Alex Fyfe: Jerusalem 1949 to Present-Day
Pulling the map slide to the right pulls across the map of Jerusalem as it stands today. The political split of the city between Israel and the Kingdom of Jordan has evaporated; the city now falls entirely under the state of Israel. This does not mean, however, that the city has been united - divisions between population groups still maintain on the ground, and in ways that become harder and harder to chart on a map. On the above slider map, each black marker represents an Israeli settler house in an area previously under Jordanian control, and the darker blue areas represent larger Israeli settler neighbourhoods. This information was collated and plotted on the map mainly from two NGOs who record the creation of Israeli settler areas east of the Green Line: Americans for Peace Now and Terrestrial Jerusalem. Projecting this information onto a map alongside the old division between Jordan and Israel, we can see how, in some ways at least, it is still possible to represent the physical separation of population groups onto a map - many divisions are too subtle for cartographic representation, however. For instance, in a city of currently around 815,000, the 300,000 Palestinian residents have less than 10% of the city's municipal budget allocated to the areas in which they live (a good example of this is health provision - there are 25 health centres in the west of the city, and 4 in the east of the city) (Shlaim). Another example are elections. As voting in municipal elections would signal a tacit legitimation of Israeli control of East Jerusalem, the vast majority of the city's Palestinian residents boycott them, meaning that the city's politicians have little extra incentive to improve their conditions (Shlaim). This movement of Israeli settlers into areas previously under Jordanian control - into areas where the overwhelming majority of residents hold Jordanian, rather than Israeli citizenship - is simply a small, outward indicator of a city fraught with division, and in itself a mark of how difficult it is in modern-day Jerusalem to usefully chart the lives of the populations on the ground.