One thread, every collection
Jerusalem
Al-Quds — the city Palestinians measure all distance from.
114 entries across 21 collections
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.
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.
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.
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.
'Allar
Jerusalem · 1948
'Allar was a village of 440 people on a mountain slope above a tributary of Wadi al-Sarar, with four shrines around it and an elementary school in it. It fell on 22 October 1948 during Operation Ha-Har. The domed school building is the one structure still standing on the site.
'Artuf
Jerusalem · 1948
'Artuf was a village of 350 people beside the Zionist settlement of Hartuv, whose Bulgarian settlers leased land to Arab cultivators — an arrangement mainstream Zionist organisations objected to. Mortared out on the night of 17–18 July 1948, its people walked three miles uphill to Dayr al-Hawa.
'Islin
Jerusalem · 1948
'Islin was a village of 260 people that had been abandoned in the 1870s and resettled around the turn of the century. Israeli troops mortared and took it on 17–18 July 1948, during Operation Dani. A Jewish National Fund plant nursery and an Egged bus repair yard now stand on the site.
Al-Maliha
Jerusalem · 1948
Al-Maliha was a village of 1,940 people five kilometres from Jerusalem, close enough to have become one of its suburbs. It emptied in two waves — after Deir Yassin in April 1948, then under direct attack in mid-July. Its houses, school and the mosque of 'Umar ibn al-Khattab are still standing inside West Jerusalem.
Al-Masmiyya al-Kabira
Gaza · 1948
Al-Masmiyya al-Kabira stood at the junction of the roads to al-Majdal, Ramla and Jerusalem, a village of 2,520 with two mosques, two schools, a clinic and a Thursday market that drew the whole district. It fell in July 1948 during Operation An-Far, in what the Israeli official history calls clearing operations in the brigade's rear. Both schools still stand — the girls' school deserted, the boys' school an Israeli army installation.
Al-Muharraqa
Gaza · 1948
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.
Al-Na'ani
Ramla · 1948
Al-Na'ani stood six kilometers from Ramla with a station on the Jaffa–Jerusalem railway beside it, 1,450 Muslims and twenty Christians, two mosques and an old well in the southwest quarter that gave the village its drinking water. The Giv'ati Brigade surrounded it on 14 May 1948 and took hostages against the surrender of its weapons; Benny Morris writes that many villagers stayed until 10 June, when they were probably ordered out or intimidated into leaving. The railway station is deserted.
Al-Qabu
Jerusalem · 1948
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-Qastal
Jerusalem · 1948
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.
Al-Qubab
Ramla · 1948
Al-Qubab — 'the domes,' for the dome-shaped hills it was built on — stood on the north side of the Ramla–Jerusalem highway, 1,980 people living from grain, vegetables, fruit and livestock. Accounts of its fall differ by three weeks: 15 May 1948 in the New York Times and in Morris, early June in the Israeli official history. In September it was one of fourteen villages Ben-Gurion sought permission to destroy; the school still stands.
Al-Walaja
Jerusalem · 1948
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.
Bayt 'Itab
Jerusalem · 1948
Bayt 'Itab was a village of 540 people on a rocky knoll seventeen kilometres west of Jerusalem, with a Crusader fortress in the middle of it and a large cavern running beneath the houses. In the 1850s it was the seat of the Lahham family, who controlled twenty-four villages. The Har'el Brigade took it on 21 October 1948.
Bayt Mahsir
Jerusalem · 1948
Bayt Mahsir held the ridge above Bab al-Wad, where the Jaffa–Jerusalem road begins to climb — 2,400 people in 1945, three schools, an olive press and flour mills. It took the Palmach three nights to take it in May 1948, and the village was levelled after it fell.
Bayt Naqquba
Jerusalem · 1948
Bayt Naqquba was a village of 240 people on a hill above the Jaffa–Jerusalem highway, taken early in April 1948 during Operation Nachshon. It is the one case among the depopulated villages where a new Arab village of the same name was later built nearby, and some of the refugees were allowed to live in it.
