunt instrument: the gap between the two thick lines—and even the thickness of the marks themselves—became the area later designated as “no-man’s-land,” a cartographic accident that was enforced on the ground as an urban boundary.

In Jerusalem and across Palestine more broadly, “no-man’s-land” was the most widely used term for the areas that fell between Israeli and Jordanian control after the 1949 Armistice Agreements. These were spaces where sovereignty was unclear or physically divided, and they could look very different depending on the location. Sometimes, they were abandoned mined zones, sometimes militarized urban strips with barbed wire and sniper posts, and sometimes even empty areas with limited civilian or United Nations (UN) presence.5

Musrara, once a vibrant residential quarter, suddenly became a neglected seam zone (see Musrara: The New City Neighborhood That Became No-Man’s-Land). The neighborhood had been a place of glamorous stone houses with balconies and small gardens, where families lived close enough to greet each other across the street and daily life naturally spilled into the nearby gates and markets of the Old City. Suddenly, it was transformed into a dangerous ghost town, a dead zone.

Michel, who grew up in Musrara, recalled walking those same streets decades later. He remembered the elegant villas, gardens, and the sense of serenity that had once defined the area. After 1948, houses facing the new barbed wire border were damaged, emptied, or left to decay; their windows looking out not onto neighbors, but onto soldiers and patrols. Families who had once lived only steps apart now found themselves separated by a militarized line they could see but not cross (see Musrara, the Center of the World).

Nearby Ma’min Allah (Mamilla), which had functioned as a bustling commercial corridor linking western Jerusalem to the Jaffa Gate, was devastated. Whole banks of shops closed, streets that once flowed naturally toward the Old City ended abruptly at fences, and economic life simply came to a halt at the wire. The change was immediate and unmistakable: where shop windows once displayed goods, there were sandbags and barricades; where neighbors once exchanged greetings across balconies, armed guards now stood watch.6

The division tightened around the Old City. Near Damascus Gate and the New Gate, the armistice line ran so close to the walls, turning the age-old stone barrier into a military frontier. Barbed wire, sandbags, and fortified posts were installed along the ancient stone and rooftops overlooking the gates. Buildings facing the line were reinforced or sealed, and soldiers monitored movement from elevated vantage points. The historic gates themselves became controlled thresholds: crossings were blocked, streets leading to them were cut off by fences and barricades, and narrow corridors of no-man’s-land stretched along sections of the wall.7

The few Palestinians who remained in what was now renamed West Jerusalem could no longer reach the Old City or its holy sites, including al-Aqsa Mosque and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Palestinians who remained or fled to the eastern side of the city, meanwhile, were cut off from their properties and relatives on the western side, unable to visit their own homes or one another, even during holidays and family gatherings.

The only opening between the two halves of the city was the Mandelbaum Gate. Located north of the Old City on the border between the Jewish neighborhood of Mea Sharim and the Palestinian neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, the crossing grew out of a checkpoint installed along the Green Line. Rather than a monumental gateway, it was a narrow, militarized corridor supervised by Israeli, Jordanian, and UN personnel. Movement was tightly regulated and limited mainly to diplomats, UN staff, clergy, and occasional humanitarian convoys, turning what had once been an ordinary urban street into the most scrutinized point of contact between the two halves of the divided city.8

The crossing became a symbol of restricted connection—proof that movement was theoretically possible yet denied to most in practice. In other words, Mandelbaum Gate stood as a reminder that the city was intact geographically but fractured politically. It allowed just enough passage to maintain diplomatic necessity, no more.

In the neighborhood of Abu Tur, directly south of Silwan and the Old City, the Green Line split the main street down its very center, turning a quiet pathway into a military boundary. Unlike the heavily fortified areas in Musrara or around the Mandelbaum Gate, the division here was not defined by massive walls or wide, empty buffer zones, but by a narrow, more intimate line that cut directly through people’s daily lives.

Residents lived in a state of suspended proximity, where the border was not a line on a map, but a physical presence at their doorsteps. Windows facing the line were often sealed or reinforced, as the threat of gunfire and surveillance was imminent. Though families were split by the divide, they could still see and hear each other just meters away. In this way, and unlike other parts of the city along the Green Line, the boundary did not erase the neighborhood; it cut through it.9

This “domestic border” meant that a misstep, a tumbling ball during child’s play, or a meandering animal could trigger confrontation. Palestinians on the Israeli-controlled side had it worst: with such restricted space, movement meant the difference between life and death.

Beit Safafa, a Palestinian community south of Jerusalem along the road to Bethlehem, was split in two by the Green Line. The northern section fell under Israeli control, while the southern part remained under Jordanian administration, leaving families, homes, and agricultural lands suddenly separated by a political frontier. The division was enforced physically by a barbed wire fence that ran through the village’s main street, guarded by Israeli soldiers on one side and Jordanian legionnaires on the other. What had once been a single social and familial landscape became a monitored boundary where everyday life unfolded under the gaze of armed posts.10

Yet villagers did not allow the line to erase their connections. Photographs from the early 1960s show wedding celebrations unfolding on both sides of the fence. Relatives gathered along the barrier, greeting each other, passing food, and even crossing briefly to join celebrations (see The Enduring Villagers of Beit Safafa: A Life Lived through Division). These moments reflected persistence and resistance, with families refusing to allow an arbitrarily drawn border dissolve the ties that had long bound them and their village.11

