The Non-City of Jerusalem

The focus of The City of Jerusalem: The Israeli Occupation and Municipal Subjugation of Palestinian Jerusalemites (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020) is clearly stated in the preface by author Meir Margalit: to describe “the Israeli disciplinary apparatus implanted in East Jerusalem, its oppressive practices and their implications and consequences for Palestinian Jerusalemite society.”1 A few paragraphs later, he expresses his objective more explicitly: “to disclose the colonial power matrix that reigns in the city, in order to provide more tools to dismantle it.”2 His profile equips him to do that with surgical precision. For 31 years, he worked in the Jerusalem Municipality, and for 10 of those years, he was elected to the Jerusalem City Council as a member of the Meretz Party, a party representing the Zionist left. In addition to being a politician and civil servant, he is also a peace activist, and this latter identity makes him a bit of an outsider in the Israeli power structure. His analysis focuses on the 10-year stretch of Nir Barkat’s two mayoral terms (2008–18).

The author describes himself as being “from Jerusalem,” a city he knows intimately; and although he can’t imagine living anywhere else, living in it is an unsettling experience.

Margalit describes the 124 square kilometers of Jerusalem as home to “three mutually incompatible cultural systems”: “secular-Jewish, religious Jewish, and Arab.”3 The three communities lack shared concepts that would enable the negotiation of differences; they also “lack a common past and future.”4 No matter which one rules, the others are left out. The lack of integration is symbolized by the presence of three departments of education, one for each community; by the lack of shared urban space; and by the separate transportation systems and disconnected economies.

The municipality lacks Palestinian representation, meaning that 40 percent of the city’s population is not represented at all in the deliberations and decisions of the municipality (see Representation). Palestinians boycott municipal elections because they argue to do otherwise legitimizes Israel’s occupation (see Jerusalem’s Municipal Elections Produce a Council Dominated by Religious Jews; the City’s Palestinians Stay Home). This makes Jerusalem an ethnocracy (a democracy for Jews only) and not a democracy for its residents. The author loves Jerusalem, and he can’t imagine living anywhere else, but he acknowledges that living in it is an unsettling experience, presumably even for himself, a member of the privileged group.

Because Jerusalem lacks legitimacy, he argues, it can only be governed by coercion: “In the face of a lack of legitimacy or recognition, the only way to rule Jerusalem is through state coercion. That is why the city lacks its own vitality; without the police, it does not exist, and disintegrates.”5 He identifies another characteristic of Jerusalem: its lack of decency, by which he means the ways in which institutions routinely humiliate residents who are seen as marginal or second class by the state. Jerusalem cannot be called multicultural; that implies coexistence, which is absent. There is no shared space in Jerusalem where the three groups can meet and express their culture safely; that would require a neutral space, impossible to find in a context of occupation.

Universally believed to be a holy city, Jerusalem, Margalit argues, is in fact a perverse non-city because of the effect of the occupation, not only on Palestinians, on whom its toxicity is apparent everywhere, but on Israeli Jews as well. Writing in 2020, he argues:

Calling for “death to Arabs,” a familiar chant at Israeli rallies and sprayed on city walls, eventually morphs naturally into a call for death to (Jewish) leftists and peace activists.

Anticipating that readers might wonder how Jerusalem is governed, Margalit dissects the way the city works. The structures, policies, and regulations he describes neatly serve the needs of a colonial regime stuck with more Indigenous people than it wants:

The covert level is the intricate control system to which Palestinian residents are subjected. No bureaucrat need feel that he has participated in a discriminatory system, since each is responsible only for a specific work area and claims no oversight over the big picture. Add to that the myth that Israel liberated East Jerusalem when it conquered it, and the illusion shared by Israelis that they have a democratic government—then the inescapable conclusion they draw is that the Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem has a civilizing dimension. Buttressed by these lofty myths, the municipal bureaucrat can believe that he acts as a competent professional according to professional standards. To the glaring evidence of vast discrepancy between East and West Jerusalem, the Israeli bureaucrat shamelessly blames Jordan (“we inherited a mess”) even decades later.

Readers will note, as I did, that discrimination is whitewashed through deceptive labels. Who would guess that the Department for the Implementation of the Urban Planning Law is the unit responsible for Palestinian home demolitions (see Home Demolitions Spike in East Jerusalem as Ongoing War Averts Attention)?8

Municipal services control city services and residential space, which are determined by the budget and the city master plan. The budget screams discrimination: NIS 500 million (11 percent of the municipal budget) were spent on East Jerusalem, where 39 percent of the population lived at the time the book was written9 (it is now over 40).

