East Jerusalem
East Jerusalem, the portion of Jerusalem east of the Green Line established formally by the armistice agreements at the end of the 1948 Palestine war, is a territory of disputed status containing the Old City and sites of religious significance to Muslims, Christians, and Jews. After the 1948 war, the territory was held by Jordan, as opposed to West Jerusalem, which became part of the newly established State of Israel. In the 1967 Arab–Israeli War, Israel captured and occupied East Jerusalem, then unilaterally annexed it in 1980. The United Nations and other intergovernmental organizations consider East Jerusalem a part of the Palestinian territories according to international law, and under illegal occupation by Israel. Many states recognize East Jerusalem as the capital of the State of Palestine, whereas other states assert that East Jerusalem "will be the capital of Palestine", while referring to it as "an occupied territory". In 2020, East Jerusalem had a population of 595,000 inhabitants, of whom 361,700 were Palestinian Arabs and 234,000 were Jewish Israelis. Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem are illegal under international law and in the eyes of the international community.
Jerusalem was envisaged as a separate, international city under the 1947 UN partition plan. It was, however, divided by the 1948 war that followed Israel's declaration of independence. As a result of the 1949 Armistice Agreements, the city's western half came under Israeli control, while its eastern half, containing the famed Old City, fell under Jordanian control, at the exception of Mount Scopus enclave. Israel occupied East Jerusalem during the 1967 Six-Day War; since then, the entire city has been under Israeli control. The 1980 Jerusalem Law declared unified Jerusalem the capital of Israel, formalizing the effective annexation of East Jerusalem. Palestinians and many in the international community consider East Jerusalem to be the future capital of the State of Palestine. The status of Jerusalem has been described as "one of the most intractable issues in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict", with conflicting claims to sovereignty over the city or parts of it, and access to its holy sites.
Israeli and Palestinian definitions of East Jerusalem differ. Following the 1967 Six-Day War, Jerusalem's municipal boundaries were extended totaling an area three times the size of pre-war West Jerusalem. This includes several West Bank villages to the north, east and south of the Old City that are now considered neighborhoods of the city, as well as eight suburban neighborhoods that were built since then. The international community considers these neighborhoods illegal settlements, but the Israeli government disputes this. The Israeli position is based on the extended municipal boundaries, while the Palestinian position is based on the 1949 Agreements.
East Jerusalem includes the Old City, which is home to many sites of seminal religious importance for the three major Abrahamic religions — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, including the Temple Mount / Al-Aqsa, the Western Wall, the Dome of the Rock and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Arab residents of East Jerusalem are increasingly becoming integrated into Israeli society, in terms of education, citizenship, national service and other aspects.
Names
East Jerusalem is the familiar term in English. Arabs largely use the term al-Quds al-ʿArabī, or, in official English-language documents, Arab Jerusalem, emphasizing the predominance of the Arabic-speaking Palestinian population, while Israelis call the area East Jerusalem because of its geographic location in the east of the expanded Jerusalem. The territory is also sometimes referred to as Occupied East Jerusalem or OEJ.History
Ancient period
The area of East Jerusalem has been inhabited since 5000 BCE, with settlement beginning in the Chalcolithic period. Tombs are attested by the Early Bronze Age, around 3200 BCE. In the late second millennium BCE, settlement concentrated around the City of David, which was chosen because of its proximity to the Gihon Spring. Massive Canaanite constructions were undertaken, with a water channel excavated through rock drawing water to a pool inside the citadel, the wall of which was thick, built from rocks weighing up to three tonnes.British Mandatory Period
In 1934, the British Mandatory authorities divided Jerusalem into 12 wards for electoral purposes. The mapping was criticized by those who believed it was drawn to ensure a Palestinian majority on the Jerusalem city council. The actual mapping suggests otherwise, according to Michael Dumper, who states that the peculiar "hook" on the western electoral borders was a gerrymander made to include as many new Jewish neighbourhoods on that side as possible, while keeping outside of the boundaries Arab villages. To the east, the city's border ended at the Old City walls, in order to exclude the contiguous Arab neighbourhood of Silwan, Ras al-Amud and At-Tur and Abu Tor. These boundaries defined the municipality down to 1948. By 1947 Palestinian Arabs constituted a majority overall in the Jerusalem district, but Jews predominated within the British municipal boundaries, 99,000 to 65,100 Arabs. The Jewish presence in eastern Jerusalem was concentrated to the Old Quarter, with a scattering also present in Silwan and Sheikh Jarrah.1948 Arab–Israeli War and aftermath
Of the 30 holy places in Jerusalem, only three were located in Western Jerusalem, with the overwhelming bulk lying within the eastern sector. During the subsequent 1948 Arab–Israeli War, a large number of Jerusalem's churches, convents, mosques, synagogues, monasteries and cemeteries were hit by shell or gunfire. After the armistice the city was divided into two parts. The western portion came under Israeli rule, while the eastern portion, populated mainly by Muslim and Christian Palestinians, came under Jordanian rule, with the international community withholding recognition of the respective areas of control of both parties.During the Battle for Jerusalem, fighting in the Jewish quarter between the Jordanian Arab Legion and the IDF, Irgun and Lehi had been particularly fierce, leaving the zone in ruins. The battle and subsequent looting by Palestinian civilians left 27 synagogues and 30 schools destroyed. The Jordanian army is said to have blown up, three days after conquering the area, what remained of the Hurva Synagogue, which had served both as a civilian refuge and Israeli military post.
