Colonial Jerusalem: The Spatial Construction of Identity and Difference in a City of Myth, 1948-2012

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Jerusalem, a Colonial City under Construction

I have often noted that the deprivations of the colonized are the almost direct result of the advantages secured to the colonizer…. To observe the life of the colonizer and the colonized is to discover rapidly that the daily humiliation of the colonized, his objective subjugation, are not merely economic. Even the poorest colonizer thought himself to be—and actually was—superior to the colonized. This too was part of colonial privilege.

—ALBERT MEMMI, The Colonizer and the Colonized, 1965

This is a bleeding process with a vengeance.

—KARL MARX, Letter to Nikolai Danielson, 1881

In 2004, in a festive ceremony, Israeli authorities broke ground on the Museum of Tolerance (MOTJ) in Jerusalem. The $100-million initiative is sponsored by the Los Angeles–based Simon Wiesenthal Center and is supported by funds raised internationally. This enormous cultural project is currently under construction in the center of Jerusalem, a city Israel has claimed an exclusive right to govern against the weight of world opinion and the historical claims of the indigenous Palestinians. The museum’s website features the structure’s varied facets and celebrates the purported contributions it will make to healing this divided and conflict-ridden urban landscape. Dedicated, as its literature announces, to human dignity, the MOTJ’s founders declare that this elaborate representational space will serve as a great landmark promoting the principles of mutual respect and social responsibility.¹

The stated aims of this place of tolerance have certainly appeared innocent, even deeply humane, to many Israeli Jews and their supporters abroad. However, this initiative has proven anything but innocuous since plans for it were first unfurled a decade ago. For one, this structure of glass and polished stone is beginning to emerge just a short distance from a string of former Palestinian neighborhoods in West Jerusalem, whose inhabitants were expelled by the new Israeli state in 1948. Further, and perhaps most critically, the museum is being established atop a segment of the Ma’mam Allah (or Mamilla) Islamic Cemetery, a centuries-old Arab burial ground.

Despite lofty assertions about this institution’s peaceful character, as construction commenced Israeli building crews were compelled to acknowledge that they had dug up the bones of those buried in the cemetery. Soon thereafter, an embarrassing international scandal arose as news of the violation of these tombs drew predictable responses of protest and indignation from Los Angeles to Lahore, including from thousands of Israeli-Jews dismayed by their government’s actions.²

Who, many demanded, justifies the despoiling and disturbing of graves? Of all the places to establish a cultural center with the avowed aim of documenting the history of anti-Semitism, why had the Israeli government and its American affiliates insisted on the burial ground of another people? And yet, despite these desecrations, digging continued implacably, applauded by U.S. and Israeli politicians and a slew of celebrity endorsers. The project has been bolstered since 2008 by the legal sanction of an Israeli Supreme Court ruling supporting the museum’s organizers and affirming their right to build at this locale. This, while voices within the Israeli press and government have questioned whether the graves were even part of a real cemetery at all.³

Facing mounting international condemnation, the Jewish state erected a symbolic, seamless ten-foot wall around the construction site’s perimeter in recent years to block the monitoring of what might yet be disinterred. A series of surveillance cameras has been placed atop this enclosure, directing their panoptic gaze outward at those who wish to observe what is happening within. As with innumerable other battles over land, memory, and the past that have arisen in Jerusalem since the beginning of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, this one has intensified in emblematic ways. The case of a museum purportedly about remembrance effacing the histories of another people is a striking metaphor for the struggle over this city waged between religious and national communities in the last century.

COLONIAL JERUSALEM: EXPANSION AND EXCLUSION

This book explores the spatial construction of identity and difference in contemporary Jerusalem, a deeply divided urban center at the core of the sixty-seven-year Palestinian-Israeli conflict. I analyze the political uses of myth, meaning, and memory across an urban landscape integral to the national identities of both Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews and highly significant to hundreds of millions of others the world over. Writing a study of this sort requires asking three interrelated questions: First, who, since 1948, has possessed the capacity to regulate, redefine, and reconfigure Jerusalem? Second, how have arrangements of enforced separation (hafrada in Hebrew, infisaal in Arabic) here and elsewhere in Palestine/Israel shaped the lives of Arabs and Jews since the rise of this national struggle?⁴ And third, who—in the words of urban theorist Henri Lefebvre (1968)—has the right to the city and what does social justice demand in contemporary Jerusalem?

