Israeli efforts to steer the struggle with the Palestinians continue to break new ground in the practice of population management. This holds true for occupied East Jerusalem. Taking forward a nascent but advancing field, Zionist ideological, institutional and policy imperatives are understood here through the lens of biopolitics; this lens aims to capture a swing in the emphasis of government from territory (geopolitics), to people (biopolitics). The goal of this paper is to show that in the fraught case of East Jerusalem, biopolitics can offer fresh insight equally into Israeli efforts to manage the city and into the scope for non-violent Palestinian resistance. The broader significance of the project lies in the capacity of biopolitics to present a fresh conceptualization of post-Oslo Israel/Palestine, shedding new light on the demographic dimensions of the conflict. The paper is based on fieldwork conducted in Jerusalem during 2012. Interview material cited ranges from the Israeli City Engineer in the Jerusalem Municipality and a dissenting (Meretz) member of the Municipal Council, to the official representative of the Palestinian Authority (PA) President’s Office in the city as well as Palestinian nationalist cadres (including prisoners) and community organizers. The planning context to this demographic struggle is set by the Israeli policy document ‘Demography, Geopolitics, and the Future of Israel's Capital: Jerusalem's Proposed Master Plan’; state planning aims expressly to maintain a demographic split in favour of the Jewish population. In practice this results in a range of measures including zoning policies, permit procedures, house demolitions and restrictions on residency juxtaposed with highly pro-active infrastructure construction in support of settlement expansion. It is in the context of an absence of control over planning that biopolitics captures some of the less obvious micro-sites of Palestinian demographic resistance, that is, sites attesting to and supporting a continued Palestinian presence through economic, social, cultural and political means. Relevant sites include commercial enterprises like the remnants of the Palestinian hotel and tourism sector (some of which have seen substantial recent refurbishment) and retail centres such as the Addar Mall (under the management of the Nuseibeh family), plus cultural centres of political import like the Yabous Productions and Cultural Center and the Palestinian National Theatre (al-Hakawati). The biopolitics of East Jerusalem are seen to unfold against a backdrop of Palestinian demographic retrenchment in the pockets of Areas A and B under PA administration in the West Bank.