East Jerusalem: The Myth of Benign Occupation Disintegrates

In the fall of 2015, Jerusalemwas gripped by a wave of violence,which subsequently spread to the rest of the occupied Palestinian territories, and led observers to wonder whether this might be the start of a third Palestinian intifada. As the moving force at Terrestrial Jerusalem, an Israeli nongovernmental organization exclusively devoted to the geopolitics of the holy city, legal expert Daniel Seidemann argues in this essay that it is the chronic trappings of occupation that have sustained the violence in Jerusalem for more than eighteen months. He points to the myriad ways in which Israeli rule in the occupied Arab part of the city is both dysfunctional and unsustainable and demonstrates that so long as official Israel continues to cling to the fig leaf of Jerusalem’s so-called reunification in 1967, there is no end in sight to the periodic and increasingly acute episodes of violence there.