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JERUSALEM: CAPITAL OF PALESTINE AND FOCUS OF IDENTITY, 1917–93
Creation of a Capital 1917–48
During the final decades of Ottoman rule in Palestine, Jerusalem was the capital of an independent district (sanjak, sancak in Turkish) directly accountable to the government in Istanbul. This was an expression of its unique status and importance in the empire. The boundaries of the sanjak were wide and included the sub-districts of Bethlehem, Jaffa, Hebron, Beersheva, and Gaza; that is, the entire center of the country and southward. The privileged families in the city constituted the main source of leadership for the entire sanjak. The holiness of the city for members of the three monotheistic religions along with its regional political status led the British, who conquered the city in December 1917, to proclaim it Palestine’s capital. The boundaries of this new political entity – Palestine – were determined with the separation of the land east of the river Jordan from the land to its west in 1922 and the marking of the border between the British mandate and the French mandate in Lebanon in 1923. Jerusalem, the capital, became the nerve center of the British administration, and the Jews and Arabs living in the land also regarded it as their natural capital (despite the competing claims of other cities).
The fact that members of elite Jerusalem families, especially the Husseinis, headed the Arab nationalist movement in Palestine added to the stature of Jerusalem as an Arab political center. When the Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, was recognized as the chief mufti of Palestine (1921) and was made head of the Supreme Muslim Council (1922), Jerusalem became the seat of Palestinian national institutions and the capital of the Palestinian-Arab state in the making. Invoking Jerusalem’s holiness for Islam enabled the mufti to mobilize the Islamic world to support the Palestinian struggle, and contributed to the consolidation of Jerusalem’s status. As would be expected from a national movement uniting Christians and Muslims, Christian Arab religious personages also became part of the struggle against Zionism, while emphasizing the holiness of Jerusalem for Christianity.1 Thus, during the mandate period, Jerusalem became both a religious and national symbol.
The importance of Jerusalem for Christianity, including for Christian Arabs, stems naturally from it being the venue for the activity of Jesus. That Jerusalem is holy for Islam is also accepted without question. Jerusalem is the city to which Muhammad and his followers turned when praying in the early months during which the community of believers emerged (awla al-qiblatayn), and it is considered the third most sacred city in Islam (thaleth al-haramayn), after Mecca and Medina. Jerusalem is also the place to which the prophet Muhammad was brought in his wondrous night journey (isra‘ ) and from whence he ascended heavenward to meet the earlier prophets and angels (mi‘raj). These traditions were known to Muslims throughout history, and as during earlier periods, the national-religious struggle surrounding the city increased its centrality in public awareness. The Supreme Muslim Council, under Hajj Amin promoted this perception. Every spring it called the masses to gather at al-Haram al-Sharif, the Temple Mount, to begin a procession to Nebi Musa in the plains of Jericho, and the day of Muhammad’s ascension to heaven was celebrated in al-Aqsa mosque with the greatest enthusiasm.
Husseini focused upon Jerusalem not only because the city was his power base, and his family had held religious and administrative positions there for many years (muftis, qadis, and mayor of the municipality until 1920), but also because he believed that the Zionist movement held Jerusalem as its highest priority. This analysis was not totally correct. Among the Zionists there were various attitudes concerning Jerusalem, and its centrality was more symbolic than practical. But Husseini argued, and apparently also believed, that the Zionist movement wanted to control Jerusalem and especially the Temple Mount. Political moves and demographic processes led many in the Palestinian public to adopt his approach. They were not indifferent to the gradual strengthening of the Jewish Yishuv in Jerusalem while the Arab population were becoming a minority in the city, and they were aware of Zionist attempts at the beginning of the mandate period to purchase the square in front of the Western Wall (al-Buraq, in Arabic, after the miraculous horse that took the Prophet from Arabia to Jerusalem and had awaited him near this wall until he descended from heaven). The Jewish struggle to change the status quo in that square, attempts to erect a divider between men and women, to set up benches for seating, and to blow the shofar beside the Western Wall, all of which increased the tension around the holy plaza, impacting on Arab awareness not less than the economic advantage gained from Jewish migration to the city.2 Indeed, it is not by chance that the bloody attacks on the Jews of Hebron, Safed, and other places in the summer of 1929 began after rumors spread that Jews were murdering Muslims in Jerusalem and were attempting to take over the mosques.
The belief that the Jews were acting to destroy the Temple Mount/al-Haram mosques has been a fundamental element in the Islamist discourse ever since the days of the mufti. Even today the Islamic movement in Israel, headed by Sheikh Ra’ed Sallah, mobilizes the Arab public under the banner “al-Aqsa is in danger.” Arab suspicion has been more than a figment of the imagination: radical Jews organized in order to harm the Temple Mount mosques in the early 1930s (the plan was aborted by the Haganah) and such activity has continued until the latest plan – reported before the Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip (2005).3 Islamic spokesmen note that not only does the extremist-religious periphery favor destruction of the mosques and construction of the third temple, but so do more central elements in Israeli society.4 Archeological excavations in close proximity to the Temple Mount Square, undertaken by the state under the patronage of Jewish East Jerusalem settlers; the opening of the Western Wall tunnel in September 1996; state budgets allocated to associations preparing holy objects in anticipation of building the third temple; the archeological excavations at the Mughrabi Gate that began in 2007; and other activities of a similar nature prove, according to the Islamist perception, that the Israeli establishment too is involved in the attempt to take control of the holy mount.
