Skyline of the Old City at the Western Wall and Temple Mount in Jerusalem

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Blog Post

Uncovering the Other Jerusalem

The Other Jerusalem: Rethinking the History of the Sacred, edited by Rashid Khalidi and Salim Tamari. Washington, DC: Khalidi Library and Institute for Palestine Studies, 2020.
 

This edited volume reprints articles on the history, geography, archaeology, sociology, and future of Jerusalem that first appeared in the Journal for Palestine Studies and the Jerusalem Quarterly, two journals published by the Institute for Palestine Studies. The volume’s editors, renowned Palestinian scholars Rashid Khalidi and Salim Tamari, selected articles that “provoke new thinking about the city and stimulate further discussion about its current predicament”—articles that “define features of the city that conventional approaches have long overlooked.”1 

The content is grouped into four parts that tell the story of Jerusalem—its physical layout, its history and society, the conflict that has tormented it since the early 20th century, and its place as a spiritual center around which a substantial body of international law has been developed.

Part 1

The four articles that make up Part 1, “Jerusalem: Physical Environment and Materiality,” describe the ways in which the physical space of Jerusalem has been reshaped by colonial designs—namely, British and Zionist—and Palestinian resistance. “Transforming the Face of the Holy City: Political Messages in the Built Topography of Jerusalem,” by Rashid Khalidi, then editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies, explains how for centuries, different groups have shaped the built topography of Jerusalem to convey religious and political messages. Reviewing the archaeological remains of construction from Herod to the Crusades, Khalidi shows that religious places were built on hilltops to dominate their surroundings, projecting political power of a particular religious slant. But the early Muslims, Khalidi demonstrates, did things a little differently; they began to project temporal and spiritual power by changing the city’s built topography. For example, they established a simple mosque (among others) on the abandoned site of Herod’s temple, culminating in the awe-inspiring Dome of the Rock.

Exterior of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre

Exterior of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre

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Dome of the Rock, Jerusalem, exterior view

Exterior view of the Dome of the Rock

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Greek Orthodox Catholicon in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem

Greek Orthodox Catholicon in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem

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Wikimedia Commons

The harmony of the city’s architecture was destroyed by the city’s post-1967 rulers, who had very different objectives. The Israeli settlements—ugly, fortress-like, and jarring—convey a very clear political message: they lay claim to territory, asserting state power and control (demographic and otherwise) over an undesirable population.

Rana Barakat’s article, “Urban Planning, Colonialism, and the Pro-Jerusalem Society,” takes a deep dive into British plans for Jerusalem during the Colonial British Mandate period. She reviews British schemes to preserve and modernize Jerusalem, a process that began with General Edmund Allenby requesting plans “to institute the necessary control of building operations and town development” in Jerusalem, even before the British military had occupied all of Palestine.2 All in all, the British would come up with six urban plans during the course of the 30-year mandate. Barakat summarizes the moves as follows:

Backgrounder The Three Israeli Settlement Rings in and around East Jerusalem: Supplanting Palestinian Jerusalem

Israel’s settlements in and around Jerusalem take the shape of three rings that contribute to Judaizing the city and fragmenting its Palestinian communities.

The British formally put into place a process by which they would exclusively control and regulate town planning and any kind of legal building with the Old and New City. In this context, the Old City was to be “cleaned up” and made to fit the British image of a classical city while the New City was to be the space for “European modernity” through the promotion of Jewish immigration and settlement into new and well-designed neighborhoods. Though this may seem an obvious extension of political power, it also dictated politics of development in Jerusalem and explained how the British used town planning to control political and social definitions of the city.3

The description of the plans makes clear that British administrators imposed their views on what the city should be. They saw the Old City as a “medieval treasure” that had to be protected and maintained in its “natural state,” giving no thought to the people living and working in it.4 Barakat recounts a telling incident involving a decision by British and Zionist figures, who worked together closely, to create a garden outside one of the gates of the Old City; the residents opposed the project and uprooted the plants. Rather than admit that they had erred in making unilateral decisions about the living space of the area’s inhabitants, the British concluded that the residents showed deficient judgment and moved on to the next ill-conceived plan. By 1930, the city began to look as the British imagined it when they occupied it in 1917: they had “construct[ed] the city of their imagination by completely marginalizing the lived city.”5

Blog Post Colonial Jerusalem

Colonial Jerusalem, written by Thomas Abowd in 2014, seems more relevant today than ever. A book review. 