Dayr Aban
Jerusalem · 1948
Dayr Aban was a village of 2,100 people on a hillside west of Jerusalem, gathered around the crossing of five roads and the al-'Umari mosque. It was the first village taken in Operation Ha-Har, on the night of 19–20 October 1948; four Israeli localities, including Beyt Shemesh, stand on its land.
Dayr al-Shaykh
Jerusalem · 1948
Dayr al-Shaykh was a village of 220 people at the foot of Mt Shaykh Badr, with a railway station half a kilometre to the east and the shrine of al-Shaykh Sultan Badr at its heart. The Har'el Brigade took it around 21 October 1948. The shrine still stands, and is now an Israeli tourist site.
Dayr Ayyub
Ramla · 1948
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.
Dayr Rafat
Jerusalem · 1948
Dayr Rafat was a village of 430 people — a hundred of them Christians — grown up around a large monastery of the Latin Patriarchate. The Har'el Brigade overran it on 17–18 July 1948; most of the village was blown up in September, during the second truce. The monastery still owns the land.
Deir al-Hawa
Jerusalem · 1948
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 · 1948
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 · 1948
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.
Ishwa'
Jerusalem · 1948
Ishwa' was a village of 620 people on the Bayt Jibrin road, its mosque named for the prophet Joshua. British artillery shelled it in March 1948 and the residents were evacuated; the Har'el Brigade cleared it for good on 16 July. A soccer field now covers part of the site, with the fallen roofs of houses at its edge.
Kasla
Jerusalem · 1948
Kasla was a village of 280 people on a ridge above two deep wadis, watered by springs and keeping a shrine for a Shaykh Ahmad. The Har'el Brigade cleared it in mid-July 1948 during Operation Dani; Morris records that the villagers here had left earlier, fled under mortar fire, or were expelled.
Khirbat al-'Umur
Jerusalem · 1948
Khirbat al-'Umur was a village of 270 people on a small plateau twelve kilometres west of Jerusalem, built beside the ruin it was named for. The Har'el Brigade took it on 21 October 1948 during Operation Ha-Har. The spring of 'Ayn al-'Umur and the stone structure around it are still there.
Khirbat al-Lawz
Jerusalem · 1948
Khirbat al-Lawz was a village of 450 people on a ridge eleven kilometres west of Jerusalem, its vineyards, olives and almonds terraced down the slope below. The Har'el Brigade took it on 13–14 July 1948 and went on turning refugees back for months afterwards. The forest planted over it is dedicated to Moshe Dayan.
Lifta
Jerusalem · 1948
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.
Qaluniyya
Jerusalem · 1948
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.
Qastina
Gaza · 1948
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.
Ras Abu 'Ammar
Jerusalem · 1948
Ras Abu 'Ammar was a village of 620 people on a hill ringed on three sides by Wadi al-Sarar, watering its vines from ponds fed off the mountain top. The Har'el Brigade took it on 21 October 1948 during Operation Ha-Har. The two-room schoolhouse is still standing.
Sar'a
Jerusalem · 1948
Sar'a was a village of 340 people in three quarters on a white chalk hill, with the maqam of al-Nabi Samat on the slope to the south. Egyptian forces defended it; the Har'el Brigade's Fourth Battalion took it on 13–14 July 1948, in preparation for the attack on 'Artuf.
Saris
Jerusalem · 1948
Saris stood on a plateau above the Jaffa–Jerusalem highway, 560 people in 1945, close enough to the coast to see Ramla and Lydda from its edge. A Haganah force destroyed it in the middle of April 1948, at the end of Operation Nachshon; the settlement of Shoresh was inaugurated on its land the same year.
Sataf
Jerusalem · 1948
Sataf was a village of 540 people on a steep slope ten kilometres west of Jerusalem, watered by two springs and selling its produce in the city's markets. The Har'el Brigade attacked it on 13–14 July 1948. Its spring is now an Israeli tourist site and its terraces are still standing.
Suba
Jerusalem · 1948
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 · 1967
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 · 1948
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.
