Abstract
This paper will examine the ways in which Israelis and Palestinians have inscribed national identities on Jerusalem’s urban landscape since 1967. I will focus principally on the contested area of the Western Wall and the site of the former Palestinian Moroccan Quarter that lay before it. I argue 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 transformation of particular Palestinian-owned locales.
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 and mythologies. 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. Such Arab losses under the new military regime were all too often what enabled a city made in the image of the Israeli state. With such assertions of colonial power have come forms of resistance among Palestinians, who also attempt to project their own claims and histories at this site of displacement and elsewhere in a post-1967 Jerusalem.
This paper draws primarily from 45 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.
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 dominate, 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 landscape of loss?
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