The city’s master plan of 2000 was guided by the goal, shared by the Israeli planners, that no more than 40 percent of Jerusalem would be non-Jewish (i.e., Palestinian), with a commensurate area to house and otherwise accommodate them. Blame the plan for not zoning Palestinian neighborhoods or allowing Palestinians building permits, and then blame the department for demolishing the homes built without permits. The implementation of the law comes with a cruel twist of the dagger: Palestinians are given the choice to self-demolish the homes they have poured their savings into or to pay the state to demolish it (see Forcible Self-Demolition of One’s Home: A Lifelong Trauma for the Whole Family). Margalit does not mention this, but it is understood: When was the last time anyone read about a Jewish resident of Jerusalem experiencing home demolition for not being able to secure a building permit?

Nir Barkat was elected mayor of Jerusalem in 2008 and again in 2013. Two conditions led him to adopt a liberal veneer in his first term: a scandal involving his predecessor, Ehud Olmert, which led to a call for transparency, and the US presidential election of Barack Obama and his focus on human rights and stated desire for “a regional peace process.”10 In the early years of his first term, Barkat wanted to improve Jerusalem’s economic condition, which meant focusing on tourism, for which he needed Palestinian buy-in. Margalit refers to this as the “commercial phase” of Barkat’s term. Barkat introduced an alternative to the mukhtar system, which had fallen by the wayside. “Local neighborhood committees or parents’ committees” acted “as spokespersons, representatives and intermediaries between the local population and the municipality.”11 According to the author, these committees helped reorient the Palestinian community; the presence of an entity to turn to when things got rough was reassuring. And then, of course, there are the old-fashioned collaborators, who assist the state to assert control.

Shortly into Barkat’s second term, Israeli settlers kidnapped and burned alive 16-year-old Mohammad Abu Khdeir, which unleashed a wave of protests by young people, furious at the murder and the overall oppression by the state. Barkat’s response (the “securocratic phase”) was to place management of East Jerusalem in the hands of the police; he regarded Palestinian residents exclusively as a threat to public order.12 For the police, every Palestinian was a target.

When the police take over and assert authority over daily life and municipal functioning, the result is an authoritarian regime that “combines security techniques with colonialist control practices.”13 Israeli Jewish residents approved of this, which Margalit presents as yet another reason Jerusalem is a non-city.14 The Palestinian community fought back on two occasions: demonstrating to remove the surveillance cameras installed around al-Aqsa Mosque and shutting down the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, because the municipality was going to tax the church.

For the Israeli state, the fear that Palestinians might become a majority in Jerusalem and elect a Palestinian mayor is the nightmare that must be avoided at all costs. That overarching concern leads to adopting farcical measures that would embarrass normal bureaucrats. In drawing the municipal boundaries to try to exclude Palestinian-concentrated areas, lines are sometimes drawn through homes. Sometimes families don’t know until they receive notification that they live in the Palestinian Authority (PA)-administered areas and not within the Jerusalem Municipality.15

Since they are not citizens, Palestinians’ legal status can be revoked at any time. They live at the mercy of the Israeli minister of interior, who can approve or strip them of their residency status. Rendering legal status precarious, revocable, and nontransferable to a spouse or a child is used as part of the overall scheme to make sure that Palestinians in Jerusalem never exceed 40 percent of the population (see Precarious Status).

It is hard to imagine living under such uncertainty, and of course that is the state’s intention. Palestinian residents never know how, when, and why they might lose their residency status. Many Palestinian families in East Jerusalem have been affected in the past decade by forced relocation processes, or been the victim of state pressure, or been forced to move from his or her residence, or been involved in lengthy legal processes to revoke a pending forcible expulsion order.16 And virtually all those who have not yet been affected live under the draining fear and anxiety of somehow drawing attention and causing a future revocation to crash their lives.

Building Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem is a clear attempt to erase or minimize Jerusalem’s Palestinian presence and to displace or surround and contain it with Israeli Jewish-controlled colonies (see Settlements). Margalit identifies two kinds of settlements: (1) the neighborhoods containing densely populated housing in which tens of thousands of Israelis live; and (2) the isolated outposts planted in the midst of Palestinian homes. He regards the latter as more troublesome (“a ticking bomb”) because of the extremist nature of the typical Israeli settler in these outposts who sees himself as “redeeming” the land and fulfilling a divine mission.17 In both types of settlement, the planning of these housing areas has nothing to do with the kind of normal urban planning cities engage in and everything to do with depriving Palestinians of territorial contiguity to forestall any future option for a Palestinian state and ensure permanent Israeli rule. The seizure and zoning of land for green spaces is motivated by the same impulse, Margalit notes. And everywhere there are cameras, recording Palestinians’ movements and intruding on their private lives.

