Arab Literary Travels

Alex Fyfe: Jerusalem - 1949-1967

Note that some elements of the slide map do not carry over to Scalar - access the full version of the map here


In the above slide map, the different phases of Jerusalem's urban development can be seen compared against the division of the city between the Kingdom of Jordan and Israel between 1949 and 1967. It was in this period of Jerusalem's history that the separation of Palestinian and Jewish populations became more distinct; in West Jerusalem, the entire non-Jewish population in 1950 was 1,930 (although many of these were foreign Christians rather than Muslim Palestinians); in East Jerusalem, the Jewish population was zero, save for one or two Jewish women married to Arab husbands (Wasserstein 179). Not only this, but at this time the population of Jerusalem began to tip towards a Jewish majority - in 1920, there were 31,000 Palestinians in the city, and 30,000 Jews. In 1947, there were 65,000 Palestinians int the city, and 99,400 Jews (Shoshan 288). In reading the above two maps with demographic information from the time, we can see how these two population groups were not merely apart insofar as lived in physically separate areas - they were also apart insofar as they were living in parts of the city that were built at entirely different times, under different governments (for the West, predominantly British-built; for the East, predominantly Jordanian-built). This physical separation (illustrated perhaps best by the photo on the black marker of the left-hand map) followed directly from the political carving up of the city between two states, and, as can be seen from the next Story Map, separation maintains even after that political line of division was erased by the 1967 war. 

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