In each of the chapters that follow, I detail how borders between (and among) Palestinians and Israelis have been constituted in this most contested of places. This book argues that the Jewish state’s attempts to sustain sole control over Jerusalem have been as much about guarding the past as they have been about fortressing the contemporary city with separation walls, checkpoints, and military emplacements. I contend that the frontiers that have dominated and defined Jerusalem have included not simply serpentine ramparts of concrete or electrified fences, but also the ossified boundaries of the imagination and the fortified divides of the mind.

The result has been a prescribed social order of apartness between Palestinians and Israelis across the entire country. This arrangement has made Jerusalem one of the most segregated cities in the world. However, among my central arguments is that this urban space represents not simply a severely divided place within a broader national struggle but also a colonized space at the heart of a colonial conflict. In analyzing Jerusalem within a colonial framework, my book diverges from the bulk of scholarly and nonscholarly writings on the contemporary city and the larger landscape of Palestine/Israel in which it is embedded.⁵

Approaching Palestine/Israel as a site of colonial governance and Jerusalem as a colonial city might appear anything but self-evident to some readers. It certainly has seemed so to a range of Western commentators on the contemporary Middle East. Even those for whom the Jewish state’s military occupation of East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank is understood to be illegal under international law are commonly averse to define Israeli authority as colonial authority. This reluctance, I assert, has partially to do with a failure to grasp with perhaps enough precision the character of Israeli policy since 1948, particularly its spatial designs and racial assumptions. But beyond misconceptions of, for instance, the discriminatory features of Israeli land law or the exclusionary bylaws of Jewish-only kibbutzim, neighborhoods, or settlements, there are also widely held beliefs about colonialism more generally that contribute to these analyses.

Crucially, there persists a taken-for-granted belief among scholars, politicians, and journalists that colonialism is something that humanity has, in a sense, progressed beyond.⁶ Colonialism and postcolonialism are all too often regarded as stages in a teleological unfolding of history. And we today—all of us—are said to reside in the latter period. Consequently, the notion of a colonial present has not informed the majority of scholarly work on this conflict or on Jerusalem specifically.⁷

Writing about Israel as a colonial state is not simply about leveling a sterner rebuke of its policies and formation. Rather, the importance of doing so pertains to the ways in which Israel (as the dominant power in the country and the region) has organized, made available, and denied the use of land and housing to Arabs and Jews since 1948. Underlying colonial governance, whether in Algeria, North America, South Africa, or Palestine/Israel, has been a relentless territorial expansion, accompanied by methods of racial exclusion and confinement imposed on subjugated and racialized communities. A prodigious and refined ideological machinery has typically also been at work, justifying, normalizing, and vindicating policies of conquest while defining the colonized as dangerous and inferior—when they are even acknowledged at all.

But why, one might still ask, are these acts of expropriation and exclusion expressions of colonial power? Conquest and mass expulsions are, after all, as old as human civilization itself. The answer lies primarily in the transformative quality of this distinctly modern exercise of domination. Describing the capacity of colonialism to radically remake captured lands and regulate populations, Talal Asad (1991) explains that the conditions of reinvention were increasingly defined by a new scheme of things—new forms of power, work and knowledge (314). These dimensions of rule—legal, cultural, and military—should be seen, he adds, not simply as a temporary repression of subject populations but as an irrevocable process of transmutation, in which old desires and ways of life were destroyed and new ones took their place (ibid).⁸

Colonial alterations in Palestine began with greatest force under British rule (1917–1948). A few of these changes and modes of control have persisted as part of Israeli governance (in West Jerusalem from 1948 to the present and in East Jerusalem since 1967).⁹ However, despite these continuities, there was one fundamental rupture in the rule of Palestine in the twentieth century: British authority was not settler colonialism; Israeli authority is and has been since its inception more than six decades ago. From the first days of its existence, the self-described Jewish state built on earlier, pre-state efforts to transform and claim the country for the exclusive benefit of Jewish communities in Palestine and abroad. This, as discussed throughout this book, has necessitated vast settlement campaigns to bolster the Jewish population at the expense of the indigenous Palestinian Christians and Muslims.

