Modern Jerusalem

In December 1917 British troops under Edmund Allenby entered Jerusalem after the retreat of Ottoman forces. This opened a new era that lasted until 1948, during which Jerusalem again became a capital, this time of a territory administered by the British under a mandate from the League of Nations. Arab opposition to Zionist immigration intensified in the interwar period. The Palestinian Arab nationalist movement was headed by the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini. The mufti used his powers as president of the Supreme Muslim Council against rivals from other notable families, particularly Rāghib al-Nashāshībī, who served as mayor of Jerusalem from 1920 to 1934. Under British rule, the city developed rapidly, expanding its economy and population despite bloody confrontations between Arabs and Jews in 1920 and 1929. In 1936 the Arabs staged a general strike, which erupted into a full-scale revolt against British authority. At one stage, rebels captured the Old City. The mufti, who was the chief instigator of the rebellion, fled the country. Skirmishes continued up to the eve of World War II.

During the war years (1939–45) the city enjoyed relative calm, but, toward the end of hostilities, communal violence resumed. Between 1945 and 1948 Jewish underground militants waged a campaign of bombings against British forces. In July 1946 members of one such group, the Irgun Zvai Leumi, blew up a wing of the King David Hotel, where British civil and military headquarters were temporarily located, with substantial loss of life. Hostilities on a large scale between Arabs and Jews broke out in 1947, and vicious atrocities were committed by both sides. In November 1947 the General Assembly of the United Nations (UN) decided that Palestine be partitioned between Arabs and Jews and that Jerusalem and its surrounding area, including Bethlehem, become a corpus separatum (“separate entity”) under a governor appointed by the UN. The plan, however, was never implemented. When the British high commissioner and all remaining British forces withdrew from Jerusalem on May 14, 1948, the mandate came to an end, and the State of Israel was proclaimed.

In the course of the first of the Arab-Israeli wars, which swiftly followed the declaration of the State of Israel, Israel held west Jerusalem, and Transjordan (later the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan) took control of the Old City and most of East Jerusalem. Residential segregation on the basis of ethnicity became almost total, as Arabs fled from west Jerusalem and Jews from the Jewish quarter of the Old City. Political and legal disputes over the ownership of real property abandoned during the war were to continue without resolution. A cease-fire was agreed to on November 30 and an armistice was reached in April 1949, but no peace treaty was signed at that stage.

In December 1949 Israel proclaimed Jerusalem its capital. None of the Great Powers recognized this action, however, and few of the main organs of Israel’s government moved to Jerusalem until several years had passed. Until 1967 the holy city remained partitioned and disfigured by barbed wire, lookout posts, gun emplacements, and walls. From time to time firing broke out across the armistice line. The Israelis maintained an enclave on Mount Scopus, but the Hebrew University and the Hadassah hospital that were located there were unable to resume operations. Nearly all the holy places of the three religions were held by Jordan. Access to these from west Jerusalem was possible only through a single point, known as the Mandelbaum Gate; this was usually limited to foreign diplomats, though Christians (not, in general, Jews or Israeli Muslims) were permitted to visit their holy places on festivals.

In the Six-Day War of June 1967, the Israelis captured the West Bank, including East Jerusalem and the Old City, from Jordan. The municipal council of East Jerusalem was dissolved, and thenceforth Israel governed the united Jerusalem within its extended municipal boundary as part of its sovereign territory—unlike the remainder of the West Bank, which Israel treated as territory under military occupation. Israel rejected UN resolutions condemning its policies in Jerusalem, and most countries sided with Palestinian Arabs in considering East Jerusalem occupied territory. Teddy Kollek, who served as mayor of the city from 1965 to 1993, led the effort to entrench Israeli control over East Jerusalem while urging sensitivity toward the Arab population. Kollek’s light-handed approach proved successful throughout the 1970s, and communal relations between Israelis and Palestinians in the city were generally amicable. However, a basic law passed by the Knesset in 1980 reaffirming that the unified city would remain Israel’s capital stirred considerable international controversy, and the city’s status was hotly disputed between the two sides in the years that followed. New construction of Jewish housing in the city and in adjoining areas accelerated. During the first intifada, a Palestinian uprising that lasted from 1987 to 1993, communal relations grew increasingly tense. These tensions were particularly exacerbated by violent clashes in Jerusalem between Palestinians and Israeli security forces in 1990.

