Jerusalem

Najwan Darwish

1978–

Jerusalem poet and editor whose flat, sardonic lines refuse consolation — 'one of the foremost contemporary Arab poets,' in the New York Review of Books' phrase.

Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni

1908–1948

The most prominent Palestinian field commander of his generation, who fought in the 1936–39 rebellion, rebuilt the Army of the Holy War after the partition resolution, and was killed retaking al-Qastal on 8 April 1948.

Dimitri Baramki

1909–1984

Chief archaeologist of Mandate Palestine and excavator of Hisham's Palace at Jericho, who lost his country in 1948 and rebuilt his career in the museum of the American University of Beirut.

Edward W. Said

1935–2003

The Jerusalem-born critic whose Orientalism remade the study of empire, and who spent three decades arguing that Palestinians were owed what he called permission to narrate.

Faisal al-Husseini

1940–2001

Son of Abd al-Qadir al-Husseini, known as the Lion of Jerusalem — he built Orient House into the PLO's political address in the occupied city and defended its Arab identity until his death in 2001.

Kamal Boullata

1942–2019

A Jerusalem painter locked out of his city by the 1967 war, who built an abstraction out of Kufic script and the eight-pointed star, and wrote the first full history of Palestinian art.

Khalil al-Sakakini

1878–1953

Jerusalem teacher who built a school without grades or punishments, and kept a diary for forty-five years that is now one of the fullest private records of Palestinian life before 1948.

Sliman Mansour

1947–

Palestinian painter whose images of porters, peasants, and olive trees made him a founding figure of contemporary Palestinian art.

Tawfiq Canaan

1882–1964

Jerusalem physician who documented Palestinian folk life — amulets, saints' shrines, and popular medicine — in foundational works of early twentieth-century ethnography.

The Battle of al-Qastal

1948

Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni, commander of the Army of the Holy War, is killed retaking the village of al-Qastal on the Jerusalem road — a loss from which Palestinian irregular forces never recovered.

The Buraq Uprising

1929

A year-long dispute over access to al-Buraq — the Western Wall — erupted in August 1929 into violence that spread from Jerusalem to Hebron and Safed. The Shaw Commission counted 133 Jews and 116 Arabs killed; many of the Arab casualties, it found, were caused by rifle fire from the police and military.

Ibrahimi Mosque Massacre

1994

Israeli settler Baruch Goldstein guns down twenty-nine Palestinian worshippers at Hebron's Ibrahimi Mosque during Ramadan; the restrictions imposed in response fall on Palestinians and hollow out Hebron's Old City.

Jerusalem Made a Separate District

1872

Ottoman administrative reorganisation enlarged the district of Jerusalem and raised it to separate status reporting directly to Istanbul — drawing, decades before the Mandate, the outline of the territory that would be called Palestine.

Founding of the PLO

1964

The Palestine Liberation Organization is established in Jerusalem, creating an umbrella body that comes to represent Palestinians in exile and under occupation.

The Six-Day War

1967

Israel captures the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza, Sinai, and the Golan Heights in six days, beginning a military occupation that continues to this day.

The Unity Intifada and the May War on Gaza

2021

Protests over Sheikh Jarrah and raids on Al-Aqsa ignite a rare uprising across all of historic Palestine — and an eleven-day escalation in Gaza.

Armenian Ceramics of Jerusalem

A craft born from two catastrophes: Armenian genocide survivors brought to Jerusalem in 1919 to retile the Dome of the Rock, whose workshops became a Palestinian tradition.

Hebron Glass

The hand-blown glass of Hebron — blue, green, and amber vessels shaped for centuries in family factories beside the old city.

In Jerusalem

Mahmoud Darwish

Darwish walks the Old City from one epoch into another without a memory to guide him — a poem in which prophets share a history and the walker is left asking who he is.