In exploring the racial assumptions and practices so integral to Israeli authority and the Zionist principles that undergird them, I have incurred a tremendous debt to the theorizing of Mary Douglas and her classic work, Purity and Danger. In it she examines the anxieties that arise when things (or people) do not fit neatly into the cherished classifications of dominant groups. Her notion of matter out of place (1966, 44) is a stellar metaphor for the tensions and fears that arise when particular people refuse to remain in their proper places. What Douglas refers to as dirt and pollution have compelling implications for the abiding racialization of communities and spaces in Jerusalem and throughout the entirety of Palestine/Israel.¹⁰ I engage her discussion of such themes in each of the chapters that follow.

The social order of separation created in Jerusalem over the last several decades has been analogous in a number of respects to that of the Jim Crow U.S. South and apartheid South Africa.¹¹ Vincent Crapanzano (1985), writing about the geographies of racial domination in the twilight of white supremacy in South Africa, aptly notes that difference is preserved through distance (39). Drawing from this and other related insights from the literature on racism and urban politics, this book explores how policed apartness between Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews, occupier and occupied, has tended to bolster beliefs among religious and national groups concerning their supposed differences.

IMAGINING THE HOLY CITY

Innumerable other urban centers across the globe have exhibited apartheid-like forms of separation between racial, religious, and ethnic communities. However, Jerusalem (known as al-Quds to Palestinians and Yerushalim to Israeli Jews) is distinguished from nearly every other metropolitan area in at least one or two vital respects. Not only is this site at the center of the enduring Palestinian-Israeli conflict but it also possesses a near-peerless religious and symbolic potency. The myths that envelop this realm (biblical, national, etc.) animate hundreds of millions, if not billions globally.

Detroit, Michigan or Baltimore, Maryland may be cities of intense racial segregation. But one could hardly imagine people from around the world converging on these sites of post-industrial decline to fight and die for them. Though smaller than Charlotte, North Carolina, Jerusalem has retained an almost magical intensity as mighty or mightier than places revered as global cities or glamorous capitals of high finance, political power, and the arts.¹²

The vast majority of those who lay claim to Jerusalem and the rest of the holy land, as it is so often marketed, reside far beyond this sliver of the eastern Mediterranean and its approximately twelve million Palestinians and Israelis, as of 2013 roughly equal in number. Their bonds and connections are routinely expressed as sacred or biblical ones, forged from promises and prophecies transmitted from unassailable celestial sources.¹³ Relatively few who claim an intimacy with this place, however, will ever visit the land they imagine binds them to those they refer to as their gods, ancestors, and prophets.

Given Jerusalem’s global importance, it is perplexing how relatively few scholarly works have sought to explore social relations and national politics in the contemporary city.¹⁴ Even fewer ethnographies have been written about the daily, lived dimensions of intercommunal encounters and conflicts that have comprised this urban center. Lisa Taraki (2006b) and other Palestinian scholars have noted in recent years that not nearly enough research on Palestinian society has examined the practices of everyday existence (xxii) under Israeli military occupation. This body of scholarship has tended, she notes, to emphasize more general political and economic relations. All too often, these works have represented Palestinians as one dimensional political subjects (xi), as a community or communities whose struggles are regularly reduced to their nationalist dimensions. The internal dynamics, stresses, and contradictions of the social groups and communities within which people live out their lives, she adds, have not received much serious attention from most researchers (ibid.).

This book takes seriously this critique and the scholarly approaches it insists upon. In the chapters that follow I examine quotidian life in Jerusalem from various perspectives. The complexities intrinsic to manufacturing and sustaining binarized notions of self and other, masculinity and femininity, the divine and the secular, past and present—even Arab and Jew and Israeli and Palestinian—are countless. These are cultural divisions and distinctions that, though routinely depicted as timeless, optionless, or eternal, have forever been in flux. They have for decades helped engender forms of separation and hostility in this city but they are not, I argue, inevitable.