Jaffa to Jerusalem
Jaffa → Jerusalem
The old road from the sea to the holy city: out of Jaffa across the citrus plain to Ramle, up through the Latrun gap, into the defile at Bab al-Wad, and along the ridge to Jerusalem. Almost every place on it was emptied in 1948 or destroyed in 1967. This is the Atlas's depopulated villages put back into the order a traveller met them.
Jerusalem to Ramallah
Jerusalem → Ramallah
Just under thirteen kilometres in a straight line, up the spine of the northern Jerusalem hills. You pass Sheikh Jarrah, Shu'fat, Beit Hanina, ar-Ram, Qalandiya and Kufr 'Aqab before al-Bireh runs into Ramallah. Every one of those places is still there, and most of the road is now something to be got through rather than travelled.
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.
al-Bireh
Ramallah and al-Bireh Governorate, central West Bank
Ramallah's Muslim twin, at the top of the Jerusalem road — a Canaanite name meaning the wells, a Crusader church, 35,910 people in the 2007 census, and the Israeli Civil Administration's West Bank headquarters sitting on 1,422 dunums of its confiscated land.
ar-Ram
Jerusalem Governorate, West Bank
A town of 18,356 people on the Jerusalem–Ramallah road, cut from the city it was a suburb of by six kilometres of wall. ARIJ's field survey found that around 20,000 people had left ar-Ram since 2000 — more than the town's own recorded population.
Beit Hanina
Jerusalem Governorate, occupied East Jerusalem
The next town north of Shu'fat on the Ramallah road, and the one the wall divided by name: Beit Hanina inside the Israeli-declared municipal boundary, Beit Hanina al-Balad — the old village it grew out of — left on the other side of the barrier, six kilometres and a checkpoint away from its own fields.
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.
Kufr 'Aqab
Jerusalem Governorate, occupied East Jerusalem
The last Jerusalem address before Ramallah, and the clearest thing the wall ever said. All of Kufr 'Aqab lies inside the municipal boundary Israel declared in 1967; the barrier leaves 92 per cent of it outside. Building inspectors have not entered since 2005, and by 2012 the neighbourhood accounted for 83 per cent of all new construction in the whole city of Jerusalem.
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.
Qalandiya
Jerusalem Governorate, West Bank
One name, four things: a village of about a thousand people, a refugee camp of 16,344 registered refugees, an airport that was Jerusalem's and is now a military camp, and the busiest checkpoint in the West Bank. Ninety-eight per cent of the village's land is Area C; the wall isolates 59 per cent of it.
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.
Sheikh Jarrah
Occupied East Jerusalem
Two kilometres north of the Old City, on the road that becomes the road to Ramallah: the quarter of Jerusalem's Muslim notables, and the place where refugee families rehoused by Jordan and UNRWA in 1956 have been evicted a second time — under an Israeli law that lets Jews reclaim pre-1948 property in East Jerusalem while denying Palestinians the equivalent right inside Israel.
Shu'fat
Jerusalem Governorate, occupied East Jerusalem
A village on the ridge north of Jerusalem, on the Ramallah road, swept inside the municipal boundary Israel declared in 1967 — and then cut in half by the wall. Shu'fat holds the only refugee camp inside that boundary: 16,419 registered refugees on 0.203 square kilometres, holding Jerusalem residency, paying Jerusalem taxes, and crossing a checkpoint to reach the city they legally live in.
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.
Ghada Karmi
Qatamon, Jerusalem
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
Ayn Karim, Jerusalem
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.
Yacoub Odeh
Lifta, Jerusalem
An eight-year-old when Lifta was emptied in early 1948, he recalls fleeing with nothing but the clothes his family wore, certain they would be back the next day.
Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni
Commander of the Army of the Holy War, killed at al-Qastal in April 1948 · 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.
Adel Manna
Historian of Ottoman Palestine and of the Palestinians who remained · 1947–
Palestinian historian of Ottoman Palestine and of the Palestinians who were not expelled in 1948 — the minority whose survival inside Israel he was the first to write as a social history from within.
