Jerusalem24 – Ask any Palestinian (or Israeli, for that matter) and Jerusalem is just that: Jerusalem. No East, no West. It is not and can never be divided.
And yet, the facts on the ground tell a very different story. The East was ripped away from the West, before being sloppily sown back to its other half two decades down the road. You can see it in the buildings, testament to urban development or willful neglect; in the differing levels of prosperity; in the language, in the markets; in the color of people’s IDs; yes, even in the (Israeli-imposed) sets of laws.
But Palestinian Jerusalemites were not always relegated to the east side of the city as they are today (although the efforts to encourage them to leave even this leftover portion of the city are still very much underway.)
“When we started this project our team asked the questions, what about West Jerusalem? What happened there? Why is it 99% Jewish today?”
Kate Rouhana is the founding director of Jerusalem Story, a website launched by the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies in Doha, Qatar, that shines a spotlight on the daily life of Palestinian Jerusalemites, and the nature and history of the unique, complex, and multi-dimensional city.
She shares with Jerusalem24 details of Jerusalem Story’s four-part West Side Story series, and how the project came to be.
Their Jerusalem
Up until 1947, Kate says, Jerusalem was “a multicultural, cosmopolitan city with many Palestinian neighborhoods in the western side.”
“What happened next in Jerusalem – in our story of Jerusalem specifically – was that Israel confiscated all the Arab properties and financial assets and began moving Jews into Arab homes,” says Kate. “Nearly 75,000 Palestinians in municipal Jerusalem and 40 western villages were never allowed to return.”
For these 75,000 Jerusalemites and their descendants, Jerusalem Story offers a platform “to tell the story of Palestinians of Jerusalem – by which we mean both [those] who live in Jerusalem and [those] who identify as Jerusalemite but live outside the city, whether by choice or because Israel has exiled them.”
The website – and the West Side Story project specifically – collects personal family stories and records that all contribute to documenting life in the city before 1947.
“In some cases, their family homes still stand there,” says Kate. “But today they are occupied by Jews and they can only go and look at them.”
Her Jerusalem
While she herself is Irish-American married to a Palestinian and her story differs greatly from those whose testimony enrich the website, Kate nevertheless has her own Jerusalem story to share.
“I lived in Jerusalem when it was the capital of the Palestinian West Bank and its hub,” she recalls. “I watched its gradual severance from its hinterland through draconian measures such as closures, checkpoints, the permit regime, and the separation wall.”
Kate spent years working as a researcher and as a journalist for the weekly English edition of Al-Fajr newspaper in Jerusalem. Even though “it seems really unbelievable today”, she and her husband would drive from Ramallah where they lived to Jerusalem every morning in only 15 minutes.
“In fact, we also used to drive from the Haifa area, where my husband’s family lives, to Nablus where he worked at An-Najah University – and we did that every morning as well.”
It was when Kate returned to Jerusalem from the US in 2000 and undertook a research study focusing on Palestinian lived realities in the city that she observed first-hand measures being put into place by Israel which would convert Jerusalem from an open city into a city closed to Palestinians who lived outside it.
“That really stayed with me,” she says. “I wanted to focus on this issue.”
Our Jerusalem
And that’s what Kate and the Jerusalem Story team are doing via the West Side Story series.
While they built on the work on many Palestinian institutions before them, the team also strive to build their own internal library of published work on the topic. And of course, there is plenty of field work involved.
“Our team includes Palestinian Jerusalemites who live in the city,” says Kate. “They are our eyes and ears on the ground and are linked to the communities still living in the city.”
After the website was launched in 2022, people even began approaching the team with their stories, including family photos and documentations, and asking them to publish their family stories. “This is the most exciting thing,” says Kate, “how Palestinian Jerusalemites come forward with family stories and treasures and trust us to tell these stories.”
And Kate continues to diligently pursue her calling from Boston, Massachusetts these days.
“It means a lot to me,” she says. “It seems to me that the world has no idea what’s going on, and I felt compelled to bring more attention to this dystopian situation.”
“Jerusalem is a city that is important to the whole world.”
Listen to the full interview on Vibes.
