Abstract
Post-1967 East Jerusalem is a unique case in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Whereas Israel has made only partial sovereign claims in the occupied Palestinian territory, East Jerusalem was officially annexed to the state, its Palestinian residents subject to Israeli civil law. Furthermore, since 1967, the Israeli political elite produced plans to withdraw from the majority of the territories or to create a form of Palestinian autonomy within them. In contrast, East Jerusalem was increasingly imagined as an organic part of the state and even as the center of the entire Jewish nation.
This paper considers the (until recently) unequivocal Israeli claim to sovereignty in East Jerusalem as a settler-colonial claim. Since 1967, the Israeli settler-colonial project in Jerusalem, explicitly referred to as “Judaization,” is accompanied by a covert process of de-indigenizing its Palestinian population. Judaization refers to a set of symbolic and practical tools undertaken by the State of Israel to transform the Palestinian landscape into a Zionist Jewish one. “De-indigenization” refers to a systematic process of turning the Palestinians into strangers and outlaws in their homes. My paper will detail the policies of Judaizing and de-indigenizing in four different yet interconnected categories:
Demographic: By adopting a supremacist national development plan, the Israeli Government settled Jewish civilians in East Jerusalem. At the same time, Israel enacted municipal-level policies with Palestinian emigration in-mind.
Symbolic: The harnessing of Israeli cultural producers to reshape the historical landscape of East Jerusalem and imbue it with a Zionized biblical character. These same processes also symbolically emptied East Jerusalem, often depicting the territory as barren, “awaiting for someone to revive it and bring it back to life,” and constructing Palestinian Jerusalemites as passive place-holders for the returning Jews.
Legal: The presence of Jerusalemites is sanctioned by “temporal” and “incidental” grounds as “permanent residents” versus Israeli Jews who are “citizens.” This means that any legal integration of Palestinian Jerusalemites into the Israeli political system is excluded and they face discrimination.
Security-physical component: The Israeli security discourse, originating from the state and cultural elite, constantly reconstitutes the Palestinians in Jerusalem as a threat and an undesired type of the “citizen.” Consequently, Palestinians are subjected to an implicit yet permanent threat of deportation or removal from “the eternal capital of the Jewish people.”
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