The Phantom City

Salim Tamari

Talbiya, Baq�a, Qatamon, �Ayn Karim, Lifta - these and several other destroyed communities and deserted villages within Jerusalem�s Western neighborhoods seemed to have been overlooked by history. Most of them were occupied, resettled and eventually - in the case of �Ayn Karim, Lifta and Talbiya - gentrified by Jewish immigrants who came to Israel after the war of 1948. For fifty years now their memories have been kept alive thousands of Palestinians uprooted from their ancestral communities who have become refugees on the other side of the armistice lines, as well as in Amman, Beirut, Damascus and other distant Arab and foreign diasporas. One striking feature of this displacement is that (with the exception of the villages of Beit Safafa and Abu Ghosh) the Israeli military forces managed to accomplish a total transfer of the Arab Palestinian population from the Western suburbs and villages to the other side of the borders. John Rose, an Anglo-Armenian Jerusalemite who managed to stay on in Baq�a, provides one of the rare descriptions of what happened to these neighborhoods and of the fate of the few non-Jewish families who managed to stay in them (mostly Christians affiliated with nondenominational churches and convents). �By the end of 1948,� he wrote, �all unoccupied houses in the Arab suburbs had been totally vandalized and nothing was left in the way of worthwhile loot. Nerves were frayed and, as one observer said, �we were living as if it were in a concentration camp on the edge of a battlefield.� Rose continued to live in Baq�a for four years following the war, when�in 1952�he crossed over to what became known as East Jerusalem. His story is unique testimony coming from one of the few non-Jewish inhabitants who remained in the Western suburbs. In a parallel but much more limited process the Jewish community that inhabited the Old City was also relocated to the Western city after the war, thus ensuring that the armistice lines separating the two parts of the city were also the lines of an ethnic/national divide.

This book is an attempt to provide a reconstruction of this process of displacement and expulsion and to account for the fate of Arab Palestinians who lost not only their property and homes, but also a whole world that exemplified Jerusalem and Palestine before 1948. Current debates on Jerusalem have been so mystified by the nature of ideological claims put forth by Israelis, Palestinians and the world community, that we forgot that before the war there was an �ordinary� city called Jerusalem and that it was divided by communities, neighborhoods, ethnicities (of various nationalities), as well as by class. The religious identity of the city and its sacred geography has since permeated all our conception of the city to the detriment of understanding its worldly character. We have also come to think of it as an Eastern and Western City divided by nationally and united by the military might of Israel. These divisions are not drawn retroactively to define the contours of the city before the ruptures of war and even when we try to transcend them in an act of historical re-creation we are compelled to use them as analytical categories.

The pre-war Jerusalem that emerges from these portraits is one that is fundamentally unrecognizable today, a city of considerable sociable mobility, of ethnic diversity and of communal conflict that is tempered by a fair amount of mutual dependence and local solidarities. This particular combination of ethnic hybridity was exemplified in the coexistence of traditional, messianic and secular trends, lending a cosmopolitan character to the city under British colonial aegis. Nowhere is this cosmopolitan culture more evident than in the social and intellectual milieu of West Jerusalem life narrated in the diaries of the Qatamon essayist, Khalil Sakakini�Kadha Ana Ya Dunya (Jerusalem, 1958).

One gleans from such accounts of contemporary life in the 1930s and 1940s (Hodgkins, Said, Rose, H. Sakakini, Oz) and from the ethnographic contributions to this volume a picture of evolving and vibrant city whose life was cut short. In the first two chapters of this book, Davis uses archival material and oral histories to reconstruct the fabric of the city�s everyday life during the Ottoman and Mandate periods.

The dynamism of these communities contrasted visibly with earlier growths of the new city towards the North and Southwest. While the Palestinian Arab notables and ashraf had established manorial residencies in Sheikh Jarrah and Wadi al-Joz before the turn of the century, the Mandate economy gave rise to a new class of professionals, merchants and government civil servants. The Arab middle classes whose households benefited from the creation of a new bureaucratic apparatus in the capitol began to move in the late 1920s from the congestion of the Old City to the bourgeois suburbs of Qatamon, Talbiya and Baq�a.

These new Arab communities displayed several patterns of growth depending on a combination of family networks and their links with the Ottoman State and neighboring village communities. The three elements which combined to create these moves were government allocation of the state land (iqta�), family waqf and religious endowments (mostly Orthodox Christian property) to members of the denomination. These family-based housing schemes grew at the same time as Christian monastic; Jewish and Templer (German) communities began to establish themselves in the Western hills.

