Editors: Rassem Khamaisi, Rami Nasrallah, Michael Younan, Robert Brooks, Shahd Wa’ary, Abdalla Owais, Mona Al Qutob

Publisher: IPCC, 2007

ISBN: 965-7283-12-4

Beginning with the annexation of Palestinian neighborhoods in 1968, the past four decades of Israeli occupation have brought a multitude of spatial, political, economic, and social changes to the Jerusalem area. Moreover, in a process that began with closure policies in 1993 which prevent suburban, West Bank, and Gaza Palestinians from entering and working in East Jerusalem, followed and sustained by an ensnarling grid of settlers-only roads, checkpoints, and road blocks, and most recently by the imposition of a mammoth separation wall, there has been a profound alteration in the demography and functionality of Jerusalem. The changes have culminated in an East Jerusalem that is in real danger of losing its status as the metropolitan center for the Palestinian people. Indeed, a city that was for centuries the cultural, institutional, economic, political, health, education, religious, and even entertainment center of an entire people has gradually become a peripheral and fragmented urban area, cut off from its nurturing suburban surroundings and isolated from its historical hinterlands. More, it has been so internally shredded, with many Palestinian neighborhoods cut off from each other and from their urban core, that it may lack the functional cohesiveness and integrity to serve as the future capital of a Palestinian state.

Jerusalem on the Map III represents IPCC’s continuing effort to update the situation on the ground in Jerusalem for a readership composed of international civil servants, academics interested in the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, and governmental, NGO, and civil society leaders interested in the problems of Jerusalem. In this volume, IPCC researchers identify and examine trends in Israel’s hegemony over the Jerusalem area today. The studies document— with the most current statistics, the results of IPCC surveys, and the presentation of new detailed maps—the unilateral expansion of Israel’s illegal writ and the fragmentation of the Palestinian fabric in Jerusalem. Issues considered include: the emergence of new, non-negotiated boundaries; the widespread and systematic deprivation of basic human rights; externally imposed changes in the city’s demography; declines in nearly all measures of the economic and social wellbeing of Palestinian Jerusalemites; a swelling unmet need for housing; the effects of the road system, checkpoints, road blocks and the separation wall upon mobility and social cohesiveness and upon the people’s right to the city. Again, overarching the analytical discussion is the question of East Jerusalem’s viability to function as the capital of a proud people.