Israeli settlers in far-right settler groups can take possession of Palestinian homes in a variety of ways. They can work with the Custodian of Absentee Property to identify owners who live outside Jerusalem’s municipal boundaries and whose homes are therefore up for grabs according to Israeli law. They can offer exorbitant sums of money to purchase homes from desperate owners, including owners whose homes have been slated for demolition. Sometimes they work through Palestinian collaborators who buy properties on their behalf, unbeknownst to the Palestinian seller, and live in them until the settlers decide they are ready to move in.18

If the Palestinian physical presence cannot be eliminated from Jerusalem, the community’s existence can be erased, ignored, or minimized through signage. As Margalit documents, this is done in various ways—for example, through road signs that specify the distances to two Israeli towns but omit to mention the Palestinian village that lies along the route; by using Hebrew and English place names and omitting Arabic names to reinforce the fiction that there are no other names for these places; and even by failing to provide any names to streets in some Palestinian neighborhoods. Margalit explains: “The absence of Palestinian neighbourhoods on road signs is not part of an official decision: that absence is a product of the neighbourhoods’ non-existence in the Israeli conceptual scheme . . . In the Israeli collective psychological pattern, the Arabs have no place.”19 The lack of street names in East Jerusalem is curious considering how long the city has been under Israeli control. Margalit believes that the municipality saw no need to bother, even though official documents must be delivered to a home address and not a PO box. This dilemma was resolved by delivering mail to prominent grocery stores in the neighborhood of the addressee, whose employees know the residents in their areas and can deliver the mail when the resident comes to shop. For Palestinians this system is functional until official mail requiring bill payment is not delivered to the addressee and the bill begins to accrue penalties and interest. It’s also a way to exclude Palestinians from political participation, as notices about registering to vote get distributed by mail.

Some streets are given names relating to Israeli military battles (such as Kovshei Katamon; see Glorifying Conquest) or units (such as the Route of the Paratroopers), which can be traumatic for Palestinians who have to use them. According to Margalit, “Such names are not incidental or casual. They are installed with the intention of reminding the Palestinian of his place within the urban fabric of the city. Their main function is to mortify the Arabs psychologically, rubbing salt into wounds that never heal, and to remind them, each time they cross those roads, who holds power over them.”20 Some names, however, refuse to disappear. Neighborhoods in Jerusalem that were primarily Palestinian prior to 1948, such as Qatamon (see The West Side Story), were given Hebrew names by the new state. But the old Arabic names were more familiar to the Jewish residents and continued to be used, a satisfying metaphor for the persistence of Arab Jerusalem.

For all Israel’s braying about Jerusalem being a united city, there is an undeniable temporariness to its status even more than 50 years after it gripped the eastern part of the city. East Jerusalem has never been integrated into Israel, as evidenced by the absence of uniform municipal services across the two parts of the city, because it comes with an unwanted and perceived-to-be disposable population. It is ironic that despite the concentrated state efforts to assert dominion over East Jerusalem and to exclude the Palestinian population that calls it home, the Israeli state and public see the area as a separate, frightening entity, one that they cannot take for granted as theirs, despite their best and most focused efforts. Even the Hebrew place names they try to give Palestinian areas gain no traction among Israeli Jews. Margalit concludes that their attempts to Judaize East Jerusalem have not succeeded.

Margalit refers to a steady increase in the percentage of Palestinian residents who apply for Israeli citizenship, but he rightfully observes that this cannot be understood as identification with the state, not when opinion polls in 2015 show a 60 percent approval among Palestinian residents of Jerusalem for armed struggle.21

In the epilogue, the author posits a solution to the impasse: Jerusalem will have two municipalities, a Palestinian one to manage East Jerusalem and a Jewish Israeli one to manage West Jerusalem. Margalit is an Israeli activist, and this vision was one circulating in progressive circles that he was part of until at least 2020, when the book was published. Even then, one would be curious to understand how he proposes that two very unequal protagonists might manage that task in the current framework of extreme structural inequality and now generally acknowledged apartheid, which he seems to envision would remain intact.

In sum, what Margalit’s analysis shows is that the city that Israel claims as its capital is a twisted, distorted, illogical, and cruel one, where decisions are based on one overriding consideration: massively developing and benefitting one population while simultaneously aggressively de-developing and systematically working to (wishfully) eliminate another, despite its being nearly half of the city. It is hard to imagine how a city based on such a cruel and warped future vision can ultimately survive, let alone a city that is a World Heritage Site cherished by billions.

Reading this book in mid-2026, against the background of an ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza, ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and southern Lebanon, and bombardment of Syria and Iran, it is hard to think of a future for Israel in the Middle East that does not pose an existential threat to the region. While the author cannot be faulted for not predicting the future, everything he describes in the book makes it clear that there can be no future for anyone until demographic considerations are removed from the calculus. Genocide in Gaza, ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, and the ongoing genocidal bureaucratic and multilevel security assaults on Palestinians in East Jerusalem amply demonstrate the consequences for Palestinians when those considerations gain ascendancy and dictate policy.