One of the earliest documented cases of Arab family neighborhoods was the emergence of the Nammari and Wa�ri quarters (ahya�) in upper and lower Baq�a. While more established families such as the Husseinis, Nashashibis and Khatib clans established their residences in the Northern neighborhoods, the Nammari clan had acquired land in the 1870s from villagers in Malha and Beit Jala. The Wa�ris, by contrast, had prevailed on the Ottoman Governor of Jerusalem to transfer state land in lower Baq�a, both lands being registered as family waqf. By the late 1920s the area had its own market (Suq al-Nammari) which served as a wholesale market for neighboring villages and a retail market for the local area.

Religious endowments and church properties brought in a second wave of suburbanization from the Old City, much of it involving Greek and Russian Orthodox properties in Musrara, the Russian Compound, Talbiya and Qatamon. Here we have a combination of families registering their own property as church endowment, to have it protected from encroachment by the state and of religious endowments bestowing long term leases and grants on their constituency.

By the early forties most of these suburbs were encroaching on the village properties of the Jerusalem hinterland. The residential expansion brought them into daily contact with two previously separate communities: the suburbanized and expanding villages�discussed in Tamari�s chapter�of Lifta, Malha, Deir Yasinand �Ayn Karimand modern Jewish settlements like Mekor Hayim, Yemin Moshe, Mea She�arim and Rahavia. The village economy was brought into the urban fabric of Jerusalem through the demand for skilled builders (stone masons and cutters), as well as for the quarries, which produced the famous Jerusalem stone. Village produce was now pouring into the city as a result of improved transportation: the Jaffa Jerusalem railroad (which went through the village of Battir), new bus lines and improved asphalt roads.

The �seam� of these communities (areas bordering and within Musrara, Romeima and Talbiya) constituted the beginnings of Arab-Jewish shared communities in which economic inter-dependence re-enforced social coexistence. Hadawi�s unique 1946 property map (which appears in this volume) indicating the ethnic mix of real estate holdings in the seam areas reflects these emerging realities. From this map one can see that ownership patterns still indicated a city largely divided by confessional and ethnic lines (it is still early to use the word �national� in this context), but that new mixed living areas were emerging.

While Arab secular historians tend to create a portrait exaggerated harmony between Arabs and Jews for the pre-1948 period (see for example �Aref al-�Aref, al-Mufassal fi Tarikh al-Quds; Muhammad Adib Al Amiry, Jerusalem)�Zionist historiography tends to suggest that the conflict is perennial and that the Jews, at best, were accorded the status of a protected (�dhimmi�) community under Ottoman and other Islamic rules. Quotidien relations at the turn of the century between the two communities, collected from contemporary testimonials and narrated here conform to neither version. Broadly speaking we can say that patterns of employment, investment and public spending by the Mandate authorities created new arenas of social integration. With the rise of cultural modernities and the globalization of European life-style this period also witnessed the beginning of �mixed� communities in middle class neighborhoods in Jaffa, Haifa and areas of Jerusalem such as Romeima, Shamma�, Sheikh Bader and Musrara. Militating against these trends however were the increasing diffusion of Zionist ideology among Jewish immigrants to Palestine and the rising tide of Arab Nationalist sentiment, undermining the confessional boundaries between Palestinian Christians and Muslims, while reinforcing them between Arabs and Jews. Many Jerusalem Jews, unlike the majority of their co-religionists in Hebron and Tiberius, were not Arabic speaking�an additional factor which was crucial in setting the two communities apart.

At the heart of the contestation of territory in Jerusalem was the issue of zoning laws and the delineation of the municipal boundaries during the mandate period. While Palestinian Arabs constituted a majority of the population in the Jerusalem District, Jews predominated within the municipal boundaries (for instance in 1947 there were 99.4 thousand Jews to 65.1 thousand Arabs). Reviewing the literature on the selective demographics of Mandate Jerusalem British historian Michael Dumper suggests two main reasons for these population discrepancies: first, estimates counted Jewish migrants who arrived in Jerusalem before 1946 and later moved to Tel Aviv and other localities; and second, they excluded Palestinians who were living in the rural periphery of the city but working in the city, (the daytime population such as the commuting workers from Lifta and Deir Yasin), while including Jewish residents living on the city�s periphery (e.g. Beit Vegan, Ramat Rahel, Mekor Haymin) who were incorporated into the municipal population through a process he refers to as �demographic gerrymandering.�

