http://the.sagepub.

com/
Thesis Eleven
http://the.sagepub.com/content/121/1/76
The online version of this article can be found at:

DOI: 10.1177/0725513614526156
2014 121: 76 Thesis Eleven
Rachel Busbridge
city
Frontier Jerusalem: Blurred separation and uneasy coexistence in a divided

Published by:
http://www.sagepublications.com
can be found at: Thesis Eleven Additional services and information for

http://the.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Email Alerts:

http://the.sagepub.com/subscriptions Subscriptions:
http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Reprints:

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav Permissions:

http://the.sagepub.com/content/121/1/76.refs.html Citations:

What is This?

- Apr 2, 2014 Version of Record >>

by Pepe Portillo on June 29, 2014 the.sagepub.com Downloaded from by Pepe Portillo on June 29, 2014 the.sagepub.com Downloaded from
Article
Frontier Jerusalem:
Blurred separation and
uneasy coexistence in a
divided city
Rachel Busbridge
Freie Universitat Berlin, Germany
Abstract
In this essay, I explore the city of Jerusalem, which not only lies at the heart of the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict but is inextricably shaped by its developments. Nominally
unified under Israeli sovereignty, Jerusalem nevertheless remains starkly divided
between an Israeli west and an occupied Palestinian east and is best understood
as a frontier city characterized by long-simmering tensions and quotidian conflict.
With its future tied to the future of the conflict, Jerusalem remains caught between
two options: the almost global preference for the citys repartition in accordance
with a two-state solution and the Israeli desire to maintain the status quo. A closer
look at contemporary Jerusalem, however, reveals the untenability of both options.
In this essay, I seek to document how the reality of Israeli-Palestinian division sits
alongside a dynamic of blurred separation in the city, which has forged an uneasy
coexistence of sorts. Re-thinking the frontier as a site of both conflict and coexis-
tence, I argue, is key to imagining future possibilities for the city that do not rest on
the desire for ethnically-pure spaces, but are rather guided by a politics of co-
presence that recognizes the impossibility of disentangling Arab and Jewish histories,
memories and connections to the city.
Keywords
Divided cities, frontier, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Jerusalem, settler colonialism
Corresponding author:
Rachel Busbridge, Freie Universitat Berlin, Altensteinstr. 40, Institut fur Islamwissenschaft, Berlin 14195,
Germany.
Email: r.busbridge@latrobe.edu.au
Thesis Eleven
2014, Vol. 121(1) 76100
The Author(s) 2014
Reprints and permissions:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0725513614526156
the.sagepub.com
by Pepe Portillo on June 29, 2014 the.sagepub.com Downloaded from
Introduction
Every year around May, Israel celebrates Yom Yerushalayim (Jerusalem Day), a national
holiday commemorating the Israeli victory in 1967s Six Day War, which saw the
country establish control over the Old City and reunify Jerusalem. Close to 100,000
right-wing Israeli activists
1
spill onto the streets in marches supported by the Jerusalem
municipality and escorted by police, following a route that takes them into the conquered
Old City to the Western Wall (Kotel) and which, from 2011, has also included Jerusa-
lems Palestinian neighbourhoods. Streets are closed to traffic and cordoned off for the
thousands of white-shirted revellers and their sea of blue-and-white flags to march, chant
and dance through the neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah to Damascus Gate (Bab al-
Amoud), the main entrance of the Old Citys Muslim quarter, amassing along the narrow
thoroughfare of al-Wad Street that leads to the Kotel. Death to the Arabs, Mohammed
was a pig and Let your village burn are favoured slogans of the marchers, while Pales-
tinian families lock themselves away in their houses, peering down from windows. Small
business owners will shutter their shops, encouraged by Jerusalems police who are con-
cerned about damage to property and the outbreak of clashes; a brave few will remain
open, risking vandalism and assaults from the keyed up revellers. Culminating in the
Western Wall plaza, the march turns into evening festivities. The sounds continue echo-
ing into the night and over the rooftops of the Old City; its Palestinian residents fall
asleep listening to the celebrations that mark their occupation.
The city of Jerusalem is, without doubt, one of the most lauded in the world. The
celebrated birthplace of three monotheistic religions, it is a revered destination for the
many pilgrims who come to wander the streets of the Old City, circumambulate
the purported site of Jesus resurrection, touch the stones of the fallen Second Temple or
pray in the al-Aqsa mosque, which holds its own in silver against the golden-blue Dome
of the Rock. Yet, Jerusalem is also the political, geographical and cultural heart of the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict (Makdisi 2010), something which is often missed by the tour-
ists and pilgrims who marvel at its collection of photo opportunities and soft beauty.
Indeed, for all the claims to its alleged reunification, the city remains starkly divided
between an Israeli West and an occupied Palestinian East, and is the site of slow-
simmering religious, political and cultural tensions between the two, effectively segre-
gated, peoples. Jerusalem is quite evidently a frontier city, framed and shaped by intract-
able conflict and largely irreconcilable claims to ownership and sovereignty, and like all
frontier cities it is characterized by both confrontation and contradiction (Pullan 2011).
In many ways, the question of the citys future is fundamentally a question about the
future of the conflict; and like the conflict more broadly, the hegemonic terms of debate
remained trapped between the Israeli states desire to maintain Jerusalem as its united
and complete capital and the global preference for the citys repartitioning into an
Israeli and Palestinian capital, as per the so-called two-state solution. Nevertheless,
there is a burgeoning area of work sceptical of this dominant paradigm, with a number
of scholars calling for more creative and importantly, just ways of imagining the
citys future (e.g. Dumper 2013; Makdisi 2010; Mendel 2013; Weizman 2007).
In this essay, I join these scholars in calling for new ways of thinking about con-
temporary Jerusalem. It is clear that the status quo/two-state paradigm is not only
Busbridge 77
by Pepe Portillo on June 29, 2014 the.sagepub.com Downloaded from
untenable, but unjust insofar as it is unlikely to solve the problems that have caused the
conflict in the first place. On the one hand, Jerusalems ongoing divisions and tensions
go very much against the Israeli claim to have united the city, as does the persistent
inequality that structures the lives and encounters of Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews.
On the other hand, the notion that Jerusalem could be divided in the middle to create a
pure Jewish west and a pure Palestinian east is fallacious in light of the facts on
the ground, which are connected not just to the 1967 occupation but also to the broader
conflict (see Mendel 2013: 56).