A significant shift in the politics of the city took place after the 1993 Oslo Accords, in which Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) formally recognized each other and agreed to negotiate over the future of the city. At that point, some sort of shared governance over at least parts of the city seemed achievable. Indeed, initially, Palestinian institutions representing the PLO were allowed to function in the city, and Palestinian Jerusalemites were allowed to vote in the elections of the Palestinian National Council. However, in the years following the accords, a number of Israeli policies designed to ensure an Israeli Jewish predominance of 70:30 in the city and the violent Palestinian responses to these policies led to disillusionment. These policies included: the ongoing Israeli settlement of Palestinian land in the east of the city, to the extent that Israeli Jews there exceeded the Palestinian Arab population of the city; the increasingly strict enforcement of the “closure” policy, which denied Palestinian Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza access to Jerusalem; housing shortages, which were exacerbated by the demolition of Palestinian houses by the Israeli Municipality; and, finally, the revocation of residency permits of Palestinian Jerusalemites who were living outside the Jerusalem borders because of the shortage of housing.

These policies intensified Palestinian Arab resistance, leading to clashes with Israeli security forces and deadly attacks by militants against Israeli civilians. In 1996 Palestinian Arab Muslims, fearing encroachments on their religious sites in the Old City, fought running battles with the Israeli army after the Likud-led government of Benjamin Netanyahu opened an entrance to an underground Jewish historical site (the Hasmonean tunnel) in the heart of the Muslim quarter.

Attempts to advance the negotiations over the city failed at the July 2000 Camp David talks, which were hosted by U.S. Pres. Bill Clinton, between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat. Later, in the same year, an inspection tour of the Temple Mount enclosure—led by the Israeli opposition party leader Ariel Sharon and comprising more than 1,000 security personnel and designed to assert Israeli sovereignty over the enclosure—provoked widespread rioting by Palestinian Arabs in Jerusalem and throughout Gaza and the West Bank.

In the decade following the Camp David talks, tensions between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs in the city increased. With the prospect of a breakthrough in negotiations receding, Israeli policies increasingly corralled Palestinian Arabs into enclaves, cutting them off from the hinterland with diminishing employment prospects and services. Municipal services for areas where Palestinian Arabs predominated were deficient, as these areas, which represented about one-third of the population, received only about one-tenth of municipal spending. Consequently, Palestinian areas were characterized by meager conditions, including poor street lighting, negligible road repairs, inadequate sewage disposal and refuse collection, overcrowded and poorly equipped classrooms, and a lack of public amenities.

In 2003 Israel began to build a barrier around the eastern parts of the city. The construction of the barrier was a response by Israel to the devastating series of bomb attacks on Israeli Jews in Jerusalem by Islamist and other militants in the West Bank. Nevertheless, its construction damaged Israel’s standing in the international community, which viewed it as an inappropriate measure and an impediment to negotiations.

The International Court of Justice ruled in 2004 that the route of the barrier was illegal and confirmed that Israel’s presence in East Jerusalem was illegal under international law. The route of the barrier also left some areas that were formally part of the municipality of Jerusalem—such as Kafr Aqab and Shuʿafat—on the other side of the barrier, thus consigning them to political and legal limbo while cutting off approximately 100,000 Palestinian Jerusalemites from the city’s educational and medical services, commercial areas, and religious sites.

The impasse over the future of the city has exacerbated the religious dimension of the conflict between the two national communities. Israeli settlers, some seeking affordable housing and others motivated by religious feeling to restore the Jewish presence in all parts of the Old City and its immediate vicinity, have systematically acquired properties and cultural sites in politically and religiously sensitive areas. The failure of the PLO and the Jordanian government to halt these activities has prompted the Islamic Movement from inside Israel to mobilize Palestinians with Israeli citizenship to campaign and protest against the settlers, sometimes with violent results.

Jerusalem has been a contested city for much of its history and remains one today. The sacred nature of the city for three religious communities has led to competing religious, political, and historical narratives. As a city that lacks strategic assets or productive natural resources, ideological imperatives will continue to influence the nature of the growth of the city’s population and the separateness or togetherness of its communities. The emotions associated with the struggle for control of the city do not bode well for its future. However, the events of the 1990s and 2000s have shown the necessity of addressing the future of the city through negotiations rather than conflict, either in terms of a partitioned city or in some form of a cooperative sovereignty. The hope that future governance of the city can be resolved in a just manner in the framework of a negotiated agreement between the parties remains the outstanding desire of the international community as well as the majority of Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs.