Suchergebnisse

This article describes the progressive depopulation of the Arab neighborhoods of West Jerusalem following the outbreak of the fighting in late 1947. By the time the State of Israel was proclaimed on 15 May 1948, West Jerusalem already had fallen to Zionist forces. Quoting from eyewitness accounts, the author recounts the widespread looting that followed the Arab evacuation and the settlement of Jewish immigrants and Israeli government officials in the Arab houses. By the end of 1949, all of West Jerusalem's Arab neighborhoods had been settled by Israelis.

In writing the history of the Middle East there is one aspect that deserves special attention: the influence of the choice of source material on the writer's point of view. Does the choice of different types of sources—in our case Western as opposed to local sources—really dictate an altogether different view of the matter under discussion? Are all sources of equal value, or should we accord each of them a different place on the scale? In this article an attempt will be made to address this question through an examination of one particular topic—the history of women in 17th-century Jerusalem.

Encyclopedias of psychology cite a type of religious psychosis known as the Jerusalem Syndrome, which can be triggered by a visit to the city. Symptoms can include bellowing liturgical songs, delivering moralistic sermons and an intensified concern with cleanliness and ritual purity. Though similar reactions have been recorded at other holy cities, notably Rome and Mecca, Jerusalem holds the record for this psychopathology. From the point of view of any normal urban logic, however, the city itself appears crazier still. Its boundaries extend far beyond its core population centres, encompassing dozens of villages, barren hilltops, orchards and tracts of desert, as well as new-build suburbs with scant relation to the historical city; in the north, they stretch up, like a long middle finger, nearly to Ramallah, to take in the old Qalandia airport, some 10 kilometres from the Old City walls, and bulge down almost to Bethlehem in the south. But if the cityscape of Jerusalem has no decipherable urban logic, what rationality has shaped its growth? In Benvenistis view, it all started from the post-1967 municipal borders and the famous principle of maximum square kilometres of land and minimum number of Arabs. There is much to be said for this hypothesis; but we will have to begin a little earlier than that. Adapted from the source document.