Status, Voice, and Governance
Precarious Status
Most Palestinian Jerusalemites have a legal status that is unique in the world: Although they are indigenous, they are stateless. This situation creates a precarity that infuses every aspect of life and leaves the community perpetually afraid that their fragile residency status will be summarily revoked. Here we explore this untenable reality.
Featured in This Topic
What’s happened since Israel’s ban on UNRWA took effect January 30, 2025?
Legal experts explain why Israel’s ban on UNRWA is on shaky legal ground.
A photographic tribute to UNRWA’s decades of service to Palestinian refugees in Jerusalem and its environs
There are 5.9 million registered Palestinian refugees with the UNRWA, and they continue to have a unique status under international law.
How Israel’s permanent-resident status constrains and contains Palestinians’ lives in Jerusalem, where the majority have been forced to hold this status.
Palestinians who hold permanent-resident status must satisfy the state that Jerusalem is their “center of life” in order to continue enjoying that status. But how frequently?
The everyday experience of moving about in Jerusalem while Palestinian
A photojournalist is left stateless and in limbo as Israel repeatedly rejects his applications for status and tries unsuccessfully to deport him.
What does it mean to have “no status” (i.e., to be stateless) after the state revokes one’s residency?
An in-depth look at the extraordinarily precarious legal status held by Palestinian Jerusalemites, and how it has become more precarious over time
An in-depth look at the extraordinarily precarious legal status held by Palestinian Jerusalemites, and how it has become more precarious over time
The state inflicts devastating punishment on a Palestinian family for the actions of a dead man; the consequences are lifelong and irrevocable, especially for the children.
When legally participating in your nation’s elections results in deportation from the city of your birth
After a 30-year legal fight, Palestinian Jerusalemite Akram Abd al-Haq was able to have the permanent-resident status with which he was born reinstated, offering hope for others.
The Story in Numbers
366,800
Palestinians in Jerusalem (registered with legal status within the Israeli unilaterally declared municipal boundaries (2020)) [1]
20,000
Approximate number of Palestinian Jerusalemites who hold Israeli citizenship [2]
346,800
Estimated number of Palestinian Jerusalemites who have Israeli permanent-resident status, an inferior, conditional, and geographically restricted status that is revocable if residents cannot continuously prove that Jerusalem is their “center of life” at any point the authorities demand such proof [3]
14,701
Number of Palestinian Jerusalemites whose residency status was revoked by Israel from 1967 to 2020 [4]
5.3
Average number of Palestinians living in a single household in Jerusalem in 2018 [5]
77,913
Very rough estimate of the number of persons affected by the residency revocations over time; since the revocation of an individual’s residency also extends to his or her dependents. [5] Others have estimated this number to be significantly higher (86,000 in 2015, at which point the number of revocations was 14,565). [6]
Notes
1. Omer Yaniv, Netta Haddad, and Yair Assaf-Shapira, Jerusalem Facts and Trends 2022 (Jerusalem: Jerusalem Institute for Policy Research, 2022), 20. Reflects the number of Palestinians entered in the Israeli Population Registry (including both citizens and permanent residents). Unregistered persons and persons with Palestinian Authority (PA) IDs living in Jerusalem may number in the thousands or tens of thousands, but are not counted in this source.
2. The story behind this number is too complex for a note. See other Backgrounders in this topic.
3. Estimate reached by subtracting the total of item no. 2 from item no. 1.
4. See Precarious Status.
5. Calculation made by multiplying the known number of individual revocations over the years by the average household size for Palestinians in Jerusalem in 2018. Michal Korach and Maya Chosen, eds., Jerusalem Facts and Trends 2020 at a Glimpse (Jerusalem: Jerusalem Institute for Policy Research, 2020). Clearly this is only a rough estimate given that the average household size would have changed over the years since 1967. The key takeaway here is that the revocation of a single individual’s residency also affects the status of all of his dependent children (see Precarious Status).
6. Tamara Tawfiq Tamimi, “Revocation of Residency of Palestinians in Jerusalem: Prospects for Accountability,” Jerusalem Quarterly 72 (2017): 37–47.
Israel tried treating Palestinian Americans like other US tourists, and I was finally able to visit my capital city.
Palestinians with Jordanian passports question, how permanent is “temporary?”