THE MAKING OF A COLONIAL CITY: HISTORICAL CONSIDERATIONS

Jerusalem, like the rest of historic Palestine, was governed by the Ottoman Empire for nearly four centuries before the advent of British colonial rule in December 1917. The city in the latter years of the Ottoman period bore little resemblance to what it would become by the end of the British Mandate just three decades later. Urban environments in the region and across the globe exhibited significant growth during the same period and since. However, Jerusalem’s rising population figures and territorial changes during that era (and indeed over the last century) reveal an urban environment whose expansion has been particularly pronounced.¹⁵ Two critical transformations came in 1948 with the creation of the state of Israel and the expulsion by that new country of roughly 750,000 Palestinian Christians and Muslims (the majority of the Arab population). Upwards of 45,000 of these were exiled from Jerusalem and its neighboring villages.

These transformations of the late 1940s were crucial to the creation of a particular kind of Jerusalem. But it should be remembered that decades before British rule the Ottoman authorities had begun to usher in a range of modern alterations to the city’s character. In the wake of nineteenth-century reforms to the land tenure system and the opening up of Palestine to European trade and markets, the Ottomans redrew Jerusalem’s boundaries in 1909, enlarging them several fold and taking in hundreds of acres beyond the former limits of the Old City walls.¹⁶

Budding neighborhoods, commercial zones, and religious institutions began to proliferate beyond the Old City in the decades leading up to the British conquest of Palestine. Residential areas grew even more rapidly in the thirty years of British colonial rule with at least two dozen new quarters built during that period. In the early phases of British control, officials further altered the city and transformed it administratively. However, consistent with the practices of colonial governance then and since, consultations with the native inhabitants over these changes were minor.

Jerusalem’s current Israeli-drawn municipal borders encompass 125.15 square kilometers, composed of what today is referred to as West Jerusalem (55 square kilometers) and East Jerusalem (70 square kilometers). The approximately 850,000 people within these boundaries include about 325,000 Palestinian Christians and Muslims (nearly all residing on the east side of the city) and roughly 500,000 Israeli Jews (about 200,000 of whom live in East Jerusalem settlements and about 300,000 live on the west side). Since Israel’s conquest and occupation of East Jerusalem in 1967, it has been in control of the entirety of this urban center. And that has meant that the Jewish state has been able to reconfigure nearly all major dimensions of this symbolic space—including its borders—with little if any participation from the Palestinian residents.

Israel redrew the borders of East Jerusalem in June 1967, expanding this side of the city ten fold (from about 6 to 70 square kilometers). Its post-1967 borders have stretched from Ramallah and al-Bireh, 12 kilometers to the north of the city center, to the outskirts of Bethlehem about 6 kilometers to the south.¹⁷ Observing the sprawling metropolitan area today, it is easy to forget that, until the start of the twentieth century, Jerusalem was defined as little more than the one-square-kilometer of land within the 400-year-old walls of the Old City. This area contained approximately 30,000 Muslim, Christian, and Jewish inhabitants by the early 1900s, a number very close to its current population.

Map 1. Jerusalem in 1947 on the eve of the departure of the British colonial regime and the city’s physical division. Courtesy of United Nations, Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), Occupied Palestinian Territory.

SOCIAL AND CULTURAL CHANGES

Running concurrently with and intersecting these vast spatial and demographic changes to Jerusalem were its shifting cultural cartographies. The rise of capitalist modernity and the rapid spread of European colonialism across the Middle East in the late 1800s and early 1900s were utterly transformational in the ways noted by Asad (1991) above. These processes helped bring new nationalist assertions, borders, identities, and movements rapidly into existence. Zionism (or Jewish nationalism) and Palestinian nationalism were late-breaking expressions of this distinctly modern form of identity. In the Palestine of the early 1900s, these ideologies began to be wedded to colonial and anticolonial politics. More and more they were mutually understood to be sharply at odds.¹⁸

Map 2. Jerusalem divided between the Israeli-ruled west side and the Jordanian-ruled east side, 1949–1967. Courtesy of United Nations, Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), Occupied Palestinian Territory.

Map 3. Palestine/Israel and Israel’s unilaterally redrawn Jerusalem, post-1967. Courtesy of United Nations, Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), Occupied Palestinian Territory.

Map 4. The progression of military occupation: Jerusalem in the years 1967, 1973, 1987, and 2005. Illegal Jewish settlements are denoted by black dots in the 1973 map and by darker areas in the 1987 and 2005 maps. Courtesy of United Nations, Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), Occupied Palestinian Territory.