Aref al-Aref
Historian of the Nakba · 1892–1973
Ottoman officer, Siberian prisoner of war, Mandate district officer, mayor of Jerusalem — and the man who spent the years after 1948 interviewing survivors across the Arab world to write the six-volume Arabic history of the catastrophe he had watched happen.
Dimitri Baramki
Archaeologist · 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
Literary critic and public intellectual · 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
PLO Executive Committee member and head of Jerusalem affairs; founder of the Arab Studies Society at Orient House · 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.
Hind al-Husseini
Educator and founder of Dar al-Tifl al-Arabi · 1916–1994
The Jerusalem educator who opened her home to children displaced from Deir Yasin in 1948 and built that act of care into Dar al-Tifl al-Arabi.
Kamal Boullata
Painter and art historian · 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
Educator and diarist · 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.
Khalil Beidas
Novelist, translator and editor of al-Nafa'is · 1875–1949
The Nazareth schoolmaster who brought Pushkin and Tolstoy into Arabic, founded the magazine that carried a generation of Palestinian writing, was sentenced to death by the Ottomans and to fifteen years by the British — and lost his library and his manuscripts in 1948.
Najati Sidqi
Communist writer and translator · 1905–1979
The Jerusalem postal clerk who studied in Moscow, served two years in Acre and Jaffa prisons, was sent by the Comintern to Spain in 1936 to argue Franco's Moroccan troops out of the war, and broke with the party over the Nazi–Soviet pact.
Sliman Mansour
Painter · 1947–
Palestinian painter whose images of porters, peasants, and olive trees made him a founding figure of contemporary Palestinian art.
Tawfiq Canaan
Physician and ethnographer · 1882–1964
Jerusalem physician who documented Palestinian folk life — amulets, saints' shrines, and popular medicine — in foundational works of early twentieth-century ethnography.
Haydar Abd al-Shafi at Madrid: We Come to You From a Tortured Land
Haydar Abd al-Shafi
We come to you from a tortured land and a proud, though captive people, having been asked to negotiate with our occupiers, but leaving behind the children of the intifada, and a people under occupation and under curfew who enjoined us not to surrender or forget.
The Declaration of Independence, Algiers
Palestine National Council
The Palestine National Council hereby declares, in the Name of God and on behalf of the Palestinian Arab people, the establishment of the State of Palestine in the land of Palestine with its capital at Jerusalem.
The Army of the Holy War
al-Jihad al-Muqaddas · founded 1935 (reconstituted 1947)
The volunteer force that defended the Jerusalem corridor in the winter of 1947–48 — a few thousand villagers with rifles against an organised army. Its commander, Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni, was killed retaking al-Qastal on 8 April 1948; the road fell, and a day later Deir Yassin was massacred.
The Palestine Liberation Organization
PLO · founded 28 May 1964
Founded in Jerusalem in May 1964 by a Palestine National Council of 422 delegates, taken over by the guerrilla organisations in 1968–69, recognised by the Arab League in 1974 as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, and the body that declared the State of Palestine at Algiers in 1988.
The Abu Khdeir family
Shu'fat, Jerusalem · Documented in Shu'fat's own records; prominent since the 20th century
One of the principal hamayil of Shu'fat, the village on the ridge north of Jerusalem — named as such by the town's own services committee. In July 2014 two of its children, one from Shu'fat and one from Tampa, Florida, made the family's name known everywhere: Mohammed Abu Khdeir, sixteen, was seized near his home and burned alive; his cousin Tariq was beaten unconscious by Israeli police at a protest the next day.
The Al-Alami family
Jerusalem · 19th century to present
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 · 19th century to present
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 · 16th century to present
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 · 18th century to present
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 · 15th century to present
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 · Mamluk era to present
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 · 20th century
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 · Mamluk era to present
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.
Armenian Ceramics of Jerusalem
craft
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
craft
The hand-blown glass of Hebron — blue, green, and amber vessels shaped for centuries in family factories beside the old city.