My particular interest here is the ways in which this reality of Arab-Jewish division
sits alongside a dynamic of blurred separation in the city, where Palestinian and Israeli
space variously intermingles and overlays each other, forging an uneasy coexistence of
sorts. Certainly, compared to the violence of the second Intifada (20005), which saw
Arabs and Jews retreat into their separate quarters, present-day Jerusalem is character-
ized by a tentative, albeit asymmetrical and uneven, mixing as Palestinians and Israelis
encounter each other more often in the urban fabric of the city. This, of course, is shaped
by the varying regimes of dispossession and inequality that structure both the city and
Israeli planning policies, something quite often (and quite rightly) pointed out by critics
of various persuasions. Nevertheless, and as is my point of departure here, such regimes
not only have unintended consequences that work against their underlying rationales, but
also are never complete in the sense that they can do away with that they seek to ostracize
(see also Busbridge in press). I take my inspiration from the idea of the frontier as a site
of both contest and contact (Cavanagh 2011: 158). To emphasize only the former, as is
often done in critical accounts of Jerusalem, is to reduce the frontier from a zone of
encounter and interaction to [merely] a zone of conflict (Rose and Davis 2005: iv) and
is also to miss some of the more subtle and arguably hopeful elements of the contem-
porary city. As much as encounters cannot help but be shaped by the violence of the fron-
tier, it is the possibilities of interaction and the reality of tentative coexistence that offers
slivers of hope in an otherwise bleak landscape.
If Jerusalem reveals all that is most dysfunctional about the Israeli-Palestinian con-
flict, then, it is also in Jerusalem that the increasingly intertwined lives, histories and
experiences of Israelis and Palestinians are most evident (e.g. Bashir 2011). It is the
impossibility of disentangling Israeli and Palestinian space that I aim to document here
through both text and image. In doing so, I make a call for a politics of co-presence in
Jerusalem. In contrast to the never-ending search for roots and the desire for ethnically-
pure spaces, this politics of co-presence seeks the more hopeful possibilities that lie at the
interstices of blurred separation and uneasy coexistence. The only viable choice left for
Jerusalem, I suggest, lies in the acknowledgement of the complexity of Palestinian-
Israeli encounters, as well as their long and intertwined histories in and connections to
the city which is now incontrovertibly and unavoidably both Arab and Jewish.
Borders and frontiers in Jerusalem
Despite its claim to be an ancient and eternal holy city, metropolitan Jerusalem is in
fact a thoroughly modern creation and a particularly strange one at that. The borders of
what is now known as Greater Jerusalem seemingly make little sense: in the east, they
78 Thesis Eleven 121(1)
by Pepe Portillo on June 29, 2014 the.sagepub.com Downloaded from
are largely marked by the walls, barriers and checkpoints that supposedly separate the
city from the West Bank; in the west, they fold out to the various red-roofed satellite
towns that dot the hills on the way to the plains of Tel Aviv (Figure 1). As Yonatan
Mendel describes, Jerusalems
. . . boundaries extend far beyond its population centres, encompassing dozens of villages,
barren hilltops, orchards and tracts of desert, as well as new-build suburbs with scant rela-
tion to the historical city; in the north, they stretch up, like a long middle finger, nearly to
Ramallah, to take in the Old Qalandia airport, some 10 kilometres from the Old City walls,
and bulge down almost to Bethlehem in the south. (2013: 36)
For all its apparent randomness, however, a closer look at the city reveals a particular
logic to its urbanism and one which is arguably not that unusual in terms of its history.
Like the patchwork stone walls of the Old City, which speak to its razing and rebuilding
by successive conquerors, modern-day Jerusalem wears the marks of its most recent vic-
tor; namely, Israel in the 1948 and 1967 wars, and its enduring project to claim the city as
the capital of the Jewish state.
The 1947 United Nations Partition Plan (which sought to split Mandate Palestine into
an Arab and a Jewish state) originally slated Jerusalem as a corpus separatum interna-
tional city to be administered separately by the UN. The outbreak of war the following
year, however, saw the original plan abandoned. Zionist forces conquered half of the city
and Jerusalem was transformed into an Israeli west and a Jordanian-administered east,
Figure 1. Map of Greater Jerusalem 2011. Courtesy of Ir Amin.
Busbridge 79
by Pepe Portillo on June 29, 2014 the.sagepub.com Downloaded from
partitioned by the 1949 Armistice Line (the Green Line, so-called because of the colour
of the pen used to draw it). Whereas the newly-established Israeli state formalized West
Jerusalem as its official capital in 1950, the east largely languished under Jordanian rule
as the Hashemite Kingdom sought to downgrade its status and also its Palestinian iden-
tity (see Shlaim 2000: 36). Its victory in 1967 saw Israel once again expand its control
over the city, militarily occupying East Jerusalem as well as the broader West Bank. Sub-
sequently, they enlarged East Jerusalems boundaries from the 6 sq km previously under
Jordanian administration
2
by an additional 64 sq km, incorporating and annexing some
28 West Bank villages, their orchards and fields as well as wide swathes of desert into
Jerusalems municipal limits (BTselem 2013a). In 1980, Israel enshrined in Basic Law
Jerusalem as its united and complete capital. For the rest of the world (including,
importantly, the Palestinians themselves), East Jerusalem is illegally occupied territory
and the status of West Jerusalem as the Israeli capital remains controversial.
In such a context, the Green Line as an administrative boundary between Israel as a
sovereign entity and the Palestinian territories it occupies has largely lost significance in
Jerusalem from the perspective of the Israeli state at least (Newman 2012: 253). In
some ways, the Green Line remains like a faint trace on the urban landscape of the city,
particularly where the differences between Palestinian East Jerusalem (al-Quds) and
Israeli West Jerusalem (Yerushalayim) are most evident. This is the case across Road 1 in
the centre of the city, which separates the Palestinian neighbourhood of Bab al-Zahra
outside the walls of the Old City from the Haredi (ultra-Orthodox Jewish) neighbour-
hood of Mea Shearim (Figure 2). Here, Jerusalem is experienced as two very different
urban spaces, each with its own tongue, script and aesthetics. East Jerusalem remains dis-
cernibly Arab, with its Palestinian majority population and landscape punctuated by
minarets and church towers; in Bab al-Zahra vendors tout coffee and kebabs, fruit and
Figure 2. Road 1, separating East Jerusalem (left) from West Jerusalem (right).
80 Thesis Eleven 121(1)
by Pepe Portillo on June 29, 2014 the.sagepub.com Downloaded from
vegetables are sold in open-air markets and families relax in sheesha cafes (Figure 3).
