In-depth: For Palestinians in Jerusalem, life is a labyrinthine system of Israeli subjugation – with the ultimate aim of forced displacement.
On Sunday, 1 December, 14-year-old Ayham Salaymah from Jerusalem was sentenced to a year in jail under the pretext of throwing stones at Israeli settlers, becoming Israel’s youngest-ever prisoner in the process.
While Israeli violence is the most pronounced in Gaza, the project of settler-colonial expansion has spared no Palestinian, wherever they may live.
In Jerusalem, Palestinians have faced increasingly draconian measures by the Israeli government both before, and during, the war on Gaza, which began in October 2023.
“You can tell it’s an existential issue, it’s an erasure and replacement campaign,” Adnan Barq, 24, from the Old City in Jerusalem, tells The New Arab.
“What we are witnessing in Palestine is different forms of ultra-violence.”
Centring Jerusalem
Following the occupation of East Jerusalem in 1967, the Israeli government officially ratified its formal annexation in 1980 under the Jerusalem Law, declaring the city its “undivided” capital.
This illegal move was unrecognised by the international community, including, until recently, by the US.
The Al-Aqsa Mosque compound and the Old City serve as some of the last remaining spaces in Jerusalem where Palestinian identity and culture are still visible and expressed.
Barq, who grew up in the Old City, says that the Aqsa compound has historically served not only as a religious sanctum but also as a playground, social gathering point, and public space for studying, celebrating, and grieving.
It has, however, witnessed a striking escalation of Israeli violence over the last few years.
“Things got toxic,” Barq told TNA, reflecting on his high school years in Jerusalem. “The police would beat us, the students, and then arrest us. I have friends that have lost their education because of these practices.”
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After the then US President Donald Trump declared Jerusalem the capital of Israel in December 2017, aggression towards Palestinians, who form roughly 40% of the population, only increased.
That same year, the Israeli government introduced the ‘Greater Jerusalem’ bill, which sought to change the demographics of the city by incorporating several West Bank settlements into Jerusalem’s Israeli municipal borders.
By 2018, the Israeli government established a new law for Jerusalem in which residencies for Palestinians could be revoked due to a “breach of allegiance” to the state. At the same time, Palestinians also risked revocation under other equally draconian measures, such as the “centre of life” law, in which a period of absence from the city can result in your residency being removed.
For Palestinians in Jerusalem, who were given the status of “permanent resident” rather than citizenship following Israel’s 1967 occupation, life is a labyrinthine system of subjugation at the best of times.
About 75% of Palestinians live below the Israeli poverty line compared to 26% of Jewish Israelis and there is systematic discrimination in the allocation of services such as education, roads, water, and sewage systems.
Only 13% of municipal land is designated for Palestinian residential purposes, with 87% allocated to Jewish neighbourhoods or green spaces.
These limitations in spatial access and the intentional deprivation of resources create a limited capacity for population development. While Palestinians constitute almost 40% of the city’s population, for example, municipal spending on Palestinian neighbourhoods is capped at just 10% of Jerusalem’s overall municipal budget.
In recent years, demolitions of Palestinian homes and infrastructure in Jerusalem have significantly increased and by August 2023 reached record highs.
 Since October 2023, Damascus Gate now resembles a military base full of border police and soldiers who racially profile Palestinians and subject them to strip searches, indefinite detention, and physical violence. [Getty] |
Just 24 years old, Adnan Barq has lived his entire life under an emboldened Israeli regime.
“What Israel has been doing is creating a coercive environment [in Jerusalem],” Barq explains. Yet despite the continued targeting of the Old City, it is wider East Jerusalem neighbourhoods that are facing the brunt of Israel’s depopulation campaign.
“The idea is that East Jerusalem offers a better infrastructure for expansion, the Old City is the Old City, no matter how creative you get, you can’t get the ‘New York’ look,” Barq explains.
“[The Israeli government] is now busy with places like Silwan, these neighbourhoods around the Old City are the priority because there is the expansionist Bell project,” he notes.
The Bell project is part of a broader set of Israeli urban planning and infrastructure initiatives focused on reshaping the city, including areas of East Jerusalem. Construction plans in mostly Palestinian areas often lead to demographic and political changes, reducing the Palestinian presence and reshaping the city’s identity to be more predominantly Jewish-Israeli.
As a result, more Palestinians have been coercively migrating from Jerusalem to areas such as Kafr Aqab, a town stranded in a no-man’s land behind Israel’s separation wall but officially part of Jerusalem’s Israeli municipal borders.
Other restrictions such as the denial of family reunification mean that Palestinians are bureaucratically obstructed from marrying outside of the city because their spouse cannot easily receive Israeli-issued permits to be in Jerusalem. Living outside the city, meanwhile, could lead to the possibility of your residency rights being revoked.
