I came back recently to Italy after an interesting and captivating book tour in some of the most prestigious US universities (UC Irvine, Harvard, Columbia, Georgetown). I presented (timing, unfortunately…) my book on Jerusalem, Jerusalem without God. Portrait of a Cruel City (AUC Press, 2017)
Here I collected the ideas I shared in my talks with scholars and students.
Exclusivity and Exclusion in Contemporary Jerusalem
I wish to start my talk on Jerusalem Without God inverting what Avishai Margalit wrote in 1991, at the time of the Madrid Conference. “Jerusalem has always had more history than geography”, he wrote. He was right, of course, as Jerusalem represents for all of us the archetype of urban and social space. The archetype of the Holy City on heart. And the archetype of the historical complexity in the Mediterranean.
But I wish to be provocative as much as I can in order to destructure what we generally think about Jerusalem, using the lesson Roland Barthes taught us: “the city is a discourse”. Therefore, I add, we have to learn the vocabulary and the syntax of Jerusalem’s language. Geography is a fundamental part of the actual semantic texture of the City.
Jerusalem has more geography than history on different levels. First of all, in terms of space.
The space occupied by the city is gradually and constantly growing since 1967, i.e. since the Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem and the city’s unification under the Israeli rule. Jerusalem has never stopped growing, because the city’s entire political destiny is caught up in its expansion. The borders, already modified and expanded immediately after 1967, have been gradually stretched like elastic. They now include areas (to the east and south) that are part of the occupied city, where the most important mayor after 1967, Israeli mayor Teddy Kollek, focused his so called “finger strategy”. Finger strategy means: Israeli settlements wedged between one Palestinian neighborhood and another, within occupied East Jerusalem.
Kollek’s and Israeli national objectives were and are above all two:
- to attract the Israeli population to Jerusalem with an active and constant housing policy, and to make another division of the city impossible through the presence of Israeli settlements to the east of the Green Line.
- Symmetrically, the Israeli authorities and planners are carving the zones where the Palestinian demographic increase are concentrated.
The new Greater Jerusalem Bill, whose discussion in the Knesset committees has been delayed by the Netanyahu government under the request of the US government, has been a topic some weeks before US president Donald Trump’s declaration on Jerusalem ‘as capital of Israel’. The bill on the Greater Jerusalem leads to a further expansion in terms of space and in terms of population, in order to support the increase of the Israeli population and therefore to strengthen the ratio of the Israeli population inside the municipal borders of Jerusalem. In the new bill, extremely populous settlements like Maale Adumim will become part of the Greater Jerusalem. On the contrary, there are legislation moves in the making to exclude some extremely populous Palestinian suburbs, like Shu’afat (actually, the only refugee camp in Jerusalem and one of the villages comprised in the 1947 corpus separatum), and confine them on the other side of the city’s border.
Jerusalem has more geography than history. First, in terms of space. Second, in terms of cardinal points.
In order to understand Jerusalem, maps are unescapable. Lines, borders, cardinal points, streets, squares, street signs are the specific Jerusalemite vocabulary. They tell us what Jerusalem became, nowadays.
The Green Line changed also the Jerusalem’s perception of the city. From 1948 on, there is a West and a East through which we use to define the international and internal structure of the city. From 1948 on, cardinal points became an unavoidable part of each and every inhabitant’s life.
Everyone has his or her own compass in Jerusalem. Everyone knows how to calculate the exact moment in which he or she is. There are few other places in the world where the cardinal points are so important—decisive in more than one sense. What a contrast to be born in the eastern part of the city, instead of the western side. What a difference to escape from west to east, or to build houses on the eastern or western side of the Green Line. What a gap to live in the north or the south, and to work in the opposite direction. The pocket compass in Jerusalem both describes and locates each individual’s position and becomes the inevitable guiding light of his or her existence.
The cardinal points of Jerusalem, unique in their category, follow the broken lines of history, the prevarications of international political actors seated around elegant tables in intentionally ascetic meeting rooms. The Jerusalemite cardinal points follow, above all, the thick lines of the pencils used from time to time by diplomats, the military, politicians, leaders, the points of which dig deep into geographic maps, like knives into flesh.
Nevertheless… nevertheless. what contemporary history means in Jerusalem, for the people of Jerusalem, the Jerusalemites, cannot erase the whole history of the city, as history has a longe duree, has its own long path. It means that, for the inhabitants, Jerusalem is one. The city is not a part of the city.
Not only for Israelis but also for Palestinians, Jerusalem is one, and just one: there is not a Palestinian east and an Israeli west, as if in the history of the city the communities’ sense of belonging could have been defined by the connection to a specific cardinal point.