[The British] had “construct[ed] the city of their imagination by completely marginalizing the lived city.”

Rana Barakat

An alley in Jerusalem’s Old City

An Old City alley

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Souvenir market, Old City, Jerusalem, 2019

Souvenir market, Old City, 2019

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iStock Photo

The Zionists would go on to carry these plans a step further decades later, when they occupied East Jerusalem in 1967, as Wendy Pullan and Maximilian Gwiazda discuss in “‘City of David’: Urban Design and Frontier Heritage.” In the Palestinian neighborhood of Wadi Hilwa, directly south of the Old City in Silwan, the ultranationalist settler group Elad manages a fantasy archaeological theme park, the City of David, for which Palestinian land was expropriated and developed. In this Disney-like tourist attraction, replicas of what were imagined to be houses of biblical eras were carefully constructed to evoke memories of Jewish roots in Silwan. By now, it has become standard practice that Israel’s discovery of its fabricated roots in Palestine necessitates the erasure of non-Jewish life. Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from parts of Silwan to make this theme park possible, a process that is ongoing. But ironically, Israeli attempts to erase the presence of Palestinians is belied by what the author refers to as

Feature Story Israel’s Disneyfication of Jerusalem Seeks to Erase Palestinians’ Historic Presence

Israel’s tourist projects ringing Jerusalem’s Old City threaten to diminish the area and transform it into a Disneyfied tourist space serving Jews and their narrative.

the heavy infrastructure of security arrangements . . . Watchtowers, tall fences above walls, heavy steel doors, and CCTV cameras are ubiquitous aspects of all settlers’ homes in the City of David . . . The level of security stands out even by the stringent standards of West Jerusalem and the Old City and East Jerusalem settlements. Securitization goes hand in hand with privatization as a mechanism of control over movement within the park and settlement.6

Israel suppresses Palestinians while always remaining hyperalert. And Palestinian residents of Silwan are daily forced to contend with this alien, settler-colonial project masquerading as a tourist attraction that fragments their community.

City of David Museum Archaeological gardens, Jerusalem

City of David Museum Archaeological gardens in the evening

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In “The Imperial Museum of Antiquities in Jerusalem, 1890–1930: An Alternative Narrative,” authors Beatrice St. Laurent and Himmet Taskomur explain how those who documented the museum’s history practically ignored the role of the Ottomans and local Palestinian Jerusalemites in its creation, preferring to credit British Mandate authorities with preserving the archaeological history of the area. Using Ottoman and modern Turkish sources, the account traces a clear “continuum of the Ottoman Museum (1901–17) in Jerusalem and its collections, with the British Palestine Museum of Antiquities (1921–30) and the subsequent Palestine Archeological Museum (1930–35) to its opening in 1938.”7

Israel suppresses Palestinians while always remaining hyperalert.

Part 2

Part 2, “Jerusalem: History and Society,” looks at the social history of Jerusalem by examining the biographies of people and villages, as well as means of communication and transportation. This section begins with a fascinating biographical sketch of the Jerusalemite Aref al-Aref, written by Salim Tamari, who was then editor of the Jerusalem Quarterly. Al-Aref was a historian, and his own history is fascinating and worthy of study because his life spanned the late Ottoman period through the Israeli colonization of Palestine, including the occupation of Jerusalem in 1967. Tamari examines al-Aref’s essays, diaries, reported statements, and activities to trace his self-identification as an Ottoman subject (preferably in a decentralized Ottoman state) to an awareness of himself as an Arab. It was an evolution experienced by many public figures of that generation, and for al-Aref, the process began while he was imprisoned in Siberia by the Russians during World War I.

Bio Aref al-Aref

A renowned journalist, historian, and politician whose account of the 1948 War remains one of the most authoritative texts on the subject

Arab Women’s Union School, Musrara, Jerusalem ca. 1940–46

Arab Women’s Union School, Musrara, ca. 1940–46

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Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division  [LC-DIG-matpc-04562]

The Palestinian women’s movement originated in Jerusalem during the British Mandate period, and that is the subject of the next article in this section: “Young Women in the City: Mandate Memories.” Ellen Fleishmann draws on interviews with women who described the period during which middle- and upper-class women got involved in the political and social affairs of the day. They describe a progressive city abuzz with social and cultural activities at the YMCA and elsewhere. It was also one of the few Palestinian cities that had schools and institutes beyond the primary level, and so women moved to Jerusalem for study and for vocational training as teachers. They founded civic and religious organizations, providing services neglected by the British Mandate authorities; they formed student unions, one of which gave Hind al-Husseini her early exposure to activism. The women’s movement was formally launched in 1929 with the convening of the Arab Women’s Congress in Jerusalem.8

The next article, “Peasant Narratives: Memorial Book Sources for Jerusalem Village History,” by Rochelle Davis, discusses village histories as recorded in village memorial books compiled after 1948. Relying on the testimony of surviving villagers and other documentary evidence, Davis explains that these histories were recorded as a way of safeguarding the lives of villages that were ethnically cleansed during the state’s establishment. The authors of these books generally cover the history, geography, resident lineages, economic and social life, and ethnic cleansing of the villages. Some have unique features; for example, the memory book for the village of Qalunya in the western hills of Jerusalem has a chapter titled “love and marriage” and a chapter on house architecture. For farming communities in particular, the expulsion from Palestine to refugee camps in neighboring countries was experienced as a fall from grace. Many of the books were written decades after the 1948 War, and it is not surprising that the authors recall their native villages as full of bounty. Davis thus notes that the village memorial books must be used with caution, because they often fall back on generalities and typically don’t cite sources for details given.

Bio Hind Taher al-Husseini

A formidable figure who dedicated her life to the care of orphans, education of girls and women, preservation of Palestinian culture, and social service

Palestinian shepherd, ca. 1900

The life of a shepherd, an illustration of the 23rd psalm, ca. 1900

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Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-DIG-matpc-05673]

“This is Jerusalem calling.” Thus began the Palestine Broadcasting Service radio broadcasts, launched in spring 1936. A British initiative, it focused on “knowledge and culture” and was aimed at two groups: music lovers (understood as a reference to Zionist settlers from European countries) and farmers. The first is understandable; the second requires unpacking. High Commissioner Arthur Wauchope explained that he believed the broadcasts could assist farmers “to increase the yield of the soil, improve the quality of their produce, and explain the advantages of various forms of cooperation.”9 The real motivator, author Andrea Stanton suggests, stems from Wauchope’s view of “rural Palestinians as a backward population that needed modernizing”; without it, farmers “might serve as a dangerous, destabilizing force.”10 While the British Mandate kept a tight rein on the station to prevent discussion of politics, Wauchope used it to address Palestinian farmers during the 1936 general strike, warning them that the strike would bring them hardships in the form of ruined harvests and higher taxes—a tactic which failed, and so the British resorted to brutal repression of the armed resistance.

Yahya Lababidi (left) and Ibrahim Tuqan at a reception at the Palestine Broadcasting Service, April 20, 1940

Subdirector of Arabic Music Yahya Lababidi (left) in conversation with the subdirector of Arabic broadcasting, Ibrahim Tuqan, at a reception at the Palestine Broadcasting Service, April 20, 1940

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Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-DIG-matpc-20590]

Part 2 ends with Penny Johnson’s “Take My Camel: The Disappearing Camels of Jerusalem and Jaffa,” which recounts the disappearance of the camel as a mode of transportation in Jerusalem. While camels historically played a role in combat, as depicted in the film Lawrence of Arabia, they are less known for their role in tearing down parts of Tegart’s Wall—a barbed wire fence—between Palestine and Lebanon during the Great Palestinian Revolt of 1936–39. British Mandate forces also mobilized camels to preserve public order, and Palestinian farmers put them to work transporting goods to markets. Johnson argues that the British saw the camels as a sign of backwardness, and that Israeli occupation forces pursued the last camel in Jerusalem (known as Kojak) with the same zeal they pursued the entire Palestinian population under their occupation. In 2011, Kojak was detained for not having “proper paperwork” and the detention drove him crazy, his owner reported.

A view of the Old City as seen from Mount Scopus

A view of the Old City as seen from Mount Scopus, undated

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Part 3

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.

