Jerusalem: The Contested Frontier

Jerusalem, the capital of Israel, is one city, whole and united, and will remain forever under Israel’s sovereignty….

The official Israeli guideline on the status of Jerusalem.

Jerusalem typifies a frontier city. It is not merely a multi-bordered, separated, segregated and culturally diverse city. It is a frontier city because it is a site of contestation. This is how it has been perceived by the Israelis and the Palestinians and this is precisely the reason why Jerusalem continues to epitomize at least the figurative core of the conflict between them. Jerusalem’s official/recognized political borders do not truly divulge the undercurrents of power in the city as well as the causal dynamics that make a rapprochement between the two protagonists particularly problematic.

The lines demarcating Israeli authority are habitually dissimilar from those delimiting separated housing or areas of unequal service facility or analogous national electoral districts of contending educational purviews. Specifically, the city’s pervasive holy sites and circumscribed religious compounds construct “enclaves/ghettoes” that incessantly endanger the Israeli state’s authority and control over the city. This absence of consonance between political control and the tangible spatial structure and commonplace usage of the city leaves many areas of occupied East Jerusalem in a kind of blurred zone where “citizenship, property rights, and the enforcement of the rule of law” are rather perplexingly enforced. There are constrictions on Israeli control over the city with the persistence of Palestinian reserves after a prolonged period of Israeli occupation. Enhancing the already complicated scenario is the part enacted by the myriad external factors, “religious, political, financial, and cultural” so that the city is also a cauldron/repository for a wide-ranging contention.

A pertinent and fascinating illustration of Jerusalem’s unique  multi-bordered character is what can be categorized as the “education borders”, to be precise, the distinctive zones where either the Jordanian-Palestinian or the Israeli curriculum is imparted in schools, that disclose an arrangement of enduring exclusion despite a prolonged period of Israeli control over East Jerusalem. In various sections/parts there is no dissimilarity among the urban areas of the West Bank (under Palestinian control) and East Jerusalem (under Israeli control) as the Palestinian syllabus is imparted and extends till the Ceasefire lines of 1949, (the Green line) and does not conclude further east, as several other Israeli regulations do, at the Israeli municipal borders constructed in 1967. In this context, therefore there is a distinct Palestinian education border that overlooks as well as is at variance with the political and security borders and continues to endure at the Green line.

Jerusalem, apparently unified under Israeli control is in real life a city segregated between Palestinians and Israelis.  Since 1967, when Israel occupied the eastern part of the frontier city, Jerusalem has been characterized by what can be termed as entrenched planning wherein the city’s frontier connotes the entire Palestinian land integrated into the north, east and south of the Israeli city that shares a borders with West (Israeli) Jerusalem as well as with the West Bank. The unilateral Israeli occupation has not been recognized by the international community, accordingly, the concomitant all-encompassing Israeli planning for the city has been equally unilateral in character with no need for Palestinian opinion or participation in the process.

East Jerusalem thus represents an expanse intentionally overwhelmed by Jewish settlements while the Palestinians continued to reside in poor, unplanned “villages turned suburbs”, explicitly signifying a deliberate separation of civilians in residential arrangements with the intention of being both exclusionary and provocative in character. The separation of the enclaves has since been institutionalized by the separation barrier and in doing so prohibiting physical contact between the two populations who nonetheless continue to live under the perpetual “gaze of the other”. While the settlements serve as a “security ring” for the Israelis and has been expanding to include new localities and outposts, the Palestinians look at them as “colonies”. As Palestinian property continues to be confiscated for the construction of more and more fortress like Jewish settlements and the expansion of the Jewish Quarter, the concomitant Palestinian marginalization breeds intensive radicalization among both populations which now explicates the society and politics of Jerusalem’s margins.

Then there is the settler politics of Jerusalem associated with Jewish encroachment into the Muslim Quarter of the Old City since the 1980s, in contrast to that of the West Bank. They are by and large driven by religious motives and political ideology to inhabit “Eretz Yisrael” (Land of Israel) and constitute what may be called a rather combative “frontier”. On the other hand, various radicalized Islamic groups have emerged and consolidated their presence within the Muslim Quarters. Though the settlers have evolved into a more structured entity with support from the Israeli state, the Islamic groups are still to acquire an institutional basis and operate more as resistance groups. As myriad forms of protests are adopted by both sides in an already charged atmosphere, both existing urban structures and the evolving ones are used to make claims and counter claims incorporating fresh vocabulary and adding a  new chapter in the already existent contending narratives.

Jerusalem, in a sense, exemplifies the (re) creation of (contested) frontiers in an almost commonplace manner. The lack of a degree of conclusiveness is evident from the fact that the Israeli encroachment/occupation notwithstanding, Israel is not sovereign over Jerusalem in the same way that it is over the western Galilee or the northern Negev.  For instance, there has been no compulsory imposition of both Israeli citizenship and Israeli law on the Arab inhabitants of East Jerusalem nor an internationally recognized agreement/treaty ratifying its territorial annexation. As ambiguous albeit opposing frontiers are constructed, the space for a negotiable settlement still exists.

References

Dumper, Michael (2014). Jerusalem Unbound: Geography, History, and the Future of the Holy City, New York: Columbia University Press.

Lustick, Ian (1997). “Has Israel Annexed East Jerusalem?” Middle East Policy, Vol.5, No.1.

Pullan, Wendy (2011). “Frontier Urbanism: The periphery at the centre of contested cities”, in the Journal of Architecture, Vol.16.No.2.

Priya

14/1/2018