West Jerusalem is unmistakably Jewish, visually more European and home to an increas-
ing religious Orthodox population who live in places like Mea Shearim, which is akin to
an insulated Eastern European shtetl (Figure 4).
Nevertheless, the Arab-Jewish separation that defines the city is far blurrier than is
often presumed to be the case, and as much as the east-west divide is both palpable and
meaningful, it should not be regarded simplistically. While it is common to imagine Jer-
usalem in terms of two different cities facing directly onto each other (e.g. Klein 2008),
instances of clear-cut separation like that across Road 1 are not only anomalous, but
largely illusory. The project to establish Jerusalem as the eternal and indivisible capital
of the Jewish state has rendered borders and boundaries equally spurious and tentative in
Jerusalem, not least because it entails an active process in which Israel must simultane-
ously make Jerusalem Jewish and curtail Palestinian claims to the city.
3
This twin
dynamic of Judaization and de-Arabization (Yiftachel 1999) is settler colonial in orien-
tation, in the sense that it is premised on the logic of the elimination of the native and the
acquisition of their land for exclusive ownership by the settler (see Wolfe 2006).
It is in this regard that understanding Jerusalem through the notion of the frontier is
valuable. While borders and boundaries are traditionally conceived of as lines separ-
ating sovereign territories (Newman and Paasi 1998), frontiers typically exist when a
state is taking possession of a territory, and therefore mark the expansion of state
sovereignty (Prescott 1987: 36). Frontiers are far more uneven than are borders, and are
asymmetrically tipped towards those doing the advancing. In Jerusalem, to frame the city
through the east-west paradigm, or the framework of Israel versus Palestine, is to only
tell part of the story. As is the case across Israel-Palestine more generally, the expansion
of borders in Jerusalem has resulted in Palestinian loss of land, displacement and
Figure 3. On the way to Friday prayers. Old City, East Jerusalem.
Busbridge 81
by Pepe Portillo on June 29, 2014 the.sagepub.com Downloaded from
dispossession by virtue of Israels ethnic-exclusive definition as a Jewish state, which
requires a Jewish demographic majority and entails differentiated rights for Jews and
non-Jews. It is this settler colonial reality, and the various land, immigration, settlement
and military policies that it entails, which has created a highly asymmetrical, segregated
and stratified political geography in the contemporary city (Yiftachel 1999).
If the notion of the frontier points to the colonially-rooted unevenness and inequality
that shapes Jerusalem, it also speaks to something critical about the relations between
Israelis and Palestinians that constitute the human weave of the citys urban geography.
As I have emphasized earlier, the frontier is a site of violence, replacement and nation-
building (Evans 2009), and as such it is the place in which opposing identities appear
irreconcilable the battle at the frontier is, after all, a battle of life-and-death. Nonethe-
less, frontiers are porous and sometimes largely imaginary spaces, where intergroup
relations [are] marked even in conditions of unequal power by negotiation and
exchange as well as coercion and violence (Elkins and Pederson 2012: 2). The reality
of the frontier as equally a place of encounter perhaps portends to alter the identities
locked in conflict with each other, or at the very least blur them. Frontiers are never lin-
ear, formal or stabilized as we often imagine our social identities to be, but are rather
deep, shifting, fragmented and elastic spaces in which the distinction between inside
Figure 4. Jaffa Street, West Jerusalem.
82 Thesis Eleven 121(1)
by Pepe Portillo on June 29, 2014 the.sagepub.com Downloaded from
and outside cannot be clearly marked (Weizman 2007: 4). Likewise, as much as settler
colonialism seeks the elimination of the native, seemingly making spatial coexistence
anomalous (Russell 2001: 2), indigenous presence is never totally eradicated (Evans
2009; see also Guha and Spivak 1988). At the frontier, the trace of the other is always
present.
What I see as most interesting about Jerusalem is the way in which the same settler
colonial logic of the frontier, and its deep inequality, has manifested in quite different
realities in both the east and west. It has also manifested in very different realities for the
citys Jewish population, which makes up 64 per cent of the citys nearly 800,000 res-
idents and is spread across the east and west, and the Palestinian population, which
stands at 36 per cent and is located almost exclusively in the east (BTselem 2012). On
the one hand, East Jerusalem is structured by the ongoing settlement enterprise with its
brutal but simple modus operandi: maximum land for Jews with minimum Arabs. In the
east, Palestinians find themselves pushed into ever-smaller spaces as more Israeli settle-
ments are established and more land is claimed for Jewish use: indeed, in East Jerusalem,
a mere 13 per cent is available for Palestinian construction and much of this is already
built up, while 35 per cent has been expropriated for Israeli settlements (UN OCHA
2011). West Jerusalem, on the other hand, is seemingly established as fully Israeli, and
yet urban space is largely constructed in such a way as to write out and over pre-1948
Palestinian history and replace Palestinian spaces with Jewish ones. Likewise, for all
efforts to maintain the Jewishness of West Jerusalem, the deliberate de-development
(Roy 1995) of the east has compelled an increasing Palestinian presence, even if only
a fleeting one. It is these different realities, as well as their underlying connective logic,
that I hope to elucidate in the remainder of this essay. Like the photographs themselves,
this exploration offers merely snapshots. Yet, in first looking east then looking west,
I want to journey through modern-day Jerusalem to examine the logics and dynamics
of the city, as well as their transmutation into the realm of everyday life.
Looking east
For the most part, East Jerusalemite Palestinians who were unwillingly incorporated into
unified Jerusalem hold the status of permanent resident of the State of Israel, compared
to Israeli residents of Jerusalem who hold citizenship.
4
This status positions East Jer-
usalemite Palestinians akin to foreign nationals who have freely chosen to migrate to
Israel. As permanent residents, the main right afforded to Palestinians is the right to live
and work in Israel, although this is subject to a number of highly restrictive conditions
(see BTselem 2013a). Unlike citizens who may leave and return to the city at any given
time, permanent residents may have their status revoked should they spend too long
away from the city. Permanent residents have the right to vote in local municipal
elections but not elections to the Knesset (national parliament). Furthermore, permanent
residency status is not immediately handed down to ones children and, should one have
a non-resident partner, they must apply for a family unification visa if their partner is to
legally live in the city. For East Jerusalemite Palestinians, such conditions are exceed-
ingly difficult to negotiate. Not only are family unification visas, for instance, very rarely
granted, but they may be evicted from the city at any given time it is not unusual that
Busbridge 83
by Pepe Portillo on June 29, 2014 the.sagepub.com Downloaded from
politically active East Jerusalemite Palestinians, especially those deemed security
threats, are expelled to the West Bank or the Gaza Strip.