Administrative incorporation within the metropolitan area was not, however, the determining factor differentiating Arab and Jewish communities. Organizations of the Jewish Yishuv chose to establish some of their New Jerusalem suburbs within the Western and NorthWestern hinterlands inside the expanded boundaries of the city. This was the case with the �garden suburbs� such as Talpoit and Rehavia, designed by Richard Kaufman. Rochelle Davis, in her analysis of the evolution of these communities, discusses the organized character of the Jewish communities, in contrast of the unplanned and family-based nature of Arab suburbs.

Several works have narrated the course of the war that led to the tragedy of displacement from a Zionist and �to a far lesser extent�from a Palestinian Arab perspective. The publication of Bahjat Abu Gharbiyyeh�s war memoirs in 1993 has contributed in a modest way to rectify his imbalance. Nathen Krystall describes the military conquest of West Jerusalem, the consequences of war in terms of the de-Arabization of these communities and the subsequent dispersal of their inhabitants. An appendix of the book consists of the war diaries of Constantine Mavrides, a Greek resident of the city who witnessed the massive relocation of Jewish refugees from the Qatamon and Baq�a and the counter relocation of Jewish refugees from the Old City. The diaries, which include entries in Greek by the author from May 14, to December 30, 1948, (translated by Y. Tleel and introduced by Musa Budeiri), provide a unique �third party� perspective.

One major conceptual problem that has confronted the writers is how to avoid anachronistic and therefor potentially misleading terminology in designating the Arab communities being examined in these essays. The term �West Jerusalem� itself is very problematic since it uses a designation that was the result of border delineation based on 1948 war conditions. The suburban communities that were built West of the city in the 1920s and 1930s, in addition to villages like �Ayn Karim, Lifta or Mahla, had no particular existence outside their relationship to the Jerusalem urban administrative nexus at large and the network of economic webs that linked Jerusalem to Jaffa, Haifa and the rest of the country. Since we are dealing here primarily with the fate of these communities and their inhabitants, we decided to use the now common term, West Jerusalem, in its current, i.e. post 1948 boundaries of the city, to reconstruct these lost communities and asses the fate of their refugees and their properties.

A similar problem arises with the terms of ethnic identification: �Palestinians� in the Mandate period included both Jewish and Arab natives of the city. �Arab� was a designation that increasingly came to mean Christians and Muslims together, as opposed to Jewish Palestinians, who�especially after the 1936 rebellion and the massive migration from Europe�became identified, consciously or unconsciously with the Zionist movement. To complicate matters more there were a substantial number of Arabic speaking native Palestinian Jews�particularly in Tiberius, Safad and Hebron, but also in smaller numbers in Jaffa, Haifa and Jerusalem. There was also a sizable number of native Jerusalemites who were neither Jews nor Arabs, but definitely Palestinian. Those included the Armenians, Greeks, Syriacs and Ethiopians of the Old City and the German Templers of the New City. All of these were Jerusalemites and Palestinians in identity if not in citizenship and therefor it would not do to use the term in its exclusive contemporary connotation of �Palestinian Arab�. The solution to this dilemma in this book has been to use the term �Arab� to mean Christians and Muslim Jerusalemites who were Arabic speaking and to use denominational terms (Orthodox, Catholic, Muslim, Jewish, etc.) when applicable. Since confessional associations played a critical role in the expansion of the Western suburbs of the city it made sense to use these functional designations, although they might seen politically incorrect in today�s jargon. The main victims of these approximations are the non-Arab Palestinian minorities (such as Greeks and Armenians) who were subsumed in these ethnic categories.

