West Jerusalem

So, you know, it's almost like the fate of the world is being held by people far, far from us.

Um, otherwise, it's held, it's held in, uh, West Jerusalem, [laughs] which is, which is very disturbing.

Um, but I think, I think, uh, I think Xi and Putin, and maybe, like, some of the BRICS members, I mean, Malaysia, countries that have become disturbed enough about what's happening that they are actually speaking out.

I mean, we even had the King of Jordan, right? Complaining, uh, that Israel was out of bounds and would never stop, and that's unusual for him.

The city line, Hakav Ha-Ironi, was a seven-kilometer segment of the Green Line dividing Jerusalem between Israel and Jordan from 1948 to 1967.

West Jerusalem, Israeli.

East Jerusalem, including the entire old city, Jordanian.

That's the shape of it.

That's a grudge with a Q.

The last person through was the American journalist Flora Lewis, shortly before the Six-Day War.

What about just living there, on either side? West Jerusalem neighborhoods along the line, Shmuel Hanavi, Mia Sherim, Musrara, Mamilla, Yemen Moshe, were considered dangerous.

They became slums.

The whole architecture is about holy sites, not statecraft, and the one party most invested in the holy sites keeps the lightest footprint.

So what happened to the plan? It was never implemented, rejected by Arab leaders, overtaken by the 1948 war which left West Jerusalem under Israel and East Jerusalem under Jordan.

Resolution 194 in December 1948 reaffirmed internationalization.

Resolution 303 in December 1949 reaffirmed it again.

Um, or perhaps the, the steel hitting the, the tracks.

ASLEF are, are balloting, I think, or are suggesting that they may go on strike, um, if, uh, a French, a Spanish company rather, um, which has previously been cited by the UN as having, uh, relationships with, uh, projects in, uh, occupied territories, including a, I think a light rail project in West Jerusalem, um, were to be agreed as, as one of the, the bidders in this project to replace, um, uh, train, uh, rolling stock in Scotland.

Uh, and of course, there's also in the, the pop world, Mr. Ed Sheeran having a, a huge backlash after, uh, his, uh, promoters and, uh, whoever's running his concerts, uh, dropped, uh, one of the support acts for making a pro-Palestinian statement at the beginning of, uh, a major conference.

Yeah.

Anyway, the reason I think from an urban perspective, it's particularly interesting is that when Chaim Jacobi talks about this, he really highlights this idea of what he calls mixed cities, which are very different from Israeli settler colonialism in these settlements.

And he talks about how there are many Palestinian Arabs who actually rent and buy in Jewish West Jerusalem and in places like Nazareth.

And there is an idea – you could imagine, even though it's very hard to imagine at the moment peace across that whole territory, you can imagine a binational shared city future.

And if we start from the urban and then work to the national, it might be more promising than thinking about where the state boundaries are, I think is the argument.

And it wasn't.

And we spent the first few days in West Jerusalem, which is occupied Jerusalem after the Six-Day War.

And it wasn't until day three that we actually went to the wall between East Jerusalem and West Jerusalem.

And like, it is wall to sky.

You don't see anything past the wall.

And so buildings are still constructed without permits.

The roads are so congested.

There is like two kilometers length of people waiting to get to West Jerusalem for no reason, because the checkpoint was just meant to be an inconvenience.

You know, when I walk down Salah al-Din Street, I feel like I'm in Jordan.

When I walk down Malchei Yisrael in Mea She'arim, I feel like I'm in Little Poland, and there's parts of West Jerusalem that feel like New York or Sydney, and it's all in one city, which is not such a big city as well.

And I share that poem because I know we're close to Yom Kippur, but I, I really want to wish all of our listeners who are listening to this podcast about finding our why that in some ways, whether travel is, is something that you do emotionally or in your mind, or travel is something that you do by going to other places, that it's not just seeing the place, but it's also seeing the people and hearing the stories, and asking other people what their why is, because I feel like sometimes there's no better way to find your why than having a sort of Martin Buber-like encounter with a stranger that you've never met before that can end up maybe changing your life.

Thank you again, Itai, and thank you to all of you out there who are listening and coming along for this journey with us.

[upbeat music] Let's go ahead and bring in our guests now.

Joining us from West Jerusalem is Mitchell Barak, founder of Kibon Research, Strategy and Communications, and a former aide to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the foreign ministry.

In occupied East Jerusalem, Adnan Jilani, director of the Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs.

And joining us from Washington, DC is Ambassador Marc Ginsberg, a former US diplomat who's worked on Arab-Israeli affairs.

All right.

Let's hear from Ambassador Ginsberg in Washington, DC.

I mean, do you think that, uh, Donald Trump can bridge these two different sides of, uh, Netanyahu that you're hearing here from Mitchell in West Jerusalem? That there is a public version and there's a sort of backside version where he's actually not rejecting that plan.

I, I really agree with Mitchell on this assessment.

Hanin Nayamna's doctoral work at LSE frames Arab Jerusalem as a state of in-betweenness, a frontier city of refugees located at the border with its lost homeland.

But she argues the municipality was a refugee institution that lost its town hall in West Jerusalem in 1948 and still actively built the city alongside residents, refugees, professional unions, local capital.

Palestinians reclaimed their right to the city under Jordanian rule.

So the