This permanent resident status is rendered all the more tenuous by the various policies
to which Palestinians are subject by virtue of the occupation. As the Israeli human rights
organization BTselem (2012) states,
since East Jerusalem was annexed in 1967, the government of Israels primary goal in
Jerusalem has been to create a demographic and geographic situation that will thwart any
future attempt to challenge Israeli sovereignty over the city. To achieve this goal, the
government has been taking actions to increase the number of Jews, and reduce the number
of Palestinians, living in the city.
Jerusalem municipal policy identifies the ideal demographic balance in Jerusalem to
be 72 per cent Jews to 28 per cent Arabs (Halper 2009). In order to achieve this, the
municipality subjects Palestinians to a chaotic maze of planning policies, regulations and
restrictions intended to thwart their presence in the city a task accorded a particular
sense of urgency because of the high Palestinian population growth rate, which is only
rivalled by that of the Jewish Haredi (ultra-orthodox) community.
The settlement project plays an important role in establishing Israeli sovereignty over
the east side of the city, which has undergone a striking process of demographic
manipulation and urban transformation since 1967. This, as Eyal Weizman (2007: 256)
details, was laid out in the 1968 Jerusalem master plan, the first and cardinal principle
of which was to ensure [Jerusalems] unification by build[ing] the city in a manner that
would prevent its possibility of being repartitioned. Central to this was the establish-
ment of 12 remote Jewish neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem, which function as set-
tlement fingers reaching in and between Palestinians neighbourhoods and villages,
ghettoizing them and trapping their natural growth. The master plan also entailed the
construction of a second, outer ring of so-called settlement dormitory suburbs, which
were key to the expansion and enlargement of the citys boundaries to create Greater
Jerusalem. In order to weave together these disparately located settlements, a network
of roads and infrastructure have been established to create the city as an organic whole;
Road 1 mentioned above, for instance, connects the northern settlements of Pisgat Zeev,
Ha Givaa HaTzarfatit and Neve Yaacov to the southern settlements of East Talpiot, Gilo
and Har Homa (Pullan et al. 2007: 178). Presently, some 200,000 Israelis live beyond the
Green Line in East Jerusalem (BTselem 2012).
5
There are marked differences between Jewish and Palestinian areas. Palestinians pay
equal taxes to Jews, and yet receive only 912 per cent of the municipal budget (Margalit
2010) something that is quite evident in a brief tour of the city. Compared to Jewish
suburbs in both West and East Jerusalem, which are well-serviced and often green and
leafy (Figure 5),
6
Palestinian neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem are poorly serviced:
trash is not collected regularly and so is often burnt in the streets, roads and footpaths
are cracked or often not paved and infrastructure is limited and run-down (Figure 6).
BTselem (2011) reports that almost 90 per cent of sewerage pipes, roads and sidewalks
are found in West Jerusalem, with entire East Jerusalem neighbourhoods not connected
to the sewerage system at all; West Jerusalem has 1000 public parks, 24 swimming
84 Thesis Eleven 121(1)
by Pepe Portillo on June 29, 2014 the.sagepub.com Downloaded from
pools, 26 libraries and 531 sports facilities, whereas East Jerusalem respectively has 45,
three, two and 33. Furthermore, Palestinian areas are typically dense and overcrowded,
due to a severe shortage of housing in the East Jerusalem Palestinian sector. While
new Jewish settlements pop up regularly, the municipality is reluctant to grant building
permits to Palestinians, which results in significant pressure for East Jerusalemite Pales-
tinian families (Halper 2009). On the one hand, the lack of building permits means that
Figure 5. Street in Rehavia, West Jerusalem.
Figure 6. Street in Silwan, East Jerusalem.
Busbridge 85
by Pepe Portillo on June 29, 2014 the.sagepub.com Downloaded from
many families build illegally
7
and risk having their houses demolished; indeed, since
1967, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimates
that some 2000 Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem have been demolished, with as many
as 46 per cent of all homes currently deemed illegal by municipality zoning laws (UN
OCHA 2009). On the other hand, the artificial housing shortage has inflated prices to the
extent that many Palestinians are left with no option but to live in overcrowded conditions
or move to the West Bank where property is cheaper. This is a precarious decision consid-
ering that permanent residents must prove their continuing connection to the city or else
face revocation of their status; as such, many Palestinians who move to the West Bank will
keep a permanent Jerusalem address on which they continue to pay municipal taxes.
The so-called separation wall has arguably emerged as the dominant feature in the
urban fabric of East Jerusalem, with its 8-metre-high concrete blocks dwarfing Palesti-
nian roads, houses and buildings (Figure 7). While its construction began in 2002 as a
temporary security measure during the second Intifada, the wall is now a permanent
fixture in Jerusalem, and plays a key role in designating municipal boundaries and there-
fore Jewish-Arab demography in the city. Tellingly, the walls route incorporates the set-
tlements of the outer ring on the Israeli side while relegating some 55,000 Palestinian
residents of Jerusalem to the West Bank and leaving approximately 1600 West Banker
Palestinians inside the citys de facto boundaries (UN OCHA 2011). This absurd situa-
tion of selective separation means that one or two Palestinian houses may be cut off from
their village on the other side of the wall in a cynical calculation of land versus Arabs; at
times, the wall even divides villages and neighbourhoods in two, such as in Abu Dis, or
severs from the city outlying villages that previously relied on economic, social and
institutional connections to Jerusalem, turning them into ghost towns. This is the case
in Al-Ram (Figure 8), which lies just north of the citys municipal boundaries and is
Figure 7. The separation wall on the road to Ramallah, East Jerusalem.
86 Thesis Eleven 121(1)
by Pepe Portillo on June 29, 2014 the.sagepub.com Downloaded from
home to 58,000 Palestinians, half of which hold permanent resident status (BTselem
2013b). Since the walls construction, several thousand have left to East Jerusalem and
Al-Ram has become an enclave: many shops and businesses have closed, and the village
is increasingly becoming the destination of choice for West Banker Palestinians exiled
from their homes and villages elsewhere, many of whom are criminals or drug addicts.
The dominance of the wall in shaping the everyday lives of Palestinians stands in con-
trast to its impact on Israeli settlers living in East Jerusalem. Not only does the walls
path better facilitate their integration into the city and serve to separate them from Pales-
tinian neighbourhoods, but it is typically landscaped where it snakes along Israeli areas
or is only visible in the distance (Figure 9).