Let’s be clear. As a journalist and a historian, my description of Jerusalem, as One City, is the real city I lived, witnessed and studied. It is not at all similar to what the Israeli governments think about Jerusalem since 1967, as a unified city under the Israeli rule and the eternal capital of the State of Israel, unrecognized capital under the international law. What I try to depict is a real city where the inhabitants nevertheless share a common space in an asymmetrical way, as rulers (the Israelis) and occupied (the Palestinians).
What I personally hope as a just and lasting peace, is the idea of a One and Shared Jerusalem, as envisioned by the Israelis and Palestinians who, since 2012, are working of the vision of One Homeland/Two States. One and Shared Jerusalem under the administration of the 2 communities. This vision is not a new one: it is part of a very long lasting debate that involves not only the idea of a One State Solution, but also the discussion of a binational State. I quote only two high profiled among the intellectuals who tried to envision alternative ideas. Martin Buber, the binationalist Martin Buber who was against the idea of a Jewish State, and later on explained his binationalism together with Judah Magnes in a testimony to the Anglo American Inquiry Commission in 1947. Later, Edward Said, who wrote the famous article on the One State Solution in 1999 for the New York Times Magazine. Incidentally, I will remind later Edward Said and Martin Buber while explaining the cardinal points in Jerusalem…
There is one example that could explain easily the gap between the political maps and the sense of belonging to the city.
During the first half of the twentieth century there was not a Palestinian urban development in the east vis-à-vis the expansion of Jewish presence in the west. On the contrary, both communities developed their own—bourgeois, middle class—presence in the west because that was the cardinal point of the sea, and therefore of trade.
The real estate properties in West Jerusalem, in 1948, were 40 percent Palestinian, 26 percent Jewish, with the remainder (almost 34 percent) belonging to the public or, even more often, to Palestinian religious institutions. This is not a detail. It contradicts rather our own western perception according to which the Israeli and Palestinian communities in Jerusalem belong, each of them, to a precise quarter of the city’s compass. This is not the case. Edward Said was born on the actual western side of Jerusalem, in Talbyeh, a neighborhood that remains strongly in the Jerusalemite memory as the neighborhood build by the Palestinian Christian middle and upper class. Martin Buber lived in the house of the Said family for a while.
As Edward Said wrote well after, “so closely intertwined are Israelis and Palestinians, despite their inequality and antipathy, that clean separation simply won’t, can’t really, occur or work”.
There is a second example, a painful example in the Palestinian national consciousness and memory. In Jerusalem people in need of a psychiatric help go west, to the Mental Health Center in Kfar Shaul. Before 1948, Deir Yassin was there, and the remnants of the village are still there, in the Mental Health Center, surrounded by a net, enclosed, invisible to Jerusalem’s inhabitants. Deir Yassin was one of the villages that, in the western side of the map, ringed Jerusalem and before 1948 furnished the city with vegetables, milk, olives, and manual labor. Furthermore, Deir Yassin was one of the villages inside the borders of the corpus separatum in 1947.
And there is a third example, among many others, that describes the life inside the old City as life in an urban space not crystallized according to cardinal points and extremely defined borders. We have to remember that, until the last part of the 19th century, Jerusalem was the Old City, enclosed by the ancient walls of Suleiman the Magnificent.
Until the advent of the British Mandate, Jerusalem was far more mixed in confessional terms than we could imagine. The British broke up the subtle and constant osmosis between the communities along invisible borders and seam-lines, and subdivided the built-up areas inside the Old City into four administratively separate quarters. They eventually became fairly homogeneous sectors according to the ethno-religious affiliations of Muslim, Christian, Armenian, and Jewish communities.
Again, politics and international intervention modified the urban composition and social life of Jerusalem.
Jerusalem has more geography than history. First, in terms of space. Second, in terms of cardinal points. Thirdly, in terms of spacial redefinition of Jerusalem’s community and social life.
Jerusalem, the archetype of the City, is at risk as a City. Because it has not anymore a square.
Confined to old administrative border lines and new security-related limitations, the four quarters no longer share any common place. No streets function as they used to, as an axis through the Old City. The market inside the Damascus Gate is not the same. Not a single shared and public square can be found.
If the square is the epitome par excellence of a public space shared by all communities, of intermingling and the free circulation of people and relations, then Jerusalem lacks public spaces. Not in the Old City. Nor in what we can call the New City.
Jerusalem is no longer a city. It is a urban body where the ongoing conflict has changed the parameters of coexistence, moving from open and shared social spaces to closed social spaces where access is limited according to ethno-religious affiliation.
