Part 3, “Jerusalem in Conflict,” consists of six articles and is the longest section in the book—a sorry recognition of the strife afflicting this holy city. The first two articles discuss the 1929 al-Buraq Uprising in Jerusalem, an important turning point in the Arab-Zionist impasse. The immediate trigger was access to the Western/al-Buraq Wall, claimed by both Muslims and Jews, but as one commission noted, the site “ceased to be a religious issue” and “became a physical and symbolic boundary point of political, ethnic, and religious communities and, as such, an immediate point of conflict when questions of redrawing these boundaries came to a head.”11
Alex Winder, author of “The ‘Western Wall’ Riots of 1929: Religious Boundaries and Communal Violence,” offers a new interpretation of this well-studied episode, one that doesn’t reduce the protagonists to warring Arabs and Jews responding to immediate triggers, but rather, as communities that experienced the violence in complex ways. As Winder argues, the failure of the British authorities to acknowledge the causes for the breakdown in communal relations and their determination to impose “new boundaries that reflected Zionist imperatives” laid the ground for the partition proposals they began putting forth in the 1930s.12
In the article that follows, “The Jerusalem Fellah: Popular Politics in Mandate-Era Palestine,” Rana Barakat also examines the 1929 uprising but focuses on the “evolution of Jerusalem through the 1920s,” investigating “how demographic and social changes directly contributed” to the violence. She looks at the role of the fellahin (the “non-elite residents,” as she defines them) from villages in the Jerusalem district in “the evolution of Palestinian resistance to colonial domination.”13
Where there is war, plunder is not far behind. The next article, written by Gish Amit and titled “Salvage or Plunder? Israel’s ‘Collection’ of Private Palestinian Libraries in West Jerusalem,” discusses Israelis’ very deliberate plunder of Palestinian personal libraries in Jerusalem during and after 1948. Home furnishings and agricultural equipment belonging to Palestinians were stolen throughout the areas that became Israel, including what later formed West Jerusalem. Books were handled a little differently: Between May 1948 and February 1949, about 30,000 books were delivered to the National Library at the Hebrew University. Amit notes that “specific collections were even targeted with the library’s needs in mind.”14 The books plundered from Arab homes did much to develop the university’s Department of Oriental Sciences.