The fiftieth anniversary commemorating the establishment of the estate of Israel and the dispersal of Palestinians from their homeland (al-nakba), has raised anew the debate about the causes and conditions of their exile. This monograph addresses in detail the atmosphere that preceded the war and the military operations that accompanied the dislocation of the Palestinian Arab communities from the Western suburbs and villages, as well as the relocation of the inhabitants of the Jewish quarter to Israel-held territory. It also addresses the question of land loss and property claims in light of the findings of the Palestinian Conciliation Commission (discussed here in essays by Rempel, Habash, Tuffakji and Jadallah). Many problems haunt any attempt at a systematic assessment of these property claims. West Jerusalem�s land titles were only partly recorded in the land registry since they were not all part of the land settlement survey that was initiated by the Ottomans in 1858 and continued (but not completed) by the British Mandate authorities, however, virtually all of these land claims can be documented from the land tax records and those records can be the basis for establishing the authenticity of these claims, where Tapu records are unobtainable. Salman Abu-Sitta, in his meticulous research on these records, provides a preliminary tabulation of theseproperties.

More difficult, however, is the process of tracing the fate of Jerusalem refugees and their location. The UNRWA registry has records for all Palestinian refugees who were eligible for relief services and who sought shelter in one of the five UNRWA field areas (West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria). Since a substantial number of West Jerusalem exiles were middle class refugees, many of them do not appear in these records. For this reason the figures below are probably an underestimate.

The Unified Registration System (URS) of UNRWA, the vast database of refugee registration, utilizes four categories of urban Jerusalem refugees and a fifth category of Jerusalem district refugees, by village. The urban categories are: �New City refugees�, �Jerusalem general� (i.e. unspecified), Jerusalem Poor� and �Jerusalem Old City�. The last two categories are Jerusalem residents whose livelihoods were affected by the war, but who were not displaced from Israeli territories. For purposes of tracing the fate of Jerusalem refugees the first two categories are the most crucial, as can be seen in the table below which shows the places of residence of refugees alive as of 1997 according to their place of origin:

The URS data, with all its limitations, shows that the bulk of the UNRWA-registered urban refugees from Jerusalem ended up living in the West Bank�most of whom have taken residences in East Jerusalem (and its suburbs), in Ramallah and in Bethlehem. Jordan contains the second largest number of urban refugees�almost half of the figure for the West Bank, with Gaza, Syria and Lebanon containing very few concentrations. These patterns, while expected, are drastically reversed for rural refugees.

URS data shows that while the global figure for UNRWA �registered Jerusalem rural refugees (and their offspring) is 110,439 (URS; May 1997), of those more than two-thirds (73,908 refugees) live today in Jordan and only 36,130 live in the West Bank. What does this mean?

Region, 1997

Source: Derived from UNRWA, relief and Social Services Dept. URS (Amman HQ) May 22, 1997 (includes New City and Unspecified Jerusalem categories; �Old City�, �Jerusalem Poor�, and villages excluded). The figures include refugees living today and their descendents.

First, it means that the majority of Jerusalem UNRWA-registered refugees stayed within the vicinity of their old homes. Particularly most urban refugees, who tend to be better off and with substantial documentation for their lost property, stayed within eyesight of their West Jerusalem properties. Secondly, it indicated that the poorer refugees from the villages in the Western hinterlands of Jerusalem�most of whom live in camps�followed UNRWA services to Jordan before 1967, when employment possibilities were more available in Amman, Irbid and Zarqa and after the war of 1967 when many Jerusalem refugees were apprehensive that UNRWA services would not be available in areas that came under Israeli rule.

These figures have great relevance and implication for future claims by Jerusalem refugees over their properties seized by Israel in the Western suburbs and villages. Since many exiles continue to live either in the annexed Eastern part of the city, or in its immediate vicinity�their claims for the return of their property (and residence) are particularly poignant since Israel has already established (and expanded several folds) Jewish private residences in the Old City (Jewish Quarter), in Silwan, Ras al-Amud, Neve Ta�coub, Atarot, Abu Tor, etc.�all areas in which Jews had some property and residence claims before 1948�and in more than a dozen newly established colonies in areas where no Jewish claims existed before. Palestinian claims for their properties in the Western city (and its rural hinterland) are fully substantiated, both in records derived from the land registry (whether in Tapu or land records), as well as in the records of the Palestine Conciliation Commission discusses here. The fact that Israel continues to claim the city to be united and indivisible, subject to the same administrative laws of the state, makes these claims all too obvious and their denial equally ludicrous.

Final status negotiations over the future of the city have created the atmosphere and the conditions for pressing these historical rights of Arab Jerusalemites to the forefront. The fact that most of these internal exiles are still alive, or have immediate offspring who are alive, renders their patrimony more present than historical. We hope that this small volume will throw some new light on their predicament half a century after their exile.