Alex Fyfe's Annotated Bibliography
Visual/Cultural Sources
Bomberg, David. Jerusalem, Looking to Mount Scopus. 1925. Tate (collection). WikiArt. Web. 2 Apr. 2016.
The website this image is taken from, www.wikiart.com, is a comprehensive open-source database of fine art, supported by public donations. The painting itself is by David Bomberg, a British modernist painter, whose painting style was something of a cross-pollination between Cubism and Futurism. Painted during Bomberg’s productive post-war years, Jerusalem, Looking to Mount Scopus (1925) provides a useful insight into how developed Jerusalem was when the British took over governance from the Ottomans. It gives a visual representation of the smallness of Jerusalem that is hard to find in 1920s photographs - looking from the Old City to Mount Scopus to the north, it takes in the most built up section of the city at the time, and provides a snapshot of Jerusalem in the years before its heavy build-up under the British Mandate.
Getty Images is a US photo stock company, and holds, without a doubt, the largest catalogue of photographic images in the world today. This image is useful to us because it documents how, even after terrible conflict, and even when one of the belligerent parties is explicitly identifiable by their uniform, the people of Jerusalem must still come together to trade and do business - they must exist together in certain communal spaces. Here, a Jewish soldier of the IDF is shown purchasing an item from an Arab market vendor.
Rodger, George. 1952. Photograph. Israel: 50 Years as Seen by Magnum Photographers. 1st ed. New York: Aperture Foundation, 1998. Image 9. Print.
Magnum Photos is a widely respected cooperative of photographers which has been operating for the better part of a century, and attempts to faithfully chronicle the world and its people. In their own words, “when you picture an iconic image, but can't think who took it or where it can be found, it probably came from Magnum.” The image in question here is interesting on two counts. Firstly, it captures a brief moment in Jerusalem’s history, the 19-year occupation of east Jerusalem by Jordanian forces, ended by the six-day war of 1967. Secondly, it documents, with splendid clarity, how the political map of Jerusalem affects people’s travels through it and experiences of it: the sign in the photograph shows the road ahead is blocked because it leads to west Jerusalem.
VICE News. "A City Divided: Jerusalem's Most Contested Neighborhood (Trailer)." Online video clip. YouTube. 30 Dec. 2014. Web. 2 Apr. 2016.
Background Sources
I found this source by approaching Israeli government websites directly, in the expectation that such an institution would exist. The State of Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) was instituted immediately after the creation of Israel to document and research the political, social, and economic make-up of the state. Although they have issued many useful publications throughout their history, for our purposes their most recent “Israel in Figures” publications might be the most useful. Each - for example, the 2014 edition - gives detailed information on the demographics of Israel (and specific demographics relating to Jerusalem) that would be difficult to obtain from anything other that a government organisation, and help to flesh out maps of contemporary Jerusalem with hard facts on the city’s population and where they live.
This source I found through a search through the UT catalogue for diaries related to the British Mandate in Palestine. Sir Henry Gurney was the last Chief Secretary of the Palestinian British Mandate, and oversaw the withdrawal of British forces from the area. His diaries, and the excellent historical commentary provided by the editor Motti Golani, provide valuable insight into quite how volatile a place Jerusalem was in the run-up to the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. They supply a tangible narrative to supplement and explain the radical changes in the Jerusalem political map in the 1948 war.
A blog on developments of Jewish settlements in east Jerusalem (I found it through the recommendation of Terrestrial Jerusalem - see "maps" section), co-authored by Hagit Oran, director of Peace Now’s settlement watch project, and Kate Stoia. It provides a human dimension to the shifting political tides in east Jerusalem, helping flesh out the headlines in modern-day Jerusalem with first-hand, human stories. Along with commentaries on the general history of east Jerusalem, it also provides an assortment of its own maps detailing the divisions between Palestinian and Jewish areas.
Wasserstein, Bernard. Divided Jerusalem: The Struggle for the Holy City. London: Profile Books, 2002. Print.
I found this book on the UT library's shelves after seeing it recommended in a book review. This book provides perhaps one of the most authoritative accounts on the changing population groups within the city available - Avi Shlaim of the London Review of Books says that one “could not do better than read Bernard Wasserstein’s thoroughly researched, elegantly written and strikingly fair-minded book.” The book moves in a generally chronological fashion through Jerusalem’s history, and offers a brilliant compendium of the scholarly work on the city. An invaluable source of background information to complement the map narrative.
Maps
Toni Levit is an infographic artist living in Tel Aviv; the 2009 book from which our map is taken is, as the book’s title suggests, an unconventional cartographic survey of Israel, including graphics that chart, for example, who is scared of whom in Israel, as well as our map of the sounds of Jerusalem. Whilst very basic in its geographical detail, this map gives an unusual - and yet illustrative - description of where different people with different cultures intermingle. In many parts of the Old City and its environs especially, we notice how the sounds of church bells are mixed with the sound of the Islamic call to prayer, which in turn is mixed with the sounds of the sirens reminding the Jewish population of the coming Shabbat, which is itself mixed with the sound of police sirens. An extremely interesting map of Jerusalem.
*note Scalar did not support a full resolution version of the scan
An authoritative and detailed survey of Israel (published by Israel’s very own Ministry of Labour), from its rule by Romans all the way through to the (then) present day, this source also includes a map of particular relevance to us - a map of Jerusalem that colour-codes every building according to when it was built. This gives us tremendously useful information in an investigation of changes to the city. When areas were built, and under whose governance, provides insight into why conflict occurs in certain parts of the city, especially when paired with the other maps containing demographic information.
Malkit Shoshan’s 470 page atlas of the conflict between Israel and Palestine is as exhaustive a geographical record of the conflict as one will be able to find. The final chapter, dedicated entirely to Jerusalem, charts changes in the city’s physical, social, and political geography over the past half millennium imaginatively through almost 100 maps and in excellent detail. Although Shoshan is an Israeli Jew, he declares in the introduction that he intended the atlas to be strictly apolitical, and in actual fact the vast majority of the research for the project was funded by the Netherlands Architecture Fund and the Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts.
Terrestrial Jerusalem is a NGO operating in Jerusalem that is, in their own words, an “Israeli non-governmental organization that works to identify and track the full spectrum of developments in Jerusalem that could impact either the political process or permanent status options, destabilize the city or spark violence, or create humanitarian crises.” Although ostensibly an Israeli institution, its principal donors include the British Foreign Office, and it is an internationally respected organisation. Of key interest to us is its “Jerusalem Atlas” project, an interactive online map that charts, in high detail - down to individual settler houses - the locations of different social/ethnic groups, and how these correspond to past, present and proposed international boundary lines. A tremendously useful source.