Mawsim al-Nabi Musa
tradition
The week-long season of pilgrimage from Jerusalem to the shrine near Jericho — prayers, drums, banners and dancing — that became, under the Mandate, a Palestinian political gathering.
Sunbula
Fair trade from 25 artisan groups · Jerusalem
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.
Listed onMakers — this collection has no page per entry.
Centre of Life
legal
The test Israel's Interior Ministry applies to Palestinians of East Jerusalem, who hold permanent residency rather than citizenship: prove the city is the centre of your life, or lose your status in it. It is the mechanism behind the family story that ends 'they went abroad to study, and were not let back'.
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.
Calling Israel an apartheid state is a slander with no basis in law
legal
Apartheid is a defined crime, not an epithet. The Rome Statute, Article 7(2)(h), defines 'the crime of apartheid' as 'inhumane acts... committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.' Israel's own B'Tselem (January 2021), Human Rights Watch (April 2021) and Amnesty International (February 2022) each concluded that the definition is met, and on 19 July 2024 the International Court of Justice held that Israel's legislation and measures in the West Bank and East Jerusalem 'constitute a breach of Article 3 of CERD,' the article that condemns racial segregation and apartheid.
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.
The Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity — they always reject peace
history
The Palestine National Council accepted Security Council resolutions 242 and 338 and declared Palestinian statehood on 15 November 1988, an offer to settle on 22 per cent of historic Palestine; the Arab Peace Initiative of 28 March 2002 offered Israel, from every Arab state, an end to the conflict and 'normal relations' in exchange for withdrawal to the 1967 lines, a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital, and a 'just and agreed solution to the Palestine refugee problem in accordance with United Nations General Assembly resolution 194 (III).' Both stood unanswered. Meanwhile the settler population Israel maintains in the occupied territory reached about 465,000 in the West Bank and 230,000 in East Jerusalem by 2023.
Bearing Witness to the Israel-Gaza War — Lee Mordechai
Lee Mordechai, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
The continuously updated documentary record compiled by Israeli historian Lee Mordechai, running to over a thousand footnoted references to testimonies, video, investigations and reporting, with chapters including one on dehumanisation — now the founding document of a wider multi-contributor project, Witnessing the Gaza War.
Community Action Center — Al-Quds University, Jerusalem
Community Action Center (CAC), Al-Quds University
A Palestinian rights centre in the Old City of Jerusalem, created by Al-Quds University in 1999, with a legal services unit and open advice hours on residency, national insurance, and building and demolition files.
HaMoked — Center for the Defence of the Individual
HaMoked
A Jerusalem legal-aid organisation that takes individual Palestinian cases against the Israeli authorities — residency revocation, family unification, tracing detainees, house demolition, freedom of movement — and publishes the ministry data it extracts along the way.
Norwegian Refugee Council — Information, Counselling and Legal Assistance (ICLA), Palestine
Norwegian Refugee Council
NRC's legal-aid programme in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza: free information, counselling and representation on housing, land and property — demolition, eviction and confiscation orders, access restrictions, and documentation.
Yes, It Is Genocide — Amos Goldberg
Local Call / Mekomit, translated by Sol Salbe
The essay of April 2024 in which Amos Goldberg, a Holocaust and genocide researcher at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, wrote in Hebrew for an Israeli readership that what Israel is doing in Gaza is genocide.
The B'Tselem Video Archive
B'Tselem — The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories · film
Filmed documentation of the occupation gathered since 1989 and organised by channel — Gaza, East Jerusalem, minors, settler violence, Israeli forces — alongside statistics, testimonies, position papers and reports.
The G. Eric and Edith Matson Photograph Collection
Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington · photographic
Over 22,000 glass and film negatives and transparencies made by the American Colony Photo Department in Jerusalem and its successor firm, the majority depicting Palestine between 1898 and 1946 — with no known restrictions on publication.
Where this thread crosses others
Counted on records the two threads actually share, not on words they have in common.
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