The limitedness and exclusivity of social spaces are best defined by the two most renowned squares, in fact the only two large squares in the Old City. The Noble Sanctuary and, just beneath, the plaza that leads to the Western Wall: one beside the other. They are endowed with an absolute religious connotation, or a deep political/religious meaning.
The Noble Sanctuary and the Western Wall Plaza are vast but not inclusive. They epitomize separation and exclusiveness in Jerusalem as a contested city. For Jews, the Noble Sanctuary is the heart of Judaism and faith. For Muslim Palestinians, the Western Wall is a denied place of faith, the Buraq Wall. It represents the erasure of Palestinian Jerusalemite history through the Israeli authorities’ destruction of the ancient Mughrabi quarter in July 1967, just after the Six Day War.
The squares are both exclusive places, almost forbidden to members of the other community. Conflicting realities face one another much as they did in Berlin before 1989, which was another divided city. The eastern and the western sectors faced each other along the Berlin Wall, demonstrating to the ‘other’ its own perceived superiority through the magnificence of its public buildings, from the Staatsbibliothek and the Philarmonie in the western side to the Alexanderplatz on the eastern.
The squares exist one in front of the other. The confrontation of the two squares ad escludendum is the architectural and spatial expression of their respective communities in an overcrowded urban reality. The Old City is predominantly narrow, comprised of little streets, alleys, and houses. As large and empty spaces, the squares are, therefore, a clear demonstration of power: open spaces that can contain the extensive and populous community of the faithful, in addition to the symbols of the faith itself.
The squares of exclusiveness in Jerusalem epitomize what the reality is telling us. The contemporary history of the city has been reproduced based on the narrative of each of the single parties. There is no common story; if anything there are parallel stories that, however, political and diplomatic players have often refused to read in order to apply possible solutions.
What we witnessed on 2016 on and around the Haram al Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary, tells us a lot about the urban significance of the square. Id est the political significance.
Among all very delicate conflicting issues, the holy places inside the Old City is at least the most evident one. The harsh controversy on the October, 2016 UNESCO document deploring the Israeli policy toward the Noble Sanctuary and its surroundings shows how difficult, almost impossible, would be the transfer of political and military control on the Old City from the Israeli authorities as the occupying power to the international community and the religious representatives of all the faiths. The tough reaction of Benyamin Netanyahu, and consequently the embarrassed declarations of many Western governments against the document presented to UNESCO by the agency’s member States adamantly illustrate how arduous would be the holy places’ protection.
The Israeli far right, in and outside the government, follows a clear strategy on the Noble Sanctuary’s future: it will try to “Hebronize” the Haram al Sharif, aimed to realize a prayers’ section for Jews, as it is nowadays the partition between the Ibrahimi Mosque and the Patriarchs’ Tomb. The actual situation in the Old City of Jerusalem shows clearly what can be expected on the horizon, as underlined also by the UNESCO World Heritage Committee’s decision of October 2016. Further Israeli escalated violence against Palestinian Muslims’ right to access to al-Aqsa mosque for praying and maintaining the status quo, further provocation by Israeli extremists and settlers in attempting to enter the Noble Sanctuary, and the military closure of the mosque.
The inscription of the Old City of Jerusalem and its Wall in 1981 under the request of the State of Jordan in the World Heritage List is very clear regarding “the value that Jerusalem represents for the three religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.” Furthermore, the representative of Jordan underlined that “It has been always our understanding that the Old City of Jerusalem constitutes an historic ensemble which should be considered in its totality as a coherent whole”.
What nobody of us – journalists, analysts, witnesses – what we did not expected was the civil and civic and peaceful protest, that erupted for two weeks last July.
After the armed assault on July 14, by three Palestinian citizens of Israel (two Israeli border police were killed), Israel had installed CCTV cameras, turnstiles, and metal detectors. As a reaction, the Waqf, the Islamic trust had called for the boycott of the third holiest site by the faithful to oppose Israel’s changes to the delicate status quo.
It was only after Israel had removed all the new equipment installed at the site that the Waqf had called for people to return to Al Aqsa.
Palestinians considered the protest as a victory. And objectively we can say that it was a successful protest. Furthermore, I think it is even more important to consider the deep meaning of the 2017 Al Aqsa protest, as it was more a civil than a religious one. Al Aqsa – as it is in the Jerusalemite perception – is far more a national, civil, popular identity symbol than a symbol linked only to a specific faith. It is the core, the hearth of the City, since what we call nowadays the Old City was The City. Videos and testimonies told us that Palestinian Christians were among the protesters. I think it is even more important to underline that the secular Palestinian sector participated at the protest en masse, especially on Salaheddin street, the commercial avenue of East Jerusalem.
