By Mike Dumper: Jerusalem Unbound: geography, history, and the future of the holy city & By Madelaine Adelman & Miriam Fendius Elman (Eds) Jerusalem Conflict and Cooperation in a Contested City (original) (raw)
Related papers
Thesis Eleven
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 city’s 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 coexistence, 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.
Borders, Boundaries and Frontiers: Notes on Jerusalem's Present Geopolitics
This article explores the relevance of geopolitics to the study of urban space in contested territories, with a specific focus on Jerusalem's colonial geographies. The main theoretical argument is that the geopolitics of cities have to do with a crossing of scales – from the neighbourhood scale to the city level and then to the colonial apparatuses of the state. This is related to the fact that the consequences and impacts of borders and territoriality are not diminishing. Instead we should pay attention to new scales of territorial affiliations and borders. At the same time as recognising that borders may be flexible, they are still selective on different geographical scales.
Jerusalem Unbound: Geography, History, and the Future of the Holy City
he explores and illustrates how, despite the wall (hard border), people on the both sides have managed to create and retain various trans-wall spheres of influence (soft borders) by taking advantage of its porous nature to breach it by various ways. This reality, which renders Jerusalem a “many-bordered” or unbound city, is primarily attributable to its rich, complex, and intersecting religious and political interests that are sought and contested by many actors
This article explores the relevance of geopolitics to the study of urban space in contested territories, with a specific focus on Jerusalem's colonial geographies. The main theoretical argument is that the geopolitics of cities have to do with a crossing of scales -from the neighbourhood scale to the city level and then to the colonial apparatuses of the state. This is related to the fact that the consequences and impacts of borders and territoriality are not diminishing. Instead we should pay attention to new scales of territorial affiliations and borders. At the same time as recognising that borders may be flexible, they are still selective on different geographical scales.
Re-Shaping Jerusalem: the Transformation of Jerusalem's Metropolitan Area by the Israeli Barrier
2013
The paper analyses the territorial implications of the Israeli barrier/wall with reference to the metropolitan area of Jerusalem. The thesis argued is that the barrier continues both the ‘Judaisation’ and ‘de-Arabisation’ process of the city implemented by the Israeli authorities since 1967 and mainly practiced through urban policies. However, unlike these latter, it does not primarily affect the demographic composition of the city, but the spatial conformation of the metropolitan area; its political aim is to create a ‘Greater Jewish Jerusalem’ composed of the city and the three main blocks of Israeli settlements close to the municipal borders. In pursuit of (and in order to pursue) this aim, the barrier breaks down the Arab metropolitan system, which closely combines East Jerusalem and the West Bank suburbs. The consequence will be the probable atrophy of Arab Jerusalem, which will be reduced to a series of residential enclaves in an alien space.
Palestine-Israel Journal, 17 (1-2), 2010
Between 1948 and 1967 Jerusalem, like pre-1990 Berlin, was a divided city, crossed by an inter-state border — the Green Line — separating Israel and Jordan. In 1967, the Six-Day War and the Israeli conquest of the West Bank put an end to 20 years of division with the annexation of East Jerusalem and its incorporation into the Israeli municipality. Israel’s policy in Jerusalem, however, has created a deeply contested and polarized city and coexistence between Jews and Palestinians has been progressively deteriorating. Jerusalem has been defined as “torn,” “polarized,” “ethnocratic,” “contested”— a city where “intimate enemies” live “together separately” or “separated and unequal,” to cite the titles of some of the academic contributions dealing with the urban dimension of the conflict.1 The rising tension in the city has cast a shadow over the status quo of reunification: On the one hand Israeli governments have created a number of physical and legal infrastructures in order to separate the various parts of the city; on the other hand, with the inception of the Oslo process, a growing international consensus has developed regarding a division of the city between Israel and a future Palestinian state. In this paper I will examine the history of “Metropolitan Jerusalem,” that is the area including both the city and its hinterland, composed of various Jewish and Palestinian communities. I suggest that the evolutions that have occurred in the metropolitan area of the city are today the main obstacle to the solution of the conflict and that the deepening of the separation between Jews and Palestinians in the city does not prefigure any return to the past — that is, to the division of the city during the two decades between 1948 and 1967 — but instead a development in continuity with the history of the contested, polarized city that has emerged after 1967.
CITY, 2018
As far as the relation between planning and politics is concerned, Jerusalem represents an exceptional urban case to study. Jerusalem is a symbolic and tangible focal point in the Israeli Palestinian conflict, earning its position in urban studies and planning literature as one of the most ethno-nationally divided, polarized and contested cities (Bollens 1998; Klien 2001; Dumper 2014; Shlay and Rosen 2015). Competing religious and political narratives have affected Jerusalem’s development and over the past half-century Israeli ethno-national principles have held a significant role in forming the contemporary city. For anyone contemplating about what our urban world can become under forces of extreme nationalism and exclusionary planning policy, Jerusalem is an important lesson and cautionary warning for a growing number of contested cities. It is with these developments that Shaping Jerusalem: Spatial Planning, Politics and the Conflict engages with in further rigour and detail.
Conflict of Sovereignties in the Urban Space of Jerusalem
Middle East Journal, 2014
This article examines the matrix of urban interventions and control through territorial and demographic engineering by Israel to transform Jerusalem into a closer approximation of Zionist colonialist ideology by various means. These include the deployment of archaeological, cultural, socio-political, territorial, and urban design instruments to de-construct or re-narrate the other histories and characteristics of the city in order to preempt alternative sovereignties. Competing visions and discourses are visually evident in urban spaces and practices. This process is a conflict that chooses "identity" as its overt manifestation and its "protection" is consequently used as justification for legal and political discrimination. The construction of this particular form of identity was and is inherently inescapable due to the colonialist basis and practices of the state.