As much as all Jewish Israelis living in East Jerusalem are considered settlers
according to international law, it is important to point out that the relations between
Palestinians and Israelis are variable. Some of the major settlement blocs like Maale
Adumim are exclusively Jewish gated communities; others, like HaGivaa HaTzarfadit,
see Palestinians and Jews living side-by-side, especially as rents and property prices
escalate in Palestinian neighbourhoods. Certainly, the vast majority of Israelis living
in East Jerusalem are considered quality of life settlers, attracted by the cheaper cost
of living and occasional government subsidies (Friedman and Etkes 2007). However,
a small proportion of settlers (about 2000) are motivated by religious ideology and have
established settler enclaves inside the Old City and its surrounding areas (the Holy
Basin), entering into a hostile relationship with local Palestinian residents. The form
these enclaves take is indicative of the haphazard, opportunistic and sometimes question-
able way in which properties are procured by the right-wing settler organizations that
organize them.
8
They may take the form of a building, a house, an apartment or some-
times just a single room, such as in the neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah where settlers
Figure 8. View from the other side (in Al-Ram).
Busbridge 87
by Pepe Portillo on June 29, 2014 the.sagepub.com Downloaded from
have taken over the front room of a house while a Palestinian family continues to live in
the rest. In the Muslim and Christian quarters of the Old City, Israeli flags, surveillance
cameras and re-enforced steel doors mark Jewish settlements (Figure 10), which are
guarded by private security guards paid for by the government and Jerusalem Municipal-
ity (BTselem 2011). Palestinian residents are intimidated, harassed and sometimes
assaulted by settlers and settler guards alike, with the atmosphere of tension adding to
the militarization of the Old City which is patrolled by police and regularly closed in
response to violence in the West Bank or on Jewish holidays (Figure 11). For the
Figure 9. The Israeli settlement of Pisgat Zeev, East Jerusalem. In the background, the separation
wall; behind that, the Palestinian village of Anata and the Shuafat refugee camp.
88 Thesis Eleven 121(1)
by Pepe Portillo on June 29, 2014 the.sagepub.com Downloaded from
Palestinian shopkeepers who make their living from tourists (Figure 12), these condi-
tions have resulted in a lack of customers which, in conjunction with increasing munic-
ipal taxes, has led to the closure of at least 250 shops in recent years.
9
The Palestinian village of Silwan, which is located just underneath the Temple
Mount/Haram al-Shariff outside the walls of the Old City, demonstrates the ways in
which occupation, settlement and inequality intertwine in everyday life in East Jerusa-
lem, and also, importantly, how Palestinian and Israeli space overlay each other in a par-
ticularly uneven configuration. Here, a settler enclave has sprung up as part of an
archaeological dig: the City of David, believed to be the location of the biblical city
of King David from 3000 years ago. Taking advantage of archaeology as a means to
legitimize Israeli presence in occupied East Jerusalem (Abu-Haj 2007), the dig is run
by the settler organization Elad who, with the support of the Israeli government, have
deemed it a national park. There is in fact no way to separate the City of David from
Figure 10. Al-Wad Street, in the heart of the Muslim Quarter, Old City, East Jerusalem. The
Israeli flags mark a settlement.
Busbridge 89
by Pepe Portillo on June 29, 2014 the.sagepub.com Downloaded from
Silwan (Figure 13). The park sits in and runs through the heart of the neighbourhood,
archaeological digs take place under peoples houses (resulting in the collapse of some)
and a number of Palestinian residents have to cross through the park to go about their
daily activities: it is not unusual, for instance, for the Israeli school groups or soldiers
who visit the park as part of organized tours to run into a young girl on her way to school,
or an old man carrying his shopping back from the souq. Some 400 settlers live in prop-
erties incorporated into the park by Elad and receive municipal services that the local
Palestinians do not. While Silwan is one of the poorest villages in East Jerusalem, many
settlers live along newly paved, well-lit streets; indeed, when settlements front onto
Palestinian streets, newly-built footpaths absurdly end at the perimeter of their proper-
ties. With 80 houses in the al-Bustan neighbourhood slated for demolition to make way
for the Kings Garden, which will function as a natural corridor between the settle-
ments and West Jerusalem, it is not surprising that Silwan is one of the tensest areas
of East Jerusalem. Violence flares up sporadically, especially between settler guards and
local Palestinians, and stone-throwing youth frequently encounter tear gas and rubber
bullets shot by border police.
Looking west
Whereas the pressures of the occupation combined with the close quarters in which
Palestinians and Israeli often live make East Jerusalem a site of constant tension
threatening to spill over into violence, West Jerusalem for the most part escapes the
conflicts that structure daily life in the east. Public space is mostly Jewish, as is the
population, and West Jerusalem has solidified itself as the internationally acceptable (as
opposed to accepted) capital of the Israeli state. In many ways, West Jerusalem is a
microcosm of broader Israeli society and the city is home to the same social divisions
Figure 11. Israeli police checkpoint outside Damascus Gate. Old City, Jerusalem.
90 Thesis Eleven 121(1)
by Pepe Portillo on June 29, 2014 the.sagepub.com Downloaded from
found across Israel. The citys Ashkenazi (Eastern European), Mizrahi (Arab), Ethiopian
and Russian Jewish populations remain largely segregated, frequenting ethno-specific
restaurants and nightspots; the migrant worker population, too, has its own public spaces
(albeit small), and one may see Nepalese or Filipinos gathering in West Jerusalems
malls and thoroughfares to informally celebrate their own cultural events and holidays.
The citys religious significance manifests in the masses of young diaspora Jews on
Taglit Birthright trips
10
who can be found filling its streets during the summer
months, joining religious Jewry from abroad on their yearly vacations, making the dis-
tinction between Jewish and Israeli particularly apparent. The purchase of properties
by French and American Jews in prime areas of the city, for instance, has driven up
prices and made a handful of neighbourhoods populated only during summer, which has
incited anger from Israeli-born Jerusalemites. However, the starkest division and the
one most dominant in West Jerusalem is that of religious/secular (Figure 14). Jerusa-
lems Jewish population is becoming increasingly religious, as the Haredi population
Figure 12. Shop selling to tourists in the Christian Quarter, Old City, East Jerusalem.
Busbridge 91
by Pepe Portillo on June 29, 2014 the.sagepub.com Downloaded from
grows significantly and secular Israelis move to satellite towns outside the citys munic-
ipal limits (Alfasi et al. 2012). The contest between secular and religious Jews to shape
public space has most recently manifested in contentions over gender-segregation on
buses and the blacking out of images of women on billboards and advertisements.