For Palestinians, expulsions from the Jerusalem area date back to January 1948, when the Haganah bombed the Semiramis Hotel in Qatamon. The death of 26 civilians marked the beginning of evacuation of the area, which increased after the nearby Deir Yassin massacre in early April, followed by a 3-day assault and looting from 30 April onwards. In the first six months of the 1948 war 6,000 Jews also abandoned the city, and when war broke out, thousands fled the northern areas subject to Jordanian shelling. After the surrender to the Jordanian Arab Legion, the Red Cross, which had been invested with the authority to protect many major sites, oversaw the evacuation westwards through Zion Gate of some 1,300 Jews from the Old Quarter. The only eastern area of the city that remained in Israeli hands throughout the 19 years of Jordanian rule was Mount Scopus, where the Hebrew University is located, which formed an enclave during that period. Likewise, Palestinians living in such western Jerusalem neighbourhoods as Qatamon, Talbiya, Baq'a, 'Ayn Karim, Lifta and Malha either fled or were forced out, many of them seeking refuge in the Old City.
East Jerusalem absorbed thousands of Palestinian refugees, a substantial number of whom were middle-class people from West Jerusalem's Arab neighborhoods when they came under Israeli rule, and many were settled in the previous Jewish areas of the eastern sector, whose inhabitants, likewise refugees, were relocated in the formerly majority-Arab suburbs of West Jerusalem, such as Overall; as a result of the conflict, the Jewish population of Jerusalem fell by 30–40%, while Eyal Benvenisti states half of its Palestinian population of 60,000 left. According to the Jordanian census of 1952, East Jerusalem had an Arab population of 46,700.
Jordanian rule
Jerusalem was to be an international corpus separatum under the 1947 UN Partition Plan. It was not included as a part of either the proposed Jewish or Arab states. During the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, the western part of Jerusalem was captured by Israel, while East Jerusalem was captured by Jordan. The war came to an end with the signing of the 1949 Armistice Agreements. On 23 January 1950, Israel declared Jerusalem its capital, with a Knesset resolution declaring that, "With the creation of a Jewish State, Jerusalem again became its capital". Jordan followed suit on 24 April and, on the basis of a referendum conducted also among Palestinian West Bankers, the Hashemite Kingdom incorporated the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. The unification was recognized by the United Kingdom, which however stipulated that they did not recognize the assertion of Jordanian sovereignty over East Jerusalem, but only de facto control. The United States, while approving the unification, withheld making any public statement and likewise affirmed that since the issue of Jerusalem was sub judice, it did not recognize either the Israeli annexation of West Jerusalem, nor the Jordanian annexation of the eastern area of the city.The municipal boundaries of Jordanian East Jerusalem were expanded to cover by taking in the nearby villages of Silwan, Ras al-Amud Aqabat al-Suwana, 'Ard al-Samar and parts of Shuafat. This expansion of the boundaries was prompted in large part by the need to cope with housing the refugee flow of Palestinians from West Jerusalem. While many municipal functions were shifted to Amman, in 1953, Jordan conferred on East Jerusalem the status of amana - in response to Israel efforts to make West Jerusalem Israel's capital- effectively making the city Jordan's second capital. The political motive behind the transfer of the bureaucracy to Amman lay in the desire to
weaken the power of the rival al-Husayni family.
Generally, the Jordanian authorities maintained the Ottoman status quo with regard to sacred sites in East Jerusalem. When the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, always an object of bitter contention between Greek Orthodox and Latin Christians, was engulfed in flames and severely damaged on 29 November 1949, the Vatican proposed the Tesla plan, which foresaw a reconstruction involving the demolition of the existing church and a contiguous mosque and its replacement by a predominantly Catholic-style structure. Jordan's King Abdullah gave his assent, on one condition he knew would be impossible to fulfill and therefore would abort the project. He stipulated that to go ahead, all involved denominations would have to approve the plan, which would have given the Catholic Church a primacy of authority over the others. Repairs were delayed a decade until a consensus was achieved between the Greek, Latin, and Armenian clerics, with Jordan playing a pivotal role as mediator.
In the early 1960s, Jordan gave the go-ahead for the construction of the Intercontinental Hotel on the Mount of Olives on waqf terrain expropriated in 1952 from the family of Abd al-Razzaq al-'Alami. Three roads, one an access route built through the Jewish Har HaZeitim Cemetery damaged many gravestones, though opinions differ as to the scale of the damage. For Yitzhak Reiter, the majority of graves were unaffected. According to Michael Fischbach, 40,000 of the 50,000 tombstones suffered some form of desecration. The Israeli government protested the desecration, stating that some gravestones had been used for roadwork and a military latrine. This East Jerusalem controversy inverted the terms of an earlier dispute when Jordan complained in 1950 of Israeli damage to the Mamilla cemetery in West Jerusalem.
File:WikiAir IL-13-06 039 - Mount of Olives.JPG|thumb|Aerial view of the ancient Jewish cemetery on Mount of Olives
Tourism in Palestine had long been an undeveloped and marginal sector of the local economy, and, with the division of Jerusalem after 1948, political issues impeded its commercial development as a tourist destination. Eastern Jerusalem suffered an outflow of population, partially accounted for by merchants and administrators moving to Amman. On the other hand, it maintained its religious importance, as well as its role as a regional center. Reaffirming a 1953 statement, Jordan in 1960 declared Jerusalem its second capital. The US protested this plan, and stated it could not "recognize or associate itself in any way with actions which confer upon Jerusalem the attributes of a seat of government..."
During the 1960s, Jerusalem saw economic improvement and its tourism industry developed significantly, and its holy sites attracted growing numbers of pilgrims, but as Jordan did not recognize Israeli passports, neither Jewish nor Muslim Israelis were allowed access to their traditional sites of worship in East Jerusalem, though Israeli Christians, with a special laissez-passer. were permitted to visit Bethlehem over Christmas and the New Year.