The Big Picture

Jerusalem is known as a “holy city,” an “international city,” and a “city of peace.”

The reality on the ground is starkly, darkly, different.

Homeless, stateless, and penniless, many Palestinians became refugees, in East Jerusalem and beyond.

Nineteen years later, in 1967, Israel conquered the rest of the city and occupied it, along with the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Immediately thereafter, the state set about to reshape and reengineer the east side of the city—to integrate it with the western, Jewish side by erasing or downplaying its Arab character, past and present, and remaking it as a Jewish urban space in an effort to ensure permanent Israeli sovereignty.

Unlike in 1948, however, the Palestinians had largely stayed put. Israel had to decide how to deal with them. And very quickly, it got down to business. 

In the chaos of the war that devastated Jerusalem and ravaged the rest of the country, many Jerusalemites fled to safety or were expelled. Shown here are frantic Palestinian refugees trying to escape over the wrecked Allenby Bridge from East Jerusalem to Jordan on June 22, 1967. The Associated Press photo caption, written at the time, notes that “Many of the refugees said they were forced to leave by the Israelis.”

After occupying East Jerusalem, Israel quickly decided that the Palestinians in the newly occupied and expanded city would be designated permanent residents, not citizens, a status typically conferred on foreigners moving to a new place. This status is inferior, with limited rights and benefits, and revocable by the Minister of Interior at any time, conditional on whatever requirements the minister decides to set. It is also nontransferable to children or spouses.

Over time, the status was whittled away and diminished to become ever more precarious. Today, Palestinian Jerusalemites must continuously prove that their “center of life” is in Jerusalem or risk deportation. They live in fear of revocation on any pretext. 

As it had done in West Jerusalem, Israel moved quickly to populate the newly conquered areas with Jews. In heavily populated East Jerusalem, this took the form of settlements. The state confiscated lands from Palestinians and built settlements within, around, and far-outlying the newly occupied eastern Arab side of the city to establish a greater [Jewish] Jerusalem region that would eventually dwarf, engulf, and contain the Palestinian populated areas. Today, there are 14 settlements in East Jerusalem with 227,100 Jews—now 39 percent of the population of that side of the city. [1]

All of these activities are illegal under international law, which prohibits an occupying power from establishing any kind of permanent presence or harming the interests of the occupied population.

In 2004, Israel began construction of a massive Separation Wall across the entire West Bank. The wall runs right through East Jerusalem and snakes all around the outer region of the city, enveloping areas of Jewish population into the city and excising or encircling areas of Palestinian population. In this way, it effectively dismantles the historic communal fabric of Palestinian Jerusalem, creating a patchwork of enclaves, exclaves, excisions, and ghettoes.

Palestinian neighborhoods that fall within the municipal boundaries are severed, their residents forced to use a single military checkpoint to access their city with all its services including health care, education, workplaces, holy sites, and more.

Once the wall was up, the municipality openly stopped providing even basic services to many of the neighborhoods on the other side of it, leaving them to decline into anarchy.