With their roots in the mandatory period, these feelings served then to reinforce the status of the city as a symbol of Palestinian nationalism. However, at the same time the city began losing its status as a focus of nationalist activity. There were material historical reasons for that. First, during the Palestinian Arab Revolt in 1936–39, it was the villagers who carried the rebellion forward. Members of the well-to-do urban families, including the Jerusalem elite took almost no active part in the rebellion. This meant that the nationalist activity and the prestige accruing from it relocated to rural locales. An additional factor in the decreasing centrality of the city in Palestinian politics then was the flight of the mufti Hajj Amin from the city in October 1937, for fear of arrest by the British.
It would be hard to exaggerate the importance of that event. From 1937 to 1948 the mufti wandered, together with other members of the Higher Arab Committee, between Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Nazi Germany, and Egypt, and the Palestinian political center wandered with them. While the avowed aspiration of the exiled leadership was to set up a Palestinian state in the entire area of Mandatory Palestine, whose capital was Jerusalem, it was acting from outside the city, and Jerusalem lost its standing as a leading political center. The absence of the national institutions from the country had a negative influence on the functioning of the national movement in the 1948 war, including in the holy city.
Capital-in-Waiting 1948–67
The Palestinians in 1948 were like a flock of sheep without a shepherd. The national leadership was in Cairo with limited freedom of movement and even more limited funds. Those leaders still inside Palestine lacked authority and means and left their cities along with the rest of the inhabitants, sometimes even before the others. The leadership crisis was one of the important causes of defeat. Around Jerusalem, the loss entailed uprooting of the Arab villages that had been the rural hinterland west of the city. They had been the homes of several tens of thousands of people. Residents of the Arab neighborhoods in the western part of the city were also uprooted.5 The Arab side too had its gains, most important being the conquest of the entire Old City of Jerusalem and displacement of the inhabitants of the Jewish Quarter, but for the Palestinians these successes paled in comparison with the dimensions of their disaster. Still, the Palestinians continued to emphasize the symbolic status of the city even after their defeat was final. In September 1948, as the battle subsided, the Palestinian leadership declared the setting up of an “All Palestine Government,” with its temporary seat in Gaza, but Jerusalem was proclaimed the capital of the new Palestinian state. Here, then, is a neglected historical detail: in the modern era it was the Palestinians who were first to announce Jerusalem as their capital; the government of Israel took such a decision only on December 5, 1949. Probably because the Zionist leadership accepted the 1947 Partition plan, according to which Jerusalem was supposed to become corpus seperatum under UN administration.
However, the Palestinian declarative step too reveals the gap between the symbolic “Jerusalem, the capital of Palestine,” as opposed to reality. A Palestinian state did not arise in 1948, and the eastern part of the city came under Jordanian control. While the original residents of the eastern part of the city, in contrast to other Palestinians, became neither refugees nor a national minority in a Jewish state, they too experienced psychological and political crisis. Refugees from nearby villages settled in the city, including inside what had previously been Jewish neighborhoods (the Jewish Quarter, the Shimon Ha-Tzadik neighborhood in Sheikh Jarrah). The level of basic services – such as water and electricity – suffered, because until then they had been part of a joint network including the western neighborhoods. Moreover, from being part of a capital city, East Jerusalem became a border city of secondary importance. In parallel, the Jordanians entrenched Amman as their sole capital at the expense of Jerusalem, and in 1951, one year after annexing Jerusalem and the West Bank, they decided that government institutions in Jerusalem would no longer serve as independent main branches of the various ministries but would instead be subordinate to the offices in Amman.
Protests from Jerusalemites who believed that the Hashemites were seeking to suppress Palestinian national identity and undermine the political status of Jerusalem, were rejected outright. To sweeten the pill and to gain legitimacy from Palestinian Arabs for their rule of the West Bank, the Jordanians co-opted senior Palestinian leaders into the Hashemite bureaucracy. Some of those supported the Jordanian annexation policy.