The waves of Jewish immigration to Palestine that began in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries typically included those intent on building a Jewish state or homeland. As already mentioned, mass settlement in Palestine was vital if such a design were to come to fruition because the land the Zionist movement had chosen was more than nine-tenths Arab Muslim and Christian in 1916.¹⁹ Carefully examining the goals and visions of the mainstream Zionist movement reveals a strong settler-colonial dimension. Those who came to live in Palestine not uncommonly referred to themselves as settlers.²⁰ To this end, Zionist officials and agencies developed dozens of neighborhoods, kibbutzim, and moshavim (the latter is the Hebrew word for colonies) with discriminatory bylaws that formally excluded Palestinian Muslims and Christians from living, and at times even working, within these residential realms.²¹

It was with the emergence of this conflict between Zionism and Palestinian nationalism that the binary opposition, Arab–Jew, began to solidify in ways it had not before. As this happened, histories and experiences of more overlapping social relations, ones in which Arab and Jew were not regarded as necessarily mutually exclusive, began to be effaced by emerging nationalist visions. The rise of distinct national divisions in Palestine, as Tamari (2009) and other scholars of Jerusalem have written, created greater separation and conflict between Arab and Jewish communities. These emerging dimensions of social life would in turn have a profound impact on the city’s changing spatial dimensions, which I will address in each of the following chapters.²²

The country’s native Christians and Muslims overwhelmingly opposed the establishment of a Jewish state, perhaps primarily because they feared that as non-Jews they would eventually be marginalized in or even expelled from their own towns and villages. Jewish nationalism could offer the Palestinians little if anything because it was not premised on their inclusion but rather on their removal or absence. Unlike other colonial ventures, mainstream Zionist state-making struggles were based not on the conquest of land and the exploitation of native labor, but instead on the exclusion or displacement of its non-Jewish inhabitants. Arab Christians, Muslims, and others registered anxieties as early as the late nineteenth century about what a Jewish state in Palestine might mean for them. Those fears, as this book will detail, have not proven unwarranted.

DEMOGRAPHIC POLITICS

Contentious debates have arisen for decades around the population figures of Ottoman-era and British Mandate Palestine. Such disputes underline how integral demographic politics have been to the struggle over this narrow strip of territory between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. Precise figures for various religious and national groupings within particular borders have been difficult to ascertain. Among the most rigorous and perhaps the most reliable works to explore population statistics in twentieth century Palestine is that of the Ottoman historian Justin McCarthy (1990). He has addressed the flawed and at times highly ideological character of several of the supposed counts.²³ After examining all major demographic estimations from the early and mid-twentieth century, he concludes that Palestine was roughly 90 percent Palestinian Arab (Christian, Muslim, and a small indigenous Jewish community) in 1916 on the eve of British rule. This was about the time Britain’s foreign secretary, Lord Alfred Balfour, declared his government’s support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine.²⁴

By the late 1940s, in the final years of British rule, there is little disagreement in the scholarly literature that the Arabs of Palestine were close to 70 percent of the total population. The Jewish communities represented approximately 30 percent. For those intent on creating a Jewish state in Palestine, the demographic dangers the Arab majority represented had not vanished after a half century of settlement activity. They were, however, largely mitigated in 1948 with the expulsion of the majority of the Palestinians. Israeli officials have blocked the return of even a segment of these refugees in violation of UN Resolution 194 and in opposition to the wishes of a fairly broad international consensus. The explicitly stated reason given by Israel is that their repatriation would threaten the Jewish character of the Jewish state.