While Beit Safafa remains one of the clearest examples of a village divided through its center, it was not an isolated case. The Green Line cut through several Palestinian villages around Jerusalem, such as al-Walaja, which remains divided to this day (see al-Walaja: The Ancient Palestinian Village Ghettoized by Proliferating Settlements and the Separation Wall).12

Directly north of the Old City, in the neighborhoods of Wadi al-Joz and Sheikh Jarrah, the line created buffer zones that altered mobility and development patterns. Roads were cut off or rerouted, and open strips of land along the Green Line were cleared and maintained as security zones. Over time, this frontier widened into what observers described as an “expanding seam.”13

The term reflected how the boundary did not remain a thin line on a map: houses facing it were abandoned or restricted, construction slowed, and land adjacent to the border was gradually absorbed into wider surveillance and patrol corridors. As a result, the urban fabric began to pull back from the line. Neighborhoods closest to it experienced declining infrastructure investment and reduced commercial activity, turning the area around this expanding seam into a neglected frontier that would shape the city’s geography well beyond 1967.14

Palestinian documentation of the period emphasizes how the division reshaped the city’s internal logic. Neighborhoods once integrated into Jerusalem’s commercial and social networks became peripheral. The traces remain visible to this day. Neighborhoods that once bordered the Green Line, such as Musrara, parts of Mamilla, and the edges of Sheikh Jarrah, still show the uneven patterns created during those years: interrupted street grids, irregular building alignments, and stretches of long-neglected land. A militarized frontier thus altered the city’s growth, leaving behind a spatial memory—a scar—that can still be seen in the urban landscape.15

For 19 years, Jerusalem functioned as two separate urban systems pressed against one another. Families were separated by short physical distances and impenetrable political realities. Schools reorganized their catchment areas. Markets shifted. Religious routes were interrupted. The daily soundscapes of frontier neighborhoods like Musrara, Mamilla, the Old City, Abu Tur, and Sheikh Jarrah were punctuated by gunfire and military patrols. Children born and raised in Jerusalem after 1948 thus only knew life with barbed wire barriers and stretches of no-man’s-land that separated communities based on ethno-religious backgrounds.

In June 1967, Israeli forces captured Jordanian Arab Jerusalem, beginning the process of “unifying” the city by militarily occupying and de facto annexing its eastern half. To do so, they dismantled barbed wire, military posts, and other physical barriers that had defined the city for nearly two decades, reopening streets virtually overnight.

But urban geography does not reset so easily. The areas that had been frontline zones continued to be marginalized through patterns of neglect and uneven development.16 The line that once ran through Abu Tur, for example, remained in more subtle ways, reflected in disparities in infrastructure, services, and living conditions between the Jewish and Palestinian sides.

In other words, what had once been marked by barbed wire and checkpoints persisted as an invisible structural separation embedded in the landscape of neighborhoods along the Green Line.17 The seam thus remained visible to those who knew where to look—in street alignments, property lines, institutional disparities, and arbitrary governmental policies. Ultimately, while the wire was removed, the division was not; it was redefined, entrenched in other ways.

As part of its occupation of the eastern half of the city, Israel unilaterally expanded its municipal borders, tripling the area of what was now named East Jerusalem and incorporating 28 Palestinian neighborhoods or parts of neighborhoods, albeit under an apartheid system of military administration that varied considerably from that in place in Jewish West Jerusalem. Land expropriation, settlement construction and intensive settler in-migration, planning policies, home demolitions, forcible home expulsions, and uneven infrastructure investment gradually produced new spatial hierarchies across the city. The urban fabric was no longer divided by barbed wire, but it was reorganized through permits, zoning, and restricted development that continues to affect Palestinian communities in Jerusalem disproportionately to this day.

The arbitrary and violent division of Jerusalem was deeply entrenched in the early 2000s with the construction of the Separation Wall (see Al-Jidar: An Instrument of Fragmentation) around and through the city.

Like its predecessor, the Green Line, the route of the Separation Wall did not follow the municipal boundaries of the city; instead, it cut deep into the West Bank and through Palestinian neighborhoods that were historically part of or closely connected to Jerusalem. The densely populated Kufr ‘Aqab, Shu‘fat refugee camp, and parts of Beit Hanina and al-Walaja were severed from the city center, even though they fall within the municipal boundaries, and many of their residents hold Israeli IDs. Abu Dis, al-Ram, Qalandiya, Hizma, ‘Anata, al-Za‘ayim, al-‘Izariyya, and other Palestinian areas were severed from the city altogether by the wall, even though historically they were always closely interwoven with Jerusalem, which served as the socioeconomic and political hub of the larger West Bank.

Unlike its predecessor, however, the meandering and snaking route of the wall was set solely by Israel, and its primary consideration was not military but demographic. As well, this time it was a towering physical wall, not a line drawn casually on a map.

For Palestinians today, as for their parents and grandparents who lived through the 1948–67 division of Jerusalem, the nine-meter-high concrete wall literally cements a geography of fragmentation. Families and neighbors are separated, access to workplaces, markets, schools, health care, and government institutions is dependent on checkpoints, and reaching hospitals often requires long detours and permits, if it is possible at all.

In this sense, the invisible seam that once ran along the Green Line reappeared in a new, more expanded and concrete form in and around Jerusalem—and the rest of the occupied West Bank. Since 1948, Palestinians in Jerusalem have therefore not known their city without a fundamental division—visible or otherwise, through, across, or around its core—that profoundly alters the fabric of their daily lives.