11
While it may not be immediately evident, the conflict between Israel and the
Palestinians is nevertheless present in West Jerusalem, shaping its geography and
landscape as much as it does in the east. As Krystall (1998) explains, prior to 1948, the
Figure 13. City of David archaeological park, Silwan, East Jerusalem.
Figure 14. Graffiti, West Jerusalem.
92 Thesis Eleven 121(1)
by Pepe Portillo on June 29, 2014 the.sagepub.com Downloaded from
Palestinian community living in what was to become West Jerusalem numbered about
28,000 and was one of the most prosperous in the Middle East, living in often grand
residences in neighbourhoods like Qatamon, Baqa, Talbiyya and Musrara. Compared to
the 95,000 strong Jewish community which owned 30 per cent of West Jerusalem lands
in 1947, the West Jerusalemite Palestinian population owned 34 per cent (excluding the
Arab villages which were later incorporated into municipal limits) and typically rented to
Jews living in mixed neighbourhoods. With the outbreak of war, the vast majority of
West Jerusalem residents, Palestinian and Jewish, fled or were evacuated from their
homes. Palestinians living in villages on the outskirts, in particular, were targeted by
Jewish paramilitaries seeking to gain control over the citys entrance on the main road to
Tel Aviv. For instance, most residents of the village of Lifta which now stands largely
empty at the entrance to Jerusalem (Figure 15) left the village after a series of attacks in
late 1947, which resulted in seven deaths and a number of houses destroyed. Residents of
other villages were expelled in similar ways, or fled following the infamous April 1948
massacre of civilians at Deir Yassin by the Stern Gang and Irgun paramilitary organi-
zations. Upon the formal cessation of hostilities, Jewish residents were permitted to
return to their homes in West Jerusalem; Palestinians were not and their homes were re-
settled, mostly by new immigrants, but also by some Jewish families displaced from
Figure 15. Lifta, a pre-1948 Palestinian village now located in West Jerusalem.
Busbridge 93
by Pepe Portillo on June 29, 2014 the.sagepub.com Downloaded from
Jewish areas in East Jerusalem (such as Shimon HaTzadik). By 1948 the conflict had
manifested in such a way that all the neighbourhoods of Jerusalem except for the Jew-
ish Quarter in the otherwise Arab Old City were exclusively Arab or Jewish, with vir-
tually no communication between them (Krystall 1998: 9).
In addition to incorporating the vast majority of Jewish Jerusalem, with the exception of
a handful of enclaves on the east side like the HebrewUniversity on Mount Scopus, newly-
founded Israeli West Jerusalem also incorporated nine previously Arab villages and neigh-
bourhoods into its bounds. These Palestinian histories remain present in West Jerusalem,
as do many old Palestinian homes, even as they have been integrated into Israeli urban and
suburban spaces. Many of the houses of Deir Yassin, for instance, were incorporated into
an Israeli hospital for the mentally ill; in other places, it is not unusual to glimpse Arabic
writing above a doorway or a crescent on an old iron gate. A number of the former Pales-
tinian West Jerusalem neighbourhoods have been re-named as part of a process of Judai-
zation Talbiyya, for example, has formally become Komemiyut (even if it has failed to
catch on) and are highly sought-after real estate. Grand Arab residences are now mar-
keted as Beit Aravi (in Hebrew: Arab house) by Israeli real-estaters who emphasize their
authentic charm and character.
12
There are, however, a handful of sites that directly testify
to their Palestinian character and which are yet to be Judaized. Lifta is one such site, and is
in fact one of the few remaining Palestinian villages not demolished or re-populated with
Jews after 1948. Nevertheless, Liftas future presently hangs in the balance, with Israeli
developers seeking to turn the old Palestinian village into an exclusively Jewish luxury
resort, complete with 212 housing units, a hotel, a shopping mall and open green areas;
the mosque would be converted into a synagogue, with the old houses incorporated into
developments (see Busbridge in press).
Mamilla (Maman Allah) cemetery is another site in West Jerusalem that speaks to
the Palestinian history of many of its spaces (Figure 16). Located just outside the walls of
the Old City close to Jaffa Gate, Mamilla is the largest and most significant Muslim
cemetery in historic Palestine, having been in use since the seventh century and believed
to contain the remains of the Prophet Muhammads companions and warriors of Salah al-
Dins (Saladins) army (Makdisi 2010: 521). Since it was transferred to Israeli control in
1948, Mamilla cemetery has been progressively built over with a handful of carparks, and
most significantly, Independence Park, which is the second largest park in Jerusalem.
Currently, only a tiny portion of the once 50-acre-large cemetery is visible, albeit in a state
of disrepair: the area is overgrown with weeds, trash is strewn between the head stones and
tombs, which are themselves cracked and damaged. Controversially, a portion of Mamilla
cemetery is the site of the planned Museumof Tolerance in Jerusalem, which is intended to
be a great landmark promoting the principles of mutual respect and social responsibility.
Since construction was first announced in 2004, it has been suspended on a number of
occasions due to news breaking in 2006 that workers excavating had been discovering
and then disposing of human remains (Makdisi 2010). Despite widespread criticism,
as well as the withdrawal of various architects including Frank Gehry, who originally
designed the building, construction continues today, albeit hidden behind the tall silver
fence that surrounds the site and dominates what is left of Mamillas graves.
As mentioned earlier, Palestinians are becoming increasingly more visible in West
Jerusalems public spaces, although this presence is more transient than permanent.
94 Thesis Eleven 121(1)
by Pepe Portillo on June 29, 2014 the.sagepub.com Downloaded from
Whereas 200,000 Jewish Israelis live in settlements in East Jerusalem, very few
Palestinians are permanent residents in West Jerusalem and of these, the vast majority
are Palestinian citizens of Israel coming from Arab towns in the north. Original Jer-
usalemite Palestinians remain unable to return to or claim compensation for their
properties, despite a great many living only relatively short distances away in East
Jerusalem or the broader West Bank. Other Palestinians who may be interested in
purchasing property encounter a number of legal, bureaucratic and logistical hurdles that
make it effectively impossible;
13
likewise, Jewish landlords are typically reluctant to rent
to Palestinians, particularly in more conservative areas with strident anti-Arab senti-
ments. The Palestinians who are present are thus those who work in West Jerusalem,
which is in fact one of the few options available to East Jerusalemites who encounter
rampant poverty, unemployment and a severe lack of opportunities in that part of the city
(see UNCTAD 2013). The vast majority are in the construction and service sectors,
working variously as shop assistants, kitchen-hands, chefs, gardeners, construction
workers and street cleaners (Figure 17) thus literally engaged in the day-to-day servi-
cing and building of West Jerusalem.