Sorting looted books at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in the wake of the 1948 War

Sorting looted books at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in the wake of the 1948 War

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Palestineremembered.com

The looting of homes was the subject of some discomfort among Israeli officials, at least formally, but the looting of private libraries seems to have been justified as an act of salvage. Nevertheless, when the daughters of Khalil Sakakini requested that their father’s books (which were identified in the catalog system of the National Library) be handed over to the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center in Ramallah, the request was shelved until the daughters could provide a complete list of their father’s books.

The loss of personal libraries pales by comparison to the loss of homes and towns, and it was a loss that occurred in stages. The next article in Part 3, “The Fall of Jerusalem, 1967,” describes the events that led to the occupation of East Jerusalem. Written by S. Abdullah Schleifer, a journalist and eyewitness during the 1967 War, the article gives a detailed account of military moves between June 5 and 7, 1967, when the Israeli flag was raised above the Western Wall (see Roundtable: Remembering the 1967 Naksa). With that occupation came several military mechanisms through which Israel would remind Palestinians who was in control.

In the next article, “On the Importance of Thugs: The Moral Economy of a Checkpoint,” Rema Hammami writes about one of these mechanisms: checkpoints, which disfigure and cantonize the topography and make the traversing of even small distances an unpredictable adventure. She describes the economy that developed in the area of the checkpoint at Surda, which controls access between Ramallah and the northern West Bank. The conflicting interests described here—between commuters who despised the checkpoints and protested them, and workers who forged micro-economies at the checkpoints and stood to lose in the event of their removal—apply to any of Israel’s larger checkpoints, including the ones that control access to Jerusalem like Qalandiya, and speak to the entrenchment of the reality of occupation among Palestinians (see Closure and Access to Jerusalem).

Bio Khalil Sakakini

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

The books plundered from Arab homes did much to develop the university’s Department of Oriental Sciences.

The final article in Part 3, “Jerusalem: Five Decades of Subjection and Marginalization,” written by Jerusalem historian Nazmi Jubeh, describes the effects of decades of marginalization and control on East Jerusalem. Jubeh reviews indicators of economic decline since 1967, caused by the increasing isolation of Jerusalem. The growth of Israeli settlements ringing Jerusalem, together with the Separation Wall, have had a profoundly negative effect on the movement of people and goods that are essential to economic and social activity. That, coupled with the attack on Palestinians’ residency rights and the functioning of academic and other institutions, the increase in home demolitions, the spate of legal maneuvers designed to maintain Jewish demographic dominance in Jerusalem, and the unceasing threat to al-Aqsa Mosque by Jewish extremists, and the picture that emerges is one of a sustained attack on the social fabric of Palestinian Jerusalem. Despite Israel’s de facto annexation of East Jerusalem in 1980 and its shrill insistence that the city is united, the fact remains that Jerusalem is very divided, and the Israeli government’s plans for the city make those divisions starkly clear.

Bio Nazmi Jubeh

A historian, archeologist, and expert on Palestinian cultural heritage and its preservation, with special expertise on Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Hebron

Part 4

The final part of the volume is titled “Jerusalem: Religion and International Law,” and it consists of five articles that tackle the role of religion and international law in considerations of the city’s future. Karen Armstrong, author of “The Holiness of Jerusalem: Asset or Burden?,” reviews Christian, Muslim, and Jewish claims to the city and their differing concepts of holiness. She argues that Christians and Jews have coupled their control of the city with exclusivity, whereas Muslims demonstrated more openness and inclusivity when they controlled the city, inviting Jews to return after the Crusaders had banished them. She concludes the article with an observation: the holiness of a city is not reflected exclusively in its shrines but in the behavior of its inhabitants, an “elementary religious principle” that Jewish fundamentalists seem to have forgotten.15

Edward Said’s essay, “Projecting Jerusalem,” first published in 1995, reviews the phased but determined Israeli control of Jerusalem. Writing after the creation of the Palestinian Authority in 1994, Said is unsparing in his critique of its incompetence and fundamental inability to confront Israel in any meaningful way. He asserts the need for Palestinians to articulate a vision of Jerusalem to strive for, which he argues should be “truer to its complex mixture of religions, histories, and cultures than the one of Jerusalem as something that we would like to slice back into two parts . . . We should insist on speaking of Jerusalem as a city with joint sovereignty and a joint and cooperative vision.”16 He argues that diaspora Palestinians must take the lead in producing that vision of Jerusalem, a process that begins with the conviction that a more inclusive vision is realizable.