Checkpoint

geography

Fixed or mobile Israeli military barriers where soldiers inspect Palestinian identity cards and permits, controlling movement between West Bank cities, into Israel and East Jerusalem, and along the separation barrier.

East Jerusalem

geography

The eastern part of Jerusalem, including the Old City and its holy sites, occupied by Israel in 1967 and unilaterally annexed in 1980 — an annexation not recognized internationally, with the UN Security Council and the International Court of Justice treating it as occupied Palestinian territory.

Identity Cards and the Permit Regime

society

The system of Israeli-controlled Palestinian identity cards and movement permits that determines where Palestinians may live, work, and travel, distinguishing West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem residents from one another and from citizens of Israel.

Judaization

history

The official Israeli policy — pursued explicitly and by that name in the Galilee and the Naqab, and in practice in Jerusalem — of increasing the Jewish population and landholding of a region while reducing the Palestinian share of both.

Naksa

history

The Naksa — Arabic for 'setback' — is the term used across the Arab world for the defeat of June 1967, when Israel occupied the West Bank including East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, and Syria's Golan Heights, and several hundred thousand Palestinians were newly displaced.

Al-Qabu

Jerusalem

Al-Qabu was a small hilltop village west of Jerusalem, its stone houses ringed by terraces of olives and grain. Captured in October 1948 during Operation Ha-Har, it was destroyed, and moshav Mevo Betar was later built on its lands.

Al-Walaja

Jerusalem

Al-Walaja, a terraced village of springs and olive groves west of Jerusalem, was emptied in October 1948 — but its people rebuilt on the fragment of their lands that fell on the West Bank side of the armistice line. Today the rebuilt village is hemmed in by settlements and nearly ringed by the separation barrier.

Dayr Ayyub

Ramla

Dayr Ayyub, a hamlet on the slopes above the Ramla–Jerusalem highway that revered the tomb of the prophet Job, changed hands repeatedly in the Latrun battles of 1948 and ended the war depopulated near the armistice line. No settlement was built on its lands; the eastern edge of Canada Park lies over the site.

Deir al-Hawa

Jerusalem

Deir al-Hawa was a tiny hamlet on a high ridge west of Jerusalem — sixty people in 1945, a mosque, and a shrine for a local sage. The Har'el Brigade captured it in October 1948 during Operation Ha-Har and it was obliterated; a Jewish National Fund park now spreads over its lands.

Deir Yassin

Jerusalem

Deir Yassin, a small village west of Jerusalem, was the site of the best-known massacre of the 1948 war, when Irgun and Lehi fighters killed more than a hundred villagers on 9 April 1948. Its name became shorthand for the terror that drove Palestinian flight.

Ein Karem

Jerusalem

Ein Karem, a spring-fed village in the Jerusalem hills venerated as the birthplace of John the Baptist, was the largest village of the Jerusalem district until its capture in July 1948. It survived the war with its houses intact — an emptied village that is now a picturesque Jerusalem neighborhood.

Lifta

Jerusalem

Lifta, at the western gateway to Jerusalem, was emptied of its roughly 3,000 residents in the first months of 1948. Its stone houses still stand in the valley below the highway, making it the most visibly surviving depopulated Palestinian village and a focus of return and preservation campaigns.

Al-Muharraqa

Gaza

Al-Muharraqa was a small barley-growing village east of Gaza whose lands had been waqf endowments for Jerusalem's Dome of the Rock. Raided with Kaufakha in late May 1948, its people were driven out, and in mid-August — during the second truce — Israeli forces mined and destroyed the village.

Qaluniyya

Jerusalem

Qaluniyya was a village on the Jerusalem–Jaffa highway whose name preserved the Roman Colonia founded on the ruins of Jewish Motza. Days after Deir Yassin, in April 1948, Haganah forces entered and blew up fifty of its houses; its ruins lie beside Motza, and Mevaseret Zion spreads over its lands.

