How do you sum up 55 years in the life of a city that was once divided?
Where do you start?
My starting point this time is the world of emotion and logic of the "founding father", David Ben-Gurion, in front of the sights of the union.
Five and a half decades after he wept in front of the Western Wall, much of his vision came true, but not all of it.
The old city wall, which Ben-Gurion proposed to remove as well, remained intact.
City patrons thought it was too important an architectural and symbolic monument to give up.
But the Mughrabi neighborhood at the foot of the Western Wall - the one whose people played a key role in narrowing the Jewish worshipers' feet there for many generations - is and its service buildings that were glued to the Western Wall were wiped off the face of the earth on the famous "Night of Bulldozers."
The narrow "Western Wall Alley", 28 meters long and 3.5 meters wide, has become a huge plaza, which today contains tens of thousands and sometimes hundreds of thousands of Jewish worshipers.
The Western Wall itself was exposed along its entire 488 meters - part above ground level and part only at its foundation level, and 144 meters of it were expropriated and registered as State of Israel property.
On the Temple Mount, Ben-Gurion refused to touch.
The man who forbade the defenders of the Jewish Quarter in 1948 to return fire to the Temple Mount - from which they were shot - was content with the Western Wall.
From a narrow alley to a huge prayer plaza.
The ruins of the Mughrabi neighborhood near the Western Wall // Photo: Dan Hadani Collection, National Library,
"Settle in barracks too."
From a distance of five and a half decades, the legacy of the "old man" in the field of settlement has also been largely fulfilled.
In those days, Ben-Gurion urged Prime Minister Levy Eshkol to quickly establish facts on the ground. "At any cost," Ben-Gurion said at the time, "Jews must be brought to East Jerusalem.
Tens of thousands of Jews need to be settled in a short time.
Jews will also agree to settle in East Jerusalem in barracks.
Do not wait for the construction of tidy neighborhoods.
The main thing is that there will be Jews there. "
The guiding principle, which became the "bible" of decision-makers in Israel, on the way to realizing the Ben-Gurion vision, was to take over a maximum area with a minimum Arab population. And east of the old boundaries of jurisdiction.The face of the capital, until that moment a divided, demarcated and limited edge city of three Hebrews - had changed beyond recognition.
Israel has established a chain of 12 Jewish neighborhoods in the new areas of Jerusalem, in which about 240,000 Jews currently live.
They constitute about forty percent of the population of East Jerusalem.
This is a tremendous
achievement, especially considering the widespread international opposition to the move, led by the US and Europe.
More, for example, one has to ask, did Israel really succeed in establishing its hold on all parts of a united Jerusalem? Did it really imitate the old borders and make it one city?
The battle has not yet been decided.
Let's start with the bottom line: despite the significant achievements, the battle for Jerusalem is far from over, neither in the urban-geographical area, nor in the settlement area, nor in the demographic area.
Nearly a quarter of a million Jews do live in parts of East Jerusalem, and even the Clinton outline recognized them as a critical mass.
Despite this, this impressive settlement enterprise has not yet decided the fate of the overall struggle for Jerusalem, mainly because Israel has given up settlement in its oldest and most significant symbolic historical nucleus - the Old City.
Only the Jewish Quarter is inhabited by Jews.
Israel avoided a similar settlement in the Muslim Quarter, although in the early twentieth century, before the riots, this quarter was called the Mixed Quarter and a century ago, no less than 5,000 Jews lived there, more than they are today in the Jewish Quarter.
According to data from the new Jerusalem Statistical Abstract published by the Jerusalem Institute for Policy Studies, there are currently only 3,240 Jews living in the Jewish Quarter, constituting only about one-tenth of the 31,130 residents of the Old City.
This is a historic miss.
As long as Jews do not live in all the districts of the Old City, it will be marked by research institutes, various contingency plans and various intermediaries - as indeed happens - as a divisible territory, and the Palestinians will believe that they have the power to return them.
The miss is even sharper because in the last decade - we discover here for the first time - about a quarter of the residents of the Old City (which in 2011 still numbered about 41,000 people) left it for neighborhoods outside the wall.
Most of the leavers were from the Muslim Quarter.