“We should insist on speaking of Jerusalem as a city with joint sovereignty and a joint and cooperative vision.”

Edward Said, writing in 1994

In the next article, “The Status of Jerusalem under International Law and United Nations Resolutions,” Palestinian lawyer Henry Cattan analyzes the legal status of the city in terms of “the right of sovereignty of the people of Palestine over Jerusalem, the internationalization of Jerusalem by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1947, and the occupation and annexation of the city since 1948.”17 He argues that instead of resorting either to international law or to United Nations resolutions exclusively, both can be consulted and used to support the argument for the internationalization of Jerusalem.

How do you solve the thorny issue of deciding the status of Jerusalem through negotiations? This is the topic of Chad Emmett’s article, “The Status Quo Solution for Jerusalem,” in which he lists three solutions that have been proposed over the years: an international city controlled by an international body; a united city controlled by one state; or a united city shared by two states. Emmett describes an option proposed by Palestinian philosopher Sari Nusseibeh: a status quo regime with “scattered sovereignty” over noncontiguous areas with sacred sites.18

This article was originally published in 1997, which explains why it might strike readers today as quaint—as though the issue with Jerusalem is control of sacred sites rather than Israel’s settler-colonial subjugation and economic impoverishment of Palestinians in Jerusalem through the Separation Wall, rings of Jewish-only settlements, checkpoints, and byzantine residency requirements, all designed to maintain Jewish hegemony over Jerusalem in perpetuity.

Video The Legal Status of Jerusalem: An Introduction to International Humanitarian Law in the Palestinian Context

An introduction to the applications of International Humanitarian Law (IHL) within the context of the occupied Palestinian Territory (oPT), including East Jerusalem.

Armed Israeli soldiers and settlers, Burin, Nablus, 2009

Armed Israeli soldiers and settlers, Burin, Nablus, 2009

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Wikimedia Commons

The last article in the volume is Walid Khalidi’s “The Ownership of the U.S. Embassy Site in Jerusalem.” Originally published in 2000, it describes the efforts of the American Committee on Jerusalem, beginning in 1999, to challenge US intentions to build its embassy on a specific plot of land in East Jerusalem that the committee could prove belonged to Palestinians, including the article’s author. When letters sent to the US State Department went unanswered, the committee went public with the case. The implications of the case go beyond the site itself and directly invoke four final status issues: The US decision recognizes Israeli sovereignty over East and West Jerusalem; it legitimizes Israeli settlements; it endorses Israel’s outright confiscation of property documented to be owned by Palestinian Jerusalemites; and it predetermines the size of any Palestinian state that might be created.19 These same issues are likely to arise in connection with any parcel of land in Jerusalem on which the US builds an embassy.20

Feature Story Palestinians Campaign against Proposed US Embassy Site on Stolen West Jerusalem Land

Palestinians have submitted documents to Israel that prove that they own the West Jerusalem site proposed for the US embassy.

Conclusion

The essays in this volume provide a multidimensional view of Jerusalem’s history, geography, urban development, religious significance, and future possibilities that challenge predominant Zionist narratives. Authored by Palestinian and other scholars, the views presented center Jerusalem as more than a symbol of religiosity or conflict, that is, a living city whose natural evolution has been derailed. Though scholarly, the articles are accessible to nonspecialists and provide critical insights into a multilayered ancient city unlike any other in the world.

Notes

1

The Other Jerusalem: Rethinking the History of the Sacred, ed. Rashid Khalidi and Salim Tamari (Washington, DC: Khalidi Library and Institute for Palestine Studies, 2020), xiv.

2

Page 77.

3

Page 77.

4

Pages 78, 79.

5

Page 84.

6

Page 96.

7

Page 62.

8

Page 129.

9

Page 153.

10

Page 154.

11

Page 199.

12

Pages 207–8, 224.

13

Page 214.

14

Page 234.

15

Page 332.

16

Page 342.

17

Page 348.

18

Page 362.

19

Page 393.

20

Rashid Khalidi, “Will the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem Be Built on Confiscated Palestinian Land?,” New York Times, January 15, 2023.

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