Al-Qastal

Jerusalem

Al-Qastal was a tiny village on a commanding hill above the Jaffa–Jerusalem road. In April 1948 it became the pivot of the battle for Jerusalem: Palmach troops seized it during Operation Nachshon, and Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni, the best-known Palestinian commander of the war, was killed trying to win it back.

Qastina

Gaza

Qastina stood on the highway between al-Majdal and the Jerusalem–Jaffa road, its 890 people farming grain and citrus beside the British camp at Beer Tuvia. The Giv'ati Brigade seized it days after the first truce ended, in July 1948; Kiryat Malakhi and several settlements later rose on its lands.

Suba

Jerusalem

Suba stood on a conical hill above the Jerusalem–Tel Aviv road, its stone houses built among the ruins of a Crusader castle. Captured in July 1948 during Operation Danny, it survives as one of the more complete village ruins in the Jerusalem corridor, within a national park beside Kibbutz Tzova.

Yalo

Ramla

Yalo stood in the Latrun salient on the road from Ramla to Jerusalem until June 1967, when its people were expelled and the village bulldozed together with Imwas and Bayt Nuba. Its lands now lie inside Canada Park, planted over the ruins.

Yibna

Ramla

Yibna — biblical Jabneel, Roman Jamnia, seat of the Sanhedrin after Jerusalem's destruction — was a town of over five thousand with a station on the Gaza–Lydda railway and a mosque praised by medieval geographers. It fell in early June 1948 as Israeli forces pushed south; its mosque and shrine stand dilapidated beside modern Yavne.

Acre

Western Galilee coast

Acre — Akka — is the walled city that broke Napoleon: a Phoenician port, the Crusaders' last capital, and an Ottoman citadel-town whose Old City is a UNESCO World Heritage site. Most of its people were expelled in 1948; among its exiled children was Ghassan Kanafani.

Bethlehem

Bethlehem Governorate, West Bank

Bethlehem — Beit Lahm — carries a double weight: the birthplace of Jesus beneath the sixth-century Church of the Nativity, and a town pressed between settlements and the separation wall that now seals it off from Jerusalem, five miles away.

Dheisheh Camp

Bethlehem, West Bank

Established in 1949 on a third of a square kilometre south of Bethlehem, Dheisheh gathered the survivors of as many as 79 villages from six subdistricts — Hebron, Jerusalem, Ramla, Gaza, Bir al-Sabi' and Jaffa; Zakariyya, Bayt Nattif, Ras Abu Ammar, al-Walaja and al-Qabu among them — into one of the most politically formidable camps in Palestine.

Jerusalem

Jerusalem Governorate

Jerusalem — al-Quds — is the city Palestinians measure all distance from: holy to three faiths, capital in memory and aspiration, and since 1967 the hardest fault line of the conflict, from the walls of the Old City to the threatened homes of Sheikh Jarrah.

Nablus

Nablus Governorate, northern West Bank

Nablus — Roman Flavia Neapolis, nestled between Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal — is the northern West Bank's proud commercial heart, famed for its Old City, its olive-oil soap and its knafeh, and shadowed by Balata, the West Bank's most populous refugee camp.

Ramallah

Ramallah and al-Bireh Governorate, central West Bank

Ramallah, twin city of al-Bireh in the hills north of Jerusalem, grew from a sixteenth-century Christian village into the de facto administrative capital of Palestine — seat of the Authority, home of its cultural life, and the burial place of Mahmoud Darwish.

Tiberias

Sea of Galilee

Tiberias — Tabariyya — was sacred to Jews since the Sanhedrin sat by its shore, and Palestine's most evenly mixed city, until April 1948, when its entire Arab population was convoyed out in two days. The childhood town of Fayez Sayegh; most of its Ottoman old city was later demolished.