Increasingly, East Jerusalemite Palestinians are opting to spend their leisure time in
West Jerusalem too. This is a particularly new development, albeit one also connected to
the occupation and the vast inequality that defines the east-west divide. On the one hand,
the construction of the Jerusalem Light Rail, which connects Israeli settlements in the
east with West Jerusalem, has made the west side of the city more accessible for Pales-
tinians. As much as the Light Rail entrenches the occupation insofar as it enacts the
Israeli claim to united Jerusalem (it is also illegal as a measure undertaken by an occu-
pying power to demographically-alter the territory it occupies), the train has emerged as
Figure 16. Mamilla cemetery, West Jerusalem. The fence at the back protects the site of the
planned Museum of Tolerance.
Busbridge 95
by Pepe Portillo on June 29, 2014 the.sagepub.com Downloaded from
one of a few sites of tentative coexistence unthinkable only a handful of years ago. Here,
one can see Jews and Arabs sitting next to each other as equal patrons of the service, and
all stops are announced in Hebrew, Arabic and English (although it is perhaps significant
that many of the Arabic announcements are in fact Arabizations of Hebrew place
names). On the other hand, the lack of public spaces in the east, including cultural centres
and cinemas for example, means that many Palestinians choose to head to the west for
leisure activities. As the west side is rendered more accessible, more and more East Jer-
usalemite Palestinians are entering West Jerusalems shopping malls and strips, restau-
rants and cafes as consumers; likewise, groups of young Palestinian men are increasingly
choosing to congregate in parks or other public spaces in the west. The evidence of this
growing Palestinian presence in the west pops up in often surprising ways, such as
Palestinian-oriented graffiti, for example (Figure 18), but most stridently in terms of visi-
ble presence. While this has sometimes made for incidents of confrontation and violence,
with Palestinians typically the target of assault (in 2012, for instance, three Palestinian
youths were lynched by a mob of Jewish teenagers),
14
in most instances it has made for
a cautiously shared public space (Figure 19).
Re-imagining Jerusalems frontier
The project of re-imagining the frontier as a site of both contest and contact thus takes on
a particular urgency in Jerusalem: not only because the citys political future demands it,
but also because to think only in terms of the former is to miss something important
about the dynamics of the contemporary city. For me, what is most important about this
task is that it compels us to examine the unforeseen and unanticipated outcomes of the
settler colonial project, particularly when it comes to the question of relations between
Figure 17. Palestinian street cleaner, Ben Yehuda mall, West Jerusalem.
96 Thesis Eleven 121(1)
by Pepe Portillo on June 29, 2014 the.sagepub.com Downloaded from
the parties respectively positioned as settler and native. The frontier, as I have sought to
examine and illuminate here, is a site of conflict, contestation and dispossession, but it is
also importantly that which binds the settler and native together. It is, to put it simply, the
Figure 19. Palestinian women sitting in Ben Yehuda mall, West Jerusalem.
Figure 18. Graffiti in West Jerusalem demanding the release of the East Jerusalemite Palestinian
hunger striker Samer Issawi. Issawi ended his nine month hunger strike in protest of the Israeli
practice of administrative detention in April 2013.
Busbridge 97
by Pepe Portillo on June 29, 2014 the.sagepub.com Downloaded from
reality and hope of coexistence in settler colonial contexts, and the challenge herein is
how to transform relations at the frontier. Jerusalem in this regard is particularly instruc-
tive, not least because the formal settlement project is unlikely to ever be complete,
compared to, say, the settler colonial spaces of Australia and Canada where the defeat
and domination of the native was achieved through the violent reality of genocide. Israeli
hitnahulut (settlement), as Oren Yiftachel (1999) frames it, has not conquered Palesti-
nian sumoud (steadfastness); instead, the two are locked in a seemingly endless battle
with one other where neither is slated to emerge victorious. In contrast to the
claims of united Jerusalem or the desire to re-partition the city along ethnically pure
lines, Jerusalem speaks to the unavoidable reality that not only must Israelis and Pales-
tinians learn to live together, but that they already do. Much like the broader Israeli-
Palestinian conflict, east and west are not only bound together in Jerusalem but are
imbricated in each other. At the frontier of the city, it is thus the simple fact of presence
of both Arab and Jew that compels us to think beyond the twin fantasies of ethnic separa-
tion and exclusive ownership.
Notes
1. These are mostly ideologically-motivated settlers from the West Bank (including East Jerusa-
lem), or people connected to settler organizations.
2. Comprised of the Old City and a handful of outlying villages.
3. Indeed, Israel is not only one of the only states in the world without internationally recognized
borders, but it has expanded its borders on numerous occasions (Newman 2012: 252).
4. While Israel offers citizenship to East Jerusalemite Palestinians, it is refused by the majority of
the population for political reasons (i.e. taking Israeli citizenship recognizes East Jerusalems
annexation). Increasingly, however, more Palestinians are taking citizenship because of the
difficulties of living in Jerusalem as a permanent resident.
5. Adding to an additional 300,000 settlers living in non-annexed areas of the West Bank.
6. With the exception of Haredi neighbourhoods, which are typically quite poor.
7. Many structures built before 1967 are deemed illegal for not conforming to municipal reg-
ulations, making illegality an artifice. It is also important to emphasize that no Jewish homes
have, to date, been demolished in Jerusalem.
8. Settler organizations, like Ateret Cohanim which is active in the Old City, will sometimes
purchase properties in underhanded transactions with local Palestinians; other times, they will
occupy empty properties without permission from owners or even claim rooms in inhabited
properties, living alongside Palestinian families.
9. See Kestler-DAmours (2013).
10. Birthright Israel organizes free ten-day trips to Israel for young diaspora Jews, with the stated
aim of encouraging a sense of connection amongst world Jewry to Jewish heritage and history
in Israel.
11. See Reuters (2011).
12. See Prusher (2013).
13. All properties confiscated in 1948 were turned over to the Israel Land Administration (ILA) as
state land. Until 2009, state land could only be sold or rented to citizens of Israel or anyone
entitled to citizenship under the Law of Return (i.e. Jews in the diaspora), which automatically
excluded East Jerusalemite Palestinians, most of whom have the status of permanent resident.
While foreigners (a category which includes permanent residents) are now able to buy and
98 Thesis Eleven 121(1)
by Pepe Portillo on June 29, 2014 the.sagepub.com Downloaded from
lease land from the ILA, they must nevertheless have the transaction confirmed by a special
committee and authorized by the ILA chair.