Would the July, 2017 Al Aqsa protest be a resilience model for Palestinian Jerusalemite after Trump’s declaration on Jerusalem? Would it replace the intifada way of reacting to such a political and diplomatic pressure on the Palestinian leaders and population?
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Jerusalem has more geography than history. First, in terms of space. Second, in terms of cardinal points. Thirdly, in terms of spacial redefinition of Jerusalem’s community and social life. Finally, in terms of spacial redefinition of the city per se.
Once, Jerusalem and the Old City were the same overlapping urban space. The first thing that groups of travelers noticed throughout the centuries of pilgrimage to the Holy Land were the sixteenth-century walls of Suleiman the Magnificent, the towers, the domes. That is no longer the case. Jerusalem is no longer a small provincial city surrounded by a wall, as it was until the Ottoman period.
It has become a densely populated and extensive city, the biggest city in Israel. This kind of transformation—from a totally provincial urban center into the internationally unrecognized capital of Israel—originated with the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Without the necessity of controlling the city, its borders and its demographics, there probably would not have been such rapid expansion. To put this in context, Jerusalem’s population at the end of 2014 consisted of nearly nine hundred thousand Israelis and Palestinians, nearly double the population from 1983.
In Jerusalem’s new configuration, thus, the Old City is no longer the city in its entirety, as it was for centuries, when the urban space was completely enclosed by its ancient walls. The Old City is nowadays more than ever Jerusalem’s heart, filled with temples, holy places, shops, tension, and outbursts of violence.
The old historical center is compressed by the overwhelming peripheries. The paradox of history, however, requires that even today, almost a century and a half after European pilgrims’ Grand Tour, Jerusalem appears to travelers to be a fortified city. Jerusalem is still a city within walls, that is, the archetype of an antimodern city. The ancient walls of Suleiman the Magnificent contain ‘only’ the religious and tourist dimensions of one of the most contested places in the world. Instead, third millennium Jerusalem is enclosed by the Wall, a concrete wall of separation to the Palestinians and a ‘defensive barrier’ to the Israelis. As a newly equipped fortress, Jerusalem is now caged inside a security system composed of the Wall and checkpoints, guarded entrances, terminals—postmodern drawbridges.
After a period of openness to modernity, between the end of the Ottoman Empire and the beginning of the British Mandate, during which construction began outside the walls and gates, Jerusalem has returned to its premodern state.
The city, once again, surrounds itself with a wall, an even higher wall made of cement. As happened in 1873, it has even closed the gates that lead into the city, for protection from the outside. The most recent and postmodern wall is the one constructed by Israel over the last dozen of years: reinforced concrete that penetrates the city, cuts out Lazarus’s Tomb, and stretches for almost one and a half kilometers from the ancient walls, winding like a snake and enclosing al-Quds University, the Palestinian university of Jerusalem. To the south, the cement barrier separates the city from what for centuries was its appendix, Bethlehem. A snake of concrete divides and tears the familiar fabric of the Palestinian population. In 1947, in the Partition Plan envisioned by the UN, on the contrary Jerusalem as corpus separatum should have inside its borders also Bethlehem.
The Wall is seen differently by the travelers, residents, and inhabitants: the prefabricated slabs of cement as high as nine meters, the barbed wire, and then the terminals, the security gates that lead into the city from all the cardinal points. The so-called checkpoints are more than just temporary police blocks; they are true and actual border passages, which incidentally have often been built on Palestinian territory.
Today, as it used to be in its history, Jerusalem is a City Surrounded by Walls
Jerusalem is a very complex issue, for the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. This is the reason why it has been put inside the diplomatic drawer, as dust under the carpet. It did not solve the issue, nor simplified the path to a possible solution. On the contrary, continued delay eroded any possibility to reach a compromise, as the Dec., 6th, Trump’s declaration on Jerusalem confirmed abruptly.
The extraordinary and unique history of Jerusalem per se demystifies the clichés of east-west identity. Both the communities feel their Jerusalemite identity as one. They belong to one city that has neither east nor west, except for the embroilments of a very recent period in contemporary history, which stretches only a few decades. For thousands of years belonging to Jerusalem meant to be part of a city, and not of a small part of it. In its uniqueness, Jerusalem is still today a ‘body’—a corpus— and it is completely ‘separated’—separatum—from all the rest. Essentially, Jerusalem embodies its distinctiveness. And the communities live a very particular asymmetric coexistence. Probably, in order to find a solution, we need to come back once again to what Avishai Margalit wrote in 1991 and to what we know since the beginning.
Nevertheless, Jerusalem has more history than geography. Better said, quoting Edward Said in a interview to Cindi Katz in 2000, “geography is the expression of history rather than of something else”.