Yarmouk Camp

Damascus, Syria

Eight kilometres south of Damascus, Yarmouk was the capital of the Palestinian diaspora in Syria — its streets named for Haifa, Safad, Lubya and Jerusalem, home before 2011 to some 160,000 Palestinian refugees. The Syrian war emptied it — Al Jazeera counts some 160,000 forced to flee over its course — and those who stayed endured siege and starvation.

Criticism of Israel or Zionism is antisemitism

rhetoric

Antisemitism — hatred of Jews as Jews — is real and must be fought, but the lead drafter of the IHRA definition, Kenneth Stern, himself warns it was never meant to police political speech, and the Jerusalem Declaration, signed by hundreds of scholars of Jewish and Holocaust studies, states that evidence-based criticism of Israel, including comparisons to settler-colonialism or apartheid, is not in itself antisemitic.

Ghada Karmi

A Jerusalem childhood ended in April 1948: days after Deir Yassin, nine-year-old Ghada Karmi's family packed a few summer clothes and left their Qatamon home, believing they would be back within weeks.

Leila Giries

Eight years old when her family fled Ayn Karim on the western edge of Jerusalem in 1948; the family moved to the United States in 1958, and she now lives in a suburb of Los Angeles with the key to the house framed on her wall.

Sunbula

marketplace

A Jerusalem fair-trade nonprofit selling embroidery, basketry, and olive-wood crafts from artisan groups across Palestine — over $2.4M paid to artisans since 2010.

Eyad al-Hallaq

c. 1988–2020

Eyad al-Hallaq, 32, was shot dead by Israeli border police in Jerusalem's Old City while walking to the special-needs school where he studied and worked; he was cornered in a garbage shed and shot after his counselor's warnings that he was disabled — the officer who fired was charged with reckless manslaughter and acquitted in 2023.

The Al-Alami family

Jerusalem

Jerusalem muftis, mayors and men of letters — a family of Moroccan origin that managed its endowments and governed the city in Ottoman times, and in the twentieth century gave Palestine Sa'd al-Din al-Alami, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem for forty years, and Musa al-Alami of the Arab Development Society.

The Ansari family

Jerusalem

An old Jerusalem family of the Haram's custodians — the al-Danf Ansaris, who by family tradition descend from the Ansar of Medina and kept the waqf registers of their endowments; their sons include Sami al-Ansari, killed in the 1936 revolt and eulogized by Sakakini, and the historian Fahmi al-Ansari.

The Dajani family

Jerusalem / Jaffa

Guardians of the Nabi Daoud shrine on Mount Zion and twice Jerusalem's mayors, the Dajanis were among the city's wealthiest houses before 1948 — with a Jaffa branch that carried the name into the PLO.

The Husayni family

Jerusalem

Jerusalem's most famous notable dynasty — holders of the city's muftiate and mayoralty across generations, leaders of the Palestinian national movement under the Mandate, and chronic rivals of the Nashashibi clan.

The Jarallah family

Jerusalem

A Jerusalem house of religious learning — muftis, qadis, madrasa teachers and al-Aqsa preachers documented from the Mamluk period onward, their line culminating in Hussam al-Din Jarallah, who won the most votes in the 1921 mufti election, stepped aside under British pressure, and finally held the Jerusalem muftiate from 1948 until his death.

The Khalidi family

Jerusalem

Jerusalem's scholarly dynasty — judges, mayors, parliamentarians and librarians, keepers of the Khalidi Library on Bab al-Silsila Road, and ancestors of some of the best-known historians of modern Palestine.

The Khatib family

Jerusalem / Hebron

A 'prominent land-owning Hebron and East Jerusalemite family' that gave East Jerusalem two Jordanian-era mayors: Anwar al-Khatib, who governed the Old City for seventeen years, and Ruhi al-Khatib, who never accepted his dismissal by Israel and carried the title of mayor in exile until his death.

The Nashashibi family

Jerusalem

The other great house of Jerusalem — landowners and officials since the fifteenth century, and the Husaynis' rival and occasional partner for leadership of Palestinian politics under the Mandate.