14. See Rosenberg (2012).
References
Abu El-Haj N (2003) Reflections on archaeology and Israeli settler-nationhood. Radical History
Review 86: 149163.
Alfasi N, Ashery SF and Benenson I (2012) Between the individual and the community:
Residential patterns of the Haredi population in Jerusalem. International Journal of Urban and
Regional Research 37: 21522176.
Bashir B (2011) Engaging with the injustice/justice of Zionism: New challenges to Palestinian
nationalism. Ethical Perspectives 18: 632645.
BTselem (2011) Settler enclaves in East Jerusalem. Available at: http://www.btselem.org/jer-
usalem/settler_enclaves (accessed 21 February 2014).
BTselem (2012) Background on East Jerusalem. Available at: http://www.btselem.org/jerusalem
(accessed 21 February 2014).
BTselem (2013a) Legal status of East Jerusalem and its residents. Available at: http://www.
btselem.org/jerusalem/legal_status (accessed 21 February 2014).
BTselem (2013b) The separation barrier surrounding A-Ram. Available at: http://www.btselem.
org/separation_barrier/a-ram (accessed 21 February 2014).
Busbridge R (in press) Haunted geography: Writing nation and contesting claims in the ghost
village of Lifta. Interventions.
Cavanagh E (2011) Review essay: Discussing settler colonialisms spatial cultures. Settler
Colonial Studies 1: 154167.
Dumper M (2013) Israel, Palestine and the Future of Jerusalem. New York: Columbia University
Press.
Elkins C and Pederson S (2012) Settler Colonialism in the Twentieth Century: Projects, Practices,
Legacies. New York and London: Routledge.
Evans J (2009) Where lawlessness is law: The settler-colonial frontier as a legal space of violence.
Australian Feminist Law Journal 30: 322.
Friedman L and Etkes D (2007) Quality of life settlers. Peace Now. Available at: http://peacenow.
org.il/eng/content/quality-life-settlers (accessed 21 February 2014).
Guha R and Spivak GC (1988) Selected Subaltern Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Halper J (2009) Obstacles to Peace, 4th edn. Jerusalem: ICAHD.
Kestler-DAmours J (2013) Isolation devastates East Jerusalem economy. Inter Press Service
News Agency, 26 May. Available at: http://www.ipsnews.net/2013/05/isolation-devastates-
east-jerusalem-economy/ (accessed 21 February 2014).
Klein M (2008) Jerusalem as an Israeli problem: A review of forty years of Israeli rule over Arab
Jerusalem. Israel Studies 13: 5472.
Krystall N (1998) The de-Arabization of West Jerusalem 194750. Journal of Palestine Studies
XXVII(2): 522.
Makdisi S (2010) The architecture of erasure. Critical Inquiry 36: 519559.
Margalit M (2010) Seizing Control of Space in East Jerusalem. Jerusalem: Sifrai Aliat Gag.
Mendel Y (2013) New Jerusalem. New Left Review 81: 3556.
Newman D (2012) Borders and conflict resolution. In: Wilson TM and Donnan F (eds) A
Companion to Border Studies. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Newman D and Paasi A (1998) Fences and neighbours in the postmodern world: Boundary
narratives in political geography. Progress in Human Geography 22: 186207.
Busbridge 99
by Pepe Portillo on June 29, 2014 the.sagepub.com Downloaded from
Prescott JRV (1987) Political Boundaries and Frontiers. London: Routledge.
Prusher I (2013) Israels absentee property law exposes an absence of morality in Jerusalem.
Haaretz Online, 7 June. Available at: http://www.haaretz.com/blogs/jerusalem-vivendi/
israel-s-absentee-property-law-exposes-an-absence-of-morality-in-jerusalem.premium-1.
528427 (accessed 21 February 2014).
Pullan W (2011) Frontier urbanism: The periphery at the centre of contested cities. The Journal of
Architecture 16: 1535.
Pullan W, Misselwitz P, Nasrallah R and Yacobi H (2007) Jerusalems Road 1. City: Analysis of
Urban Trends, Culture, Theory, Policy, Action 11: 176198.
Reuters (2011) Israelis take Jerusalems gender fight to buses and billboards, 14 November.
Available at: http://blogs.reuters.com/faithworld/2011/11/14/israelis-take-jerusalems-gender-
fight-to-buses-and-billboards/ (accessed 21 February 2014).
Rose DB and Davis R (eds) (2005) Dislocating the Frontier: Essaying the Mystique of the
Outback. Canberra: ANU e-Press.
Rosenberg O (2012) Israel police: Hundreds watched attempt to lynch Palestinians in Jerusalem, did
not interfere. Haaretz Online, 20 August. Available at: http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/
israel-police-hundreds-watched-attempt-to-lynch-palestinians-in-jerusalem-did-not-interfere-1.
459293 (accessed 21 February 2014).
Roy S (1995) The Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of De-development. Washington, DC:
Institute for Palestine Studies.
Russell L (2001) Colonial Frontiers: Indigenous-European Encounters in Settler Societies.
Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Shlaim A (2000) The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World. New York: W.W. Norton.
UNCTAD (2013) The Palestinian Economy in East Jerusalem: Enduring Annexation, Isolation
and Disintegration. New York and Geneva: United Nations.
UN OCHA (2009) The planning crisis in East Jerusalem: Understanding the phenomenon of
illegal construction. Available at: http://www.ochaopt.org/documents/ocha_opt_planning_
crisis_east_jerusalem_april_2009_english.pdf (accessed 21 February 2014).
UN OCHA (2011) Barrier update: Special focus. Available at: http://www.ochaopt.org/documents/
ocha_opt_barrier_update_july_2011_english.pdf http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/israel-
police-hundreds-watched-attempt-to-lynch-palestinians-in-jerusalem-did-not-interfere-1.459293
Weizman E (2007) Hollow Land: Israels Architecture of Occupation. London and New York:
Verso.
Wolfe P (2006) Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native. Journal of Genocide
Research 8: 387409.
Yiftachel O (1999) Ethnocracy: The politics of Judaising Israel/Palestine. Constellations 6:
362391.
Author biography
Rachel Busbridge is an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow at Institut fur
Islamwissenschaft, Freie Universitat, Berlin, and a Research Associate at the Centre for
Dialogue, La Trobe University, Melbourne. A political sociologist, her research interests
include the politics of recognition and reconciliation, culture, identity, nation and post-
colonial theory, which she has published on in the contexts of Israel-Palestine and
Australian multiculturalism.
100 Thesis Eleven 121(1)
by Pepe Portillo on June 29, 2014 the.sagepub.com Downloaded from