East Jerusalem

The 1948 war split Jerusalem in two: Israel held the western part, Jordan the eastern, including the walled Old City with the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and the Western Wall. In the June 1967 war Israel captured East Jerusalem, expanded the municipal boundaries deep into the West Bank, and applied its “law, jurisdiction and administration” to the area; in 1980 the Knesset’s Basic Law: Jerusalem declared “Jerusalem, complete and united” the capital of Israel. The UN Security Council responded in Resolution 478 (1980) by declaring the measure a violation of international law and calling on states to withdraw their diplomatic missions from the city.

The international legal position has been consistent since: East Jerusalem is occupied territory. The International Court of Justice’s 2004 advisory opinion on the separation barrier treated it as part of the Occupied Palestinian Territory to which the Fourth Geneva Convention applies, and Security Council Resolution 2334 (December 2016) reaffirmed that Israeli settlements there have “no legal validity” and constitute a flagrant violation of international law. Only a handful of states, led by the United States in 2018, have recognized Israeli sovereignty over the city or moved embassies to it; most maintain that its status must be settled in negotiations.

For its several hundred thousand Palestinian residents — a majority or near-majority of the city’s Palestinian population, most of whom hold Israeli “permanent residency” rather than citizenship and can lose that status — the dispute is daily life: building-permit restrictions, home demolitions, settlement enclaves in Palestinian neighborhoods, and periodic confrontations around the holy sites. Palestinians regard East Jerusalem as the capital of a future state; Israel regards the entire city as its eternal, undivided capital. Along with refugees, it was one of the “permanent status” issues the Oslo process deferred and never resolved.

Sources

• Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (Advisory Opinion, 2004) — International Court of Justice
• Security Council Adopts Resolution 2334 (2016) on Israeli Settlements — UN Press Release