Nonetheless, Palestinian nationalism continued to ferment beneath the surface. This erupted in the assassination of King Abdullah on July 20, 1951. On that day the king came to pray, as he did regularly on Fridays, in the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, when the assassin, Mustafa Shukri al-Ashu, a resident of the Sheikh Jarrah quarter, approached the king and shot him dead. The investigation revealed that one of his handlers had been Musa Abdullah al-Husseini, a member of the family of the Mufti. The investigation ended without all the details becoming known, but there is no doubt that the opposition to Jordanian policies on the part of nationalist Palestinians centered in Jerusalem had led to the attack.6
But the assassination was an exceptional occurrence. On the whole, those living in the West Bank and Jerusalem rarely acted against the Hashemite monarchy, even though the question of Palestinian identity and the relations between the two banks of the river Jordan remained open, and Palestinian demands for political representation did not abate. It would appear that the discrimination felt by the Palestinians (rightly or not), both in budgetary allocations and in decision-making, was one of the factors responsible for preserving Palestinian identity among Jerusalemites. In 1959 King Hussein tried to deal with the discontent of West Bank and Jerusalem residents concerning his policies by declaring Jerusalem the second capital of the kingdom. The municipality was given the title imana, a term that had previously been reserved only for Amman, and the king announced his intention to build a palace in the city. But these steps proved to be less than symbolic. The city did not receive special funds, its problems were not dealt with, and it was in no way treated as if it were a capital city. Continuing neglect led two years later to the collective resignation of the members of the Jordanian city’s municipal council.7
The founding convention of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in May–June 1964, in the Intercontinental Hotel in Jerusalem, symbolized not only the rebirth of institutionalized Palestinian nationalism but also the fact that the renewed nationalist movement continued to regard Jerusalem as its capital. While Ahmad Shuqayri, head of the PLO, under the auspices of the Arab League, was, for political reasons, not allowed to present territorial demands to Jordan, the founding of the organization aroused even more the nationalist-Palestinian feelings of West Bank residents.
At that time, the political demands of the Palestinians in the West Bank were not completely defined, but opposition to the Hashemite government and its policies toward the West Bank kept growing. In November 1966, after the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) reprisal action in the village of Samu’ in the southern Hebron hills, a wave of anti-Hashemite demonstrations began throughout the West Bank. It was only natural that Jerusalem became one of the centers of events. On Friday, November 25, after prayers at the al-Aqsa Mosque, huge demonstrations took place in town, both inside and outside the wall. Demonstrators fired gunshots towards policemen stationed at Damascus Gate. In one case, a soldier’s weapon was snatched, and the demonstrators began to shoot (fatally wounding other demonstrators). A total curfew was placed on the city until after the funerals. The Jordanian governor of Jerusalem placed an armed guard beside the PLO offices in Jerusalem and in Beit Hanina, ostensibly to defend their workers, but in reality to dissuade them from leading the demonstrations. Simultaneous assemblies and demonstrations took place in other cities in the West Bank, and events were led by national activists from Nablus and Jerusalem. A manifesto demanded, among other things, that Jordan institute full cooperation with the PLO and not obstruct the Palestinian fedayeen (combatants who are willing to sacrifice their lives, the common term for Palestinian militants at the time). 8 On the eve of the 1967 War, Jerusalem experienced another wave of stormy demonstrations. In his memoirs, the then governor of Jerusalem, Anwar al-Khatib, relates that Ahmad Shuqayri, chairman of the PLO, had come to Jerusalem for Friday prayers several days before the battles broke out and was immediately lifted on people’s shoulders as the masses shouted slogans in support of the PLO. At the end of the prayers, al-Khatib continues, someone in the congregation grabbed the microphone from the preacher and passed it over to Shuqayri who delivered an impassioned speech.9 Indeed, Jerusalem and al-Haram al-Sharif at its center were an important focus of Palestinian nationalism before the 1967 war. And among the city’s personages were more than a few who emphasized their Palestinian nationalism (for the most part within the framework of pan-Arabism).
Like many others, Shuqayri then believed that Arab armies would defeat Israel, and his hope was that the PLO, under his leadership, would take control of the liberated Palestinian land. But his hopes failed to materialize. In six days of fighting, the IDF succeeded in dealing a serious blow to the Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian armies and neutralized them, conquering wide areas in each of these countries. East Jerusalem was brought under full Israeli control, as were tens of thousands of the Arab residents who lived there.
Capital in the Making 1967–93
Israeli conquest of East Jerusalem occurred in the midst of a process of strengthening of Palestinian national identity among its inhabitants. However, at that time this identity was quite complicated and did not necessarily entail separation of the West Bank from the eastern one. That is one of the reasons that when the outstanding figures in the city re-established the Supreme Muslim Council in July 1967, their proclamation stated that “Arab Jerusalem is an inseparable part of Jordan.”10 True that there were also other reasons for this declaration: the understanding that the internal disagreements should be left for a time after the withdrawal of the IDF from the area; the assumption that from the standpoint of the international community, the demand to return the land to the previous authority was stronger than the demand to establish a new body; and the strong connections that existed between some of these figures and the Jordanian regime.
Setting up the Supreme Muslim Council was institutional expression of the struggle of residents of East Jerusalem against Israeli occupation and especially the Israeli decision of June 28, 1967 to extend Israeli law to East Jerusalem within its expanded boundari...