Between emotion and logic.
David Ben-Gurion and Haim Herzog in front of the Western Wall // Photo: Meir Freudelach,
Small outposts, strategic quality
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This error - the relinquishment of settlement in the Old City - is being corrected by the ideological, non-governmental outposts in other areas of Jerusalem that the state has skipped over.
Simultaneously with the construction of the 12 large neighborhoods by the state, a chain of small outposts was established, in which an estimated 3,500 Jews currently live. Apparently, this is a negligible minority, but it embodies a strategic settlement quality.
The settlement in Shimon the Righteous, for example, creates the much-needed continuum between Mount Scopus and the neighborhoods west of the city.
The non-governmental Jewish settlement on the Mount of Olives, coming to Ras El Amud, is valuable, as it creates for the first time a base of life and a real hold alongside the oldest, largest and most important Jewish cemetery in the world, the Mount of Olives.
Between 1948 and 1967, the Jordanians harassed Mt.
Similar things can be said about the Jewish settlement in the city of David, near the Shiloah spring, like a rainbow from the Western Wall and the Temple Mount.
There, settlement allows a grasp of the historical core from which Jerusalem developed, where it all began, and a tangible touch on history and archeology relevant to the history of the Jewish people in Jerusalem.
The ideological outposts also include the House of Lights on Mount Scopus, the View of Zion established near Jabal Mukaber;
A large residential complex in the Christian Quarter of the Old City near the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, and outposts in Kidmat Zion in the Abu Dis area, Beit Hanina, Abu Tor, Ba-Tur, in the Yemenite neighborhood of Silwan, and many dozens of other residences and Torah and Chesed institutions in the Muslim Quarter.
The decline in the Jewish majority was halted.
The situation is also mixed when examining the demographic balance between Jews and Arabs in Jerusalem.
Although Israel has maintained the Jewish majority in the city for 55 years, it has shrunk from 74% to only about 60%.
The demographic forecast of the "Master Plan for Transportation" predicts a decrease of only one percent more for the Jewish majority in 2040 (59%).
This curb is a new trend that stems from the fertility rate of Jewish women, which since 2012 is higher than the fertility rate of Arab women.
Despite this, the trend of increasing the Arab majority is not reversing and the Jewish majority is not growing again, mainly for one reason - a continuous negative migration balance: more Jews leave Jerusalem every year and fewer Jews come to live there.
A careful reading of the Jerusalem Institute for Policy Studies' yearbooks over the past 31 years reveals that about 530,000 people left Jerusalem over about three decades, but only about 323,000 came to live there.
This amazing figure - over half a million Jews leaving the city within three decades, mainly due to lack of apartments and jobs - explains everything: if only half of those leaving remained in Jerusalem, the demographic balance in favor of Jews would be much better and their share among the city would reach 70% .
(10% more than today).
And here is another significant figure that needs to be addressed urgently: about a third of the Arab population of East Jerusalem lives in the north of the city across the fence, in areas that were until recently neglected by Israeli authorities in every conceivable area: poverty, crime, drugs, terrorism, illegal weapons. Construction crime, physical infrastructure and services, areas of welfare and community and more.
In this wild east, which attracts more and more population from both Judea and Samaria and Jerusalem, there are now about a third of the west of East Jerusalem, about 140,000 people.
Against this background and against the background of the reduction in the Jewish majority, in recent years there have been proposals to deprive the Arab neighborhoods beyond the fence of Jerusalem, and to establish separate local councils for them, under Israeli sovereignty.
The benefit that can arise from such a move is twofold: both the rehabilitation and treatment of these neighborhoods in terms of budget, infrastructure and services, as well as a significant improvement in the demographic balance, for the benefit of the Jewish side.
These proposals, backed by Jerusalem Affairs Minister Zeev Elkin and signed by Ma'aleh, were not promoted and did not materialize.
Difficult, but possible.
A Jewish peddler and an Arab peddler in the Old City // Yoav Ari Dodkevitz,
Shares and mixes
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When examining lights and shadows in Jerusalem, one must also consider the relations of the Jews with the Arabs of the east of the city.
Until a few years ago, and to some extent even now, it was possible to talk about the textures of relations and cooperation between Jews and Arabs.
