Produced by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in 2000 and published by Journeyman Pictures, Will Jerusalem Remain Divided Forever? examines the political and human realities of life in Jerusalem through the voices of Palestinian residents, Israeli settlers, politicians, and academics. More than two decades later, the documentary feels less like a historical reflection and more like an early warning of the reality Palestinians in Jerusalem continue to face today.
One of the film’s most important observations comes from Palestinian geographer Khalil Tufakji, who explains that Jerusalem may appear “united,” but in reality, it is “divided united.” For nearly 20 years before the 1967 War, Jerusalem was physically divided, with borders, checkpoints, and visible separation shaping everyday life. After Israel occupied East Jerusalem during the 1967 War, the government consistently touted a “unified” Jerusalem under Israeli control. The documentary, however, reveals how the division never truly disappeared; it simply transformed into political, legal, demographic, and social forms of separation. Palestinians and Israelis continued to live under entirely different realities within the same municipality: unequal infrastructure, discriminatory housing policies, residency revocations, restricted urban development, settlement expansion surrounding and asphyxiating Palestinian neighborhoods, and vastly different relationships to power and mobility.
The film powerfully captures this contrast through both policy and personal experience. Palestinian families are shown fighting to remain in their homes and retain their Jerusalem residency rights, while Israeli officials and settlers openly discuss strengthening Jewish demographic control over the city. One of the documentary’s most emotional moments occurs when Palestinian professor Nahla Asali visits the home her family lost in 1948 and confronts the Israeli Jewish settler who now lives there. The exchange reveals two historical traumas—Palestinian displacement and Jewish exile from Arab countries—yet also exposes the imbalance between memory and power. While the journalist attempts to present both perspectives equally, the film unintentionally reveals the deeper reality: one side speaks from a position backed by state authority, law, and institutional protection, while the other from ongoing loss, dispossession, and the constant need to raise and justify its right to remain.
The documentary also highlights the range of Israeli political approaches toward Jerusalem at the time, from officials promoting permanent Israeli sovereignty over the entire city to settler organizations actively expanding Jewish presence inside Palestinian neighborhoods of the Old City. Policies presented as administrative, or “security,” measures are shown functioning as demographic tools designed to reshape Jerusalem’s identity and population balance. Through Yasser Abu Khalaf’s story, where a Palestinian child battling cancer loses access to health care after his family’s Jerusalem residency is revoked, the film demonstrates how bureaucracy and arbitrary decisions become part of the system that controls Palestinian life.
Watching the documentary today is especially disturbing, because the realities documented in the year 2000 have dramatically intensified. Settlement expansion in East Jerusalem has continued at an accelerated pace, Palestinian neighborhoods face increasing demolitions and displacement threats, and residency revocations remain a mechanism of pressure against Palestinians living outside municipal boundaries. The construction of the Separation Wall after the Second Intifada physically fragmented Jerusalem even further, isolating many Palestinians from workplaces, schools, health care, and holy sites in the city.
What is perhaps most striking today is that even the reality documented in 2000 no longer captures the scale of what Palestinians in East Jerusalem and the rest of the occupied West Bank have experienced over the past three years, particularly during Israel’s war on Gaza. The systems of control, displacement, and demographic engineering shown in the documentary have accelerated dramatically. East Jerusalem has witnessed increasing home demolitions, forcible expulsions evictions, settlement expansion, intensified police and military presence, restrictions on Palestinian access to al-Aqsa Mosque, and growing attempts to reshape the city’s demographic and political character. Neighborhoods such as Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan have remained at the center of expulsion and demolition campaigns, while Palestinian families continue to face the threat of losing their homes to settler organizations. Reports since Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza began have documented sharp rises in demolitions, displacement, settlement approvals, and restrictions on movement and worship in Jerusalem.1
The city has also experienced unprecedented levels of surveillance, arrests, political repression, and limitations on Palestinian public life. At the same time, the separation between East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank has become even more entrenched through checkpoints, residency restrictions, and policies that continue to isolate Palestinians from their social, economic, and cultural center. What appears in the documentary as a city living under unequal realities has, over the years, evolved into an even harsher system where displacement, fragmentation, and insecurity have become increasingly normalized.2 The “divided united” Jerusalem that Tufakji described remains an accurate description of the city, but the gap between those two realities has grown wider and more brutal than the filmmakers could have imagined in 2000.
What the documentary ultimately shows is that Jerusalem was never truly “united” in the way Israeli political discourse claimed. Instead, the visible borders of the past were replaced by invisible systems of inequality, control, and segregation that continue to define the city today, only now in even harsher and more deeply entrenched forms, where Palestinians in Jerusalem continue to live under harsher circumstances, constant instability, and a conditional existence.