I shall return to this and other racial anxieties throughout this book and to why these discourses and practices are integral to Israeli colonialism. But consistent with my interest in challenging the taken-for-granted aspects of Jerusalem’s mythic landscape, I want to make a remarkably simple point that nonetheless bears repeating. It should be recalled that a city’s or country’s contours, its demographic makeup and those whom it includes and excludes, depend on where and how its boundaries are drawn and—just as importantly—who is empowered to draw them. The delineation of borders is rarely anything other than an effect of power. Though these dividing lines commonly assume an almost natural or fixed quality, we forget at great peril that they are human constructions that were made and can be unmade. This point is as relevant to contemporary Jerusalem under Israeli colonial rule as it was under the domination of the British Empire. As I write, the Israeli state is actively altering, once again, the de facto boundaries of the city they regard as exclusively and eternally theirs. These emerging borders are, since the early 2000s, becoming enclosed within high concrete walls and electrified barriers. Illegal Jewish settlements are increasingly being included within this new Jerusalem, while burgeoning numbers of Palestinians are being left outside the expanding frontiers.²⁵

These ideas about the invented character of cartographic boundaries are doubly imperative to keep in mind given that cultural cartographies and the borders around supposed communities, races, ethnicities, nations, and genders are invented and policed no less than territorial ones.²⁶ The multiple ways in which contemporary Jerusalem’s social, demographic, and spatial realities have been redrawn and transformed are crucial to understanding the shifting quality of that which is referred to as Jerusalem at any particular historical moment. I shall take up these questions and concerns in each of the chapters that follow.

COLONIAL EPISTEMOLOGIES

This chapter opens with a pair of quotes from two keen witnesses of colonial power, Karl Marx and Albert Memmi. Both offer perspectives into what colonialism routinely entailed (and continues to entail) for rulers and the ruled alike. Precisely because their respective vantages—temporal, cultural, and ideological—are for the most part at variance, I have found their insights productive for better appreciating the diverse elements that have comprised colonial governance and the imperial imagination.

Marx, ever the perceptive analyst of capitalism’s development and contradictions, expressed complex feelings about the escalating project of European penetration into the Middle East, India, and elsewhere in the nineteenth century. But his writings regarding the spread of colonial conquest and the forces that chase the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe were, I believe, held hostage by his linear view of progress and a belief in the teleological character of history (Marx and Engels 1848 [1967], 83–84).

Marx clearly understood much about the violently transformative qualities of colonialism. However, he saw these dynamic happenings as providing a revolutionary path for both a modern industrializing Europe as well as for colonized peoples that he regarded as in the throes of pre-industrial backwardness.²⁷ His analysis highlighted the processes of economic exploitation as well as emerging social relations and class struggles. These are vital concerns given the centrality of production and consumption to imperial designs and capitalist desires. But there have always been other dimensions of colonialism that Marx was not, perhaps, best situated to elucidate.

Enter Albert Memmi, a former subject of French colonial rule in Tunisia and one who identified as both an Arab and a Jew. He witnessed the final phase of direct European domination in the Middle East and wrote novels and theoretical works that gave an account of colonial racism as it moved through and transformed him and the multiple communities of French-ruled North Africa of which he was a part. As mentioned above, the now largely naturalized binary opposition, Arab–Jew did not possess the power that it came to in the Middle East until the ascendancy of modern Zionism. Actual, lived experiences of Memmi and other Jews of the region in the 1940s and 1950s speak to this condition. Memmi (1965) delved more deeply into the shifting, overlapping, and contradictory dimensions of identity and intercommunal relations in the colony than did Marx and others writing from the metropoles of modern Europe. He speaks of the ambivalences of social difference and the fissures and heterogeneity within the binary categories of colonizer and colonized.

What Memmi refers to as the daily humiliations of the colonized (e.g. quotidian dimensions of racism, cruelty, and hatred) will be among the primary subjects of this work. Everyday life for Palestinians under Israeli rule in this city and elsewhere has been fraught with persistent forms of degradation, often, though not always, at the hands of Israeli soldiers and settlers. And, in light of the ways Palestinians have watched their lands and homes being taken away from them, Marx’s (1881) reference to colonialism as a bleeding process with a vengeance increasingly struck me as an appropriate, though blunt, metaphor for Israeli rule.

One of this book’s points of departure is that it is important to understand the fears, suffering, and hardships of both dominant and subordinate national communities. In this case, that means Israeli Jews as well as Palestinian Arabs. However, any study of this ongoing struggle over land that does not point out the fundamental power differential between Israelis and Palestinians would be engaging in a discourse of parity that obscures far more than it could ever clarify. Sadly, so much of the writing and commentary on Palestine/Israel (and on Jerusalem more specifically) addresses this place and its peoples in just such a