This presentation will address the forgotten transitional period that separated Ottoman Jerusalem from the beginning of British military rule and the beginning of the Mandate Period. War and social dislocation created new conditions of urban life-styles and practices on the eve of the British Mandate in Palestine. Famine, disease and exile contributed to the disruption of the social fabric of whole communities. In Jerusalem, as well as in other cities in the area, new public spaces and new behavioral patterns began to emerge. A substantial state sector gave rise to an enlarged civil service and investments in the national economy invigorated the mercantile strata in the coastal regions. One often forgets that the British Mandate over Palestine occupied barely three decades of the country’s modern history. In scholarly literature and in Palestinian popular imagination the Mandate has acquired a colossal (if not mythical) impact on the molding of modern Palestinian society and its destiny. A quick list of its often cited achievements (and disasters) would make this point: the creation of modern institutions of government, including a new civil service and police force, and the centralization of the national bureaucracy in Jerusalem; the modernization of the land code and the taxation system; the creation of a legal corpus to replace (and supplement) the Ottoman code; the conduct of a national census (1922 and 1931), and the creation of the population registry; the creation of the rudimentary features of citizenship and icons of unfulfilled sovereignty (currency, stamps, passports), etc. City plans during the early Mandate period, drawn by MacLean, Geddes, and Ashbe-- the heart of Ashbee’s garden landscaping schemes, which seperated the old walled Jeruslalem from its new suburbs was the creation of a “designated route through a sequence of experiences that elicited differing emotions and aroused varied associations.” The new scheme was specifically planned “to arouse in its visitors emotional or religious sentiments for the city and its walls, which bear so many centuries of evocative history. Similar to the English picturasque garden, benches were also added in locations offering both rest and enjoyment of the view.” To what extent these intentions succeeded in evoking these subjective associations, while creating a sense of privacy in public space? The paper will attempt to answer this question and contrast the British and Ottoman planning schemes in the pre- and post-war period.

Jerusalem has functioned within Palestinian national discourse as both locus and emblem of national space. After the Oslo accords, and increasingly during the high Oslo years (1993-2000) , it became central in official Palestinian national discourse. Jerusalem as "the key to peace in the region' became a motif, displacing the refugees as the determining issue of the national trajectory. Evidenced in particular through the programs of the Palestinian radio, in which specific programs were devoted to Jerusalem, the modalities in which this discourse was produced were responsive to the political problems engaged on the ground at a number of critical points, including the elections of 1996, the Palestinian census of 1998, and the Israeli implementation of the Center of Life Law which functioned to edge Palestinians out of the city. Thus, Palestinian discourse over Jerusalem during this period responded to lived trajectories and Israeli colonial practices, and expressed the paradoxical accommodation which was embedded in the Oslo turn. In the sharpened struggle over the future of the city that emerged in the context of the colonial balance of power, this discourse fashioned a distinctive articulation of the relationship of property rights with national space, the political with the legal, secular religious pluralism with the 'sacred', the present with the past, 'will' and 'right' and citizenship with national identity. The paper will explore the strands of this complex discourse on Jerusalem, and the often paradoxical and laminated ways it constituted place, space, identity, agency and political action, through a contextualized discourse analysis of materials drawn from various programs, newscasts and references to Jerusalem broadcast over the Voice of Palestine during the Oslo period. The radio materials come from a personal archive of over 700 PBC broadcasts collected by the author between 1994-98, which is perhaps the only original surviving Palestinian collection of these materials after the destruction of the PBC archives themselves by the Israeli army during the invasion of the West Bank in 2002 (although the author has now made copies of these). The project will contribute to our understanding of the politics of place and space in the colonial encounter, and in the constitution of the 'national' generally, and the ways that Jerusalem in particular has been constituted as both locus and singular emblem of such a politics in the Palestinian case.

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?

On the eve of the Great War, Jerusalem was part of the Ottoman sultanate ruled by Pashas who, in turn, were directly appointed by the government of the dictatorial triumvirate that took over power in Istanbul in 1913. A city, a district capital with significant consular representation, and a growing administrative center for Palestine, Jerusalem was largely homogeneous in terms of ethnicity, culture and language. But it was also the destination of increased Zionist Jewish migration. The changes in administration and role of diplomats that took place during the years of the war—including the departure of diplomats, institutions and citizens connected with the triple entente—although grave, did not significantly alter the social fabric of the city. Instead, the war and the conscription of the young men of the city coupled with the arrival of soldiers in conscripts from various parts of the empire to the city effected significantly how the people of Jerusalem saw themselves in relation to their Turkish rulers. The oppressive policies of the wartime administration of Jamal Pasha, coupled with famine due to the British blockade, the locust and public hanging of Arab nationalists and deserters, had a serious impact on how the people of Palestine were imaging their future and their relations. In a sense, signs of Arab, Syrian or Palestinian nationalisms were starting to be seen within the in the city in various ways. Using photographs, memoirs and papers of Jerusalemites from the period, I will illustrate how the war altered the way Jerusalemites thought of their world, themselves and their relationship to their rulers. The documents used will include family photographs, memoirs—of musician Wasif Jawhariyeh, educator Khalil Sakakini and conscript Ihsan Turjuman. Evidence of repression, changing of administrators and economic decline could be deciphered from the photographs. Juxtaposing photographs and memoirs as subaltern narratives, my aim is to argue that an antonymous voice(s) on the Palestinians were in existence in Jerusalem. Those voices found their articulations through a complex web of socially marginal activities—Jawharyih’s descriptions of indulgence in drinking and hashish consumption in the city—, nihilist political societies—Sakakini’s vagabond party—and the soldiers’ complete ambivalence towards the war—as in the diary of Turjman. My presentation will show Jerusalem as a sort of Dickensian city in both social and cultural turmoil.