There is something exceptionally valuable about this visual footage of Jerusalem. Filmed and produced by British Pathé in 1967, shortly before the Naksa, it captures a city that was on the verge of dramatical upheaval. The camera moves through Jerusalem while the eastern part of the city was still Arab and under Jordanian rule, recording streets, people, religious sites, and even King Hussein himself—moving between the two sides of the city and revealing the physical division that had shaped Jerusalem since 1949.
Footage like this is rare. Today, we are accustomed to almost every moment being documented, but this was certainly not the case in Jerusalem in the 1950s and 1960s. Thus, what survives on film provides us with an unusual opportunity to look at the city as it appeared during a specific period. Perhaps some of the most interesting moments are not even what the filmmakers intended to document: people walking in the streets, children appearing before the camera, cars passing, buildings, clothing, and fragments of ordinary life unfolding in the background. For a few minutes, Arab Jerusalem is not simply something described retrospectively through war and politics; it is there, moving before us.
This is ultimately why we find the footage important to share. However, it is important to distinguish between the historical value of these images and the narrative imposed upon them. The views expressed in British Pathé’s audio narration were produced within the political and cultural context of its time and should be approached critically. The narration offers a distinctly Western and Orientalist reading of Jerusalem: it privileges certain biblical and Jewish claims to the city, while giving considerably less space or credence to its Arab and Muslim authentic history, presence, and attachment to place. At moments, this narrative also risks presenting the city’s division as the product of timeless religious antagonism rather than being the result of a very recent and specific political event, namely, the violent settler-colonial Zionist project. We nevertheless opted to present the film with its original narration intact, both as a historical document that should itself be approached critically and, above all, because of the exceptional value of its rare visual record of Arab Jerusalem at a critical point in time.
Throughout the film, Jerusalem is presented almost as a city destined for conflict. Its religious history is repeatedly invoked to explain its contemporary division, moving between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam and portraying Jerusalem as a place where competing attachments to the same sacred geography have made conflict nearly inevitable. There is a certain irony in this framing, as the narrator repeatedly points out: a city sacred to different faiths, associated with messages of peace, sacrifice, and salvation, yet physically divided by soldiers, barbed wire, and a no-man’s-land.
Jerusalem’s division in 1967, however, was not simply the continuation of some timeless religious struggle. It was the result of a very recent and specific political event; namely, the violent settler-colonial Zionist project. The 1948 War had divided the city, displaced Palestinians from neighborhoods that happened to fall on what became the “Israeli side,” and produced a hard, impassable frontier running directly through what had once been a continuous urban space (see Divided Jerusalem (1948–67): When a City Became a Frontier and Divided Jerusalem). By the time this footage was filmed on the eve of the 1967 War, that division had been part of Jerusalem’s reality for almost two decades.
One of the most striking moments in the narration comes when the filmmaker asks us to “consider the effect on city life where a no-man’s-land corridor like this was superimposed on everyday existence.”1 Here, the images perhaps speak most powerfully alongside his words. Borders and political agreements are usually drawn on maps, but in Jerusalem they passed through people’s everyday surroundings. Barbed wire, soldiers, checkpoints, and guard checks at entrances became part of the geography of ordinary life.
Knowing what happened only months after these images were filmed gives the documentary another dimension today. Near the end, the narrator looks at the divided city around him and asks: “This split city today tells us the story of a thousand turbulent yesterdays, but what does it tell us of tomorrow, except dread?”2
He was asking this question from his present. We are now living in that tomorrow. Within months, the city shown in the footage would cease to exist in this form. In June 1967, Israel occupied Arab Jerusalem, along with the rest of the West Bank, and renamed it East Jerusalem. The barriers dividing East and West Jerusalem were removed, and Israel subsequently greatly expanded Jerusalem’s municipal boundaries and applied its law, jurisdiction, and administration to the expanded territory. The physical frontier captured so vividly in this film disappeared.
Yet the disappearance of that frontier did not mean the disappearance of division. Nearly 60 later, Jerusalem remains a city in which questions of sovereignty, belonging, access, displacement, and competing visions of the city’s future remain deeply unresolved. The lines have changed, as have the political realities surrounding them, yet many questions about this divided city have persisted.
This is perhaps what makes watching the film today so compelling. We know something its narrator could not know. We know what happened next, and we witnessed the decades that came after.
And yet, strangely, we are still asking versions of the same questions. The Jerusalem captured here belongs to a particular moment that disappeared almost immediately after the camera recorded it. That alone makes these images worth preserving and revisiting. The footage also allows us to place two moments beside one another: Jerusalem as someone saw it in 1967, uncertain about what tomorrow would bring, and Jerusalem today, carrying nearly six additional decades of history.
We can now answer parts of the narrator’s question about tomorrow. Other parts remain painfully unresolved.