Along with the national and religious conflict over the city, the "wisdom of the masses" also created another reality, which expressed the understanding of the general public that alongside violence and terrorism in Jerusalem also revolves a life of reconciliation, sharing and interests, which often outweighs politics and controversy.
In the north of the city, across the fence, in horribly neglected areas, live about a third of the population of East Jerusalem - 140,000 people.
The proposals to deprive them of the city limits and establish separate councils for them under Israeli sovereignty - have not been promoted so far
After 55 years, the city is connected through common infrastructure systems, which are difficult and perhaps no longer possible to separate.
Services of varying levels are provided to all parts of the city: from roads to unified systems of water, electricity, sewage and telephone.
In Jerusalem's hospitals, Jewish and Arab doctors and nurses, serving both populations, work in Nablus.
Many of the drivers on Egged's transportation lines as well as the passengers on them are Arabs.
The Arab population in Jerusalem has integrated into the field of hotels and pharmacy and commerce.
The malls, supermarkets, retail chains and entertainment centers in the city are bustling with Jewish and Arab shoppers and sellers.
The reality of "mixing" existed until a few years ago also in the playgrounds and amusement parks at the seam line.
Arabs come to the zoo and Ein Yael.
Their children participate in summer camps held at these sites and more Jerusalem Arabs have in recent years applied for an Israeli identity card, registered for Israeli matriculation and even wanted to volunteer for national service and study at an academy in Israel.
The Jews visit East Jerusalem in lower numbers, but here too there is "mixing": the Old City, for all its quarters, has died for many years among many tourists and Jews, and within the walls there has even been cooperation in the fields of trade and tourism.
Sectoral neglect.
This reality, the least talked about, has existed for years, despite the most prominent Achilles' heel in Jewish relations with the Arab population - the great neglect of infrastructure and services in most East Jerusalem neighborhoods.
Although recent years have been marked by a sharp change - a government influx of billions in an attempt to reduce the huge gaps - the level of services and infrastructure in the east of the city still remains significantly lower than in the west of the city.
A detailed comparison of services for the two sectors will reveal gaps of hundreds and sometimes thousands of percent and significant deficiencies in basic infrastructure such as sidewalks, roads, sewer systems, lack of classrooms and kindergartens, playgrounds, public parks or garbage disposal.
Over the years, there have also been many shortcomings in the operation and enforcement of Israeli law and the actual implementation of Israeli sovereignty in East Jerusalem, from enforcing parking and peddling laws to coming to terms with widespread construction offenses.
The chaos that has dominated the planning and construction field in the east of the city for years stemmed, among other things, from the state's opposition to establishing a land settlement in this area, and to registering the landowners in an orderly manner.
This position changed a few years ago.
Recent years, years of terrorism, violence, religious extremism and waves of terrorist attacks, have weakened the fabric of unity and cooperation between Jews and Arabs.
Those that continue to exist are not characterized by reconciliation, as was the case in the past, and more than once we have witnessed, in the common workplaces, commerce and recreation, that once, not long ago, were several times calmer - to the effects of religious and national conflicts.
Were born into a different reality.
The many partition plans for Jerusalem, which have risen and fallen over the years by statesmen and researchers, have moved between two main poles: The first is a physical division with a border, which will re-separate the populations.
The second - a division of powers and sovereignty only, without a physical division of the city, where the two populations can continue to move in each region.
Alongside these discussions, a figure of great importance was completely missed: 90 percent of the Arabs of Jerusalem and 82 percent of the Jews do not even know the reality of a divided city.
They were born into the reality of one city, without borders.
This figure must be significant in terms of the possibility of turning the wheel backwards, which the Palestinians are striving for, and in relation to international claims to redistribute Jerusalem.
This figure also affects the attitudes of East Jerusalem residents, many of whom oppose the redistribution of the city, although many of them also hold national and religious aspirations.
The solution, if and when it arrives, will therefore not be able to be based on a redistribution of the city.
"Woe to a city that has no south, to a city that has no north / to a city that lost its eastern edge," wrote the poet Yitzhak Shalev before 1967,
To those days - it is forbidden to return any more.
Were we wrong?
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