This paper will examine the ways in which Israelis and Palestinians have inscribed national identities on the urban landscape of Jerusalem in the decade before and after 1967. I will focus principally on the contested area of Jerusalem's Old City and detail the shifting religious and national meanings of the Western Wall and its environs in the early years of the Israeli occupation. This paper argues that, with the conquest and occupation of East Jerusalem in 1967, the Israeli state sought to project the city as its “eternal” and “undivided” national capital through the appropriation and utilization of particular Palestinian-owned locales. With such assertions of colonial power have come forms of resistance among Palestinians, who also attempt to project their own claims and histories. Israeli colonial power, I demonstrate, has not simply been forged through sheer coercion and force, but just as importantly through the use and (re)invention of potently symbolic sacred places. In this paper, I detail how Israeli efforts at altering the Kotel area (including the 1967 destruction of a 1300-year-old Arab neighborhood that existed immediately before the Wall), has been integral to Zionist assertions to exclusive control over the whole of the city. This paper draws primarily from 28 interviews and life histories collected over the last decade with former Palestinian residents of the demolished Moroccan Quarter, other Israeli and Palestinian residents of the Old City, and Israeli city planners. In addition to work with these oral sources, I have also dealt with primary documents, such as Israeli planning schemes and Palestinian titles to land found in the Jerusalem Municipal Archive and other private archives. These varied sources permit a complex examination of the shifting character of this contested landscape. This paper will exemplify the multi-faceted character of a complex urban center at a crucial time, one that has been vital to Israeli and Palestinian nationalist self-fashionings. My methodological trajectory has allowed me to record hidden histories of Palestinian families who once resided in the area, not simply dominant, Israeli ways of representing Jerusalem. How has the Old City been reconfigured spatially as well as discursively in the context of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict? What do these practices tell us about the ways nationalist sentiment has been inscribed on this sacred landscape?