Jerusalem’s Cafés, Sanctuary for Centuries, Buzz with Worries of an Explosion

The older man sat up in his seat after taking a puff on his argileh in front of the café at the intersection of Bab Khan al-Zayt, the spice market, and ‘Aqabat al-Saraya, the road leading to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the Old City.

“Jerusalem is boiling, and we will certainly witness a major explosion soon,” Mahmoud Abdel Hamid, 70, a retired professor of archaeology at Al-Quds University, assessed.1 “Our ability to endure has reached its limit. The Israeli authorities have excelled at complicating our lives, making us pay for even the oxygen we breathe. Their goal is known to young and old alike: to force us to leave the city. This will never happen.”

“Look,” he said, pointing at the entrance, “there’s a sign on the door of this 150-year-old café. It says, ‘No Smoking.’ This sign was put up by the café owner upon the orders of the Israeli authorities. This café is for hookah smoking, which means there is smoking. In other words, Israel is forcing us to do the impossible. Can you explain what ‘No Smoking’ means when you’re smoking hookah in a café for smokers?”

Regulation, taxation, and over-policing by Israeli officials trying to enforce their control of the city are a thorn in the side of East Jerusalem shop owners and residents.

Nevertheless, their vigilance has not cowed Palestinians into submission, Jerusalem Story finds.

Smoking hookah in Jerusalem’s cafés as they have for hundreds of years, Palestinian elders see trouble brewing. But they also say that Palestinians are going nowhere.

Professor Abdel Hamid devoted his life to teaching in Jerusalem, specializing in the history of the Old City—himself embodying the city. He told Jerusalem Story that during the Jordanian era, Jerusalem was at its most beautiful. It was truly the capital of capitals.

“Israel still benefits from the infrastructure left by Jordan. In some places, they haven’t even changed the tiles in the alleyways since the Jordanian era. When Israel occupied the city, it didn’t know what to do with us. It tried to displace us by every means—through intimidation and enticement. We didn’t leave our homes. Those who had left in the first days of the war returned to Jerusalem clandestinely. Even on the day of the [1967] census, Jewish officials were surprised by the number of Jerusalemites in their homes, because the prevailing belief was that most had left.”

Among the clientele of Siam’s café on this June day was a Palestinian who had worked for the Jerusalem municipality during the Jordanian era. He spoke on condition of anonymity, saying that when Israel occupied the municipality building after annexing the city, they asked all employees to remain in their posts, demanding that they hand over all Jordanian maps prepared for expanding and developing it.

“I retired several years ago, and I don’t recall a single detailed plan being drawn up for any neighborhood in East Jerusalem during my entire time working at the municipality. Therefore, in 59 years, not a single neighborhood has been built in East Jerusalem, and not a single industrial zone has been established there. Instead, Israel has destroyed the [Palestinian] commercial sector,” he told Jerusalem Story.2

Most Palestinian workers in Jerusalem are employed in Israel in the service sector. In the meantime, most Palestinians in the city are below the poverty line, despite being more educated, he said (see Economic Hardship Weighs on Jerusalem Families as Unemployment Rates Soar and Poverty Rises and Socioeconomic Snapshot of Jerusalem). The former municipal employee mourned that the city’s Palestinian neighborhoods have been “suffocated” by growth in expanding Israeli settlements (see Settlements).

“More than 400,000 Palestinians live in Jerusalem on an area of no more than 10,000 dunams, while fewer than 250,000 settlers live in East Jerusalem on more than 34,000 dunams,” he compared.

“This exacerbated the housing crisis: Jerusalem needs more than 1,700 apartments annually due to natural population growth, and there is an urgent need to build 70,000 housing units immediately to address the shortage.”

According to him, more than 175,000 Palestinian residents of Jerusalem have been forced to live in neighborhoods beyond the Separation Wall in more than 70,000 apartments—built without licenses but with the knowledge of the Jerusalem Municipality (see The Separation Wall and Neighborhoods beyond the Wall). (Polling and the census do not usually capture their numbers.) Israeli city officials do not demolish these homes, because they lie on the side of the Separation Wall that is connected to the rest of the West Bank and can only access the city through a limited number of checkpoints. Over time, authorities hope that their placement outside the wall limits Palestinian ties to Jerusalem and its holy sites.

“A complex system of tools and policies was employed—urban planning and settlement, the reengineering of public space, control of resources, and the dismantling of Palestinian institutional structures,” agrees researcher Malek Zabalh.3 “These measures worked in an integrated manner, forming a unified system aimed at producing a new gradually normalized reality outside the context of confrontation.”

Jerusalem is a dual space: it is a physical space shaped by force and politics, and it is a social, cultural, and spiritual space produced and reproduced through memory, relationships, institutions, symbols, and traditions. Between these two levels, a permanent gap becomes visible—the distance between Israel’s ability to control the physical place and its ability to control meaning.

Israel has succeeded in redrawing the city’s maps and producing new geophysical realities, but so far it has not succeeded in transforming those realities into an alternative collective identity or consciousness. The facts on the ground indicate that while Jerusalem has changed in terms of demographics, maps, roads, and architecture, it has not been reduced to a single narrative in the minds of its residents.

Perhaps what worries Jerusalemites the most these days is Israel’s efforts to undermine the role of the Islamic Waqf Department, which manages al-Aqsa Mosque and other holy sites, so as to impose total Israeli sovereignty over the coveted holy site. Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir is taking rapid steps to create a new reality at al-Aqsa Mosque before the Israeli elections this fall (see Police Tighten Siege on al-Aqsa Mosque to Force Jerusalem Waqf to Submit to Israeli Control).

Israeli opinion polls show that the goal of establishing Jewish sovereignty over al-Aqsa Mosque enjoys the support of the majority of the Jewish Israeli public, regardless of which party they support. An article by Israeli writer Pinhas Inbari, known for his close ties to Israel’s far right, stated that control over the al-Aqsa Mosque lies at the heart of the election campaign.4

“For the first time in Israeli election campaigns,” Inbari wrote, “the issue of what they refer to as the ‘Temple Mount’ (al-Aqsa Mosque) has become an election promise. This has been stated by the ultra-Orthodox party, the Shas party.”

But this is not just happening in Shas. On social media, an AI-generated image has been circulating among Likud supporters in recent days, depicting Netanyahu kneeling under a burden, his suit torn, a huge Star of David slung over his shoulders, with the Temple and a menorah in the center, and the Dome of the Rock at sunrise in the background to his right. The image portrays him as bearing the burden of Jerusalem, the Temple, and Judaism, with the caption: “Never again now.”

One Likud activist commented on the photo, “As we live our lives, Netanyahu bears the decisive weight of our eternal destiny. May God bless him with strength, wisdom, and unwavering courage in his mission.”

Palestinian Jerusalemites feel that the extreme right, represented by Ben-Gvir, will work to divide Jerusalem after physically unifying it, while the Arabs are showing restraint, according to Inbari.

Before leaving the café, having finished his hookah, Professor Abdel Hamid said that Israel has practically done little for Arab Jerusalem and its people. “Education here is practically collapsing, and health care—were it not for the health centers run by Arabs—would be practically nonexistent. In fact, the majority of doctors, nurses, and pharmacists in Israeli institutions in the city are from Jerusalem and, generally, are Arabs.”

“The worst educational outcomes are found in Israeli-run schools,” he said. “Israel wishes to wake up one day and find that all the Arab residents of Jerusalem have vanished—and that the Old City has become a museum devoid of Arabs. Of course, this is just their dream, and it will never happen.”