For Palestinians in Jerusalem, the last decade was punctuated by state-sponsored surveillance and violence, including judicial and diplomatic warfare.
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It is no accident that the Hamas-led offensive of October 2023 was dubbed ‘Toufan Al-Aqsa’ or ‘Al-Aqsa Flood’, a reference to the rise of settler and state violence against Palestinians in Jerusalem and increasing fears that Israel’s far-right government was agitating to change the status quo of the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound.
Months before 7 October, the Israeli minister of national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, began calling for ‘Operation Defensive Shield 2,’ a large-scale military operation in East Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank.
During the past year, meanwhile, the extremist minister has undertaken provocative visits to the Al-Aqsa compound and called to allow Jewish prayer, a move which drew widespread criticism.
Beyond Gaza: Jerusalem after 7 October
“In sum, what Israel is doing is displacing Palestinians by choice in that Palestinians are forced to leave Jerusalem – including the Old City,” Barq tells TNA.
As Israel focuses on expelling Palestinians from their homes in East Jerusalem via coercive bureaucracy, house demolitions, or systemic arrest campaigns, the Old City has witnessed an increase in daily harassment and violence from Israeli soldiers and settlers.
“In the last year, [Israeli forces] started to have new ways with us. Before 7 October, soldiers would commonly push their bodies against us and frisk us, sometimes hitting our knees,” Barq says.
“The post-October edition is not only one or two soldiers against you, but at least three where they push you against a wall and have a soldier come whisper in your ear sexual threats against us and our families. It’s an attempt to provoke a response so they can beat us.”
Since October 2023, the Old City in Jerusalem has been largely empty, save for Israeli forces and repeated incursions by armed settlers, which often turn violent.
Damascus Gate, which has historically been a gathering hub for Palestinian families, especially young people, now resembles a military base full of border police and soldiers who racially profile Palestinians and subject them to a series of strip searches, indefinite detention, and physical violence which can turn lethal.
Without any protection from state and settler violence, the Hamas attacks of 7 October saw Israel intensifying its harassment and repression of Palestinians in Jerusalem, in a bid to ultimately displace them from the city.
“Before 7 October, there was some leeway to try and argue for your rights when an Israeli soldier wants to beat you, or at least yell back,” Barq says. “Now, if you sneeze, you’re getting shot.”
 More Palestinians have been coercively migrating from Jerusalem to areas such as Kafr Aqab, a town stranded in a no-man’s land behind Israel’s separation wall but officially part of Jerusalem’s Israeli municipal borders. [Getty] |
Criminalising resistance
“Something that is creepy after 7 October is the way [Israeli forces] force you to unlock your phone,” Barq tells TNA. “The soldier/police would take the phone and put it towards your face to unlock and then go through the phone and open different applications and if they find anything related to resistance, or Hamas, even if it’s news, then they beat you up severely.”
According to Barq, young Palestinians aren’t always detained, but they are always beaten.
“Look at the process: you either open your phone and they look through it for ‘terrorist content’ and they beat you and possibly detain you, or you refuse to give your phone and you are beaten. Either way, prepare to be beaten,” he says.
In Jerusalem, daily life for Palestinians has become a series of obstacles at the most basic level. Just walking around the city risks the possibility of being targeted and attacked.
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The way Israel allows or justifies these measures is through what is known as the Counter-Terrorism Law, which was adopted by the Israeli Knesset in November 2016. However, in November 2023, just four weeks into the war on Gaza, the Israeli Knesset amended the law to criminalise the “systematic and continuous consumption” of materials associated with terrorist organisations, with individuals facing up to one year in prison.
Although the amendment is only applicable for two years, its key feature is the broad definition of terrorism and terrorist organisations, allowing enhanced penalties, procedural changes, and special police powers.
For Palestinians, this law has meant a rise in state-sponsored violence. “I have had a friend taken by soldiers in Jerusalem, and they found a photo that would constitute ‘terrorist’ materials, and the soldiers began to beat him. When a friend called his phone a soldier answered and said, ‘come get your friend’. But when he went, soldiers then began to beat him up, and the soldiers kept doing this.”
As a Palestinian from Jerusalem, Barq is no stranger to daily Israeli violence. But another group of Palestinians, living under a different form of Israeli rule, is also increasingly experiencing Israel’s ‘ultra-violence’ and coercive measures.
While Israel destroys Gaza with military force and continues to build settlements in the occupied West Bank, intending to annex it, Palestinians with Israeli citizenship have also become entangled in a violent relationship with a state that once forced them to live under military rule and now, especially since 7 October, has attempted to control every aspect of their daily life as citizens.
Mariam Barghouti is a writer and journalist based in the West Bank. She has been covering the region as a reporter and analyst for ten years, served as the senior Palestine correspondent for Mondoweiss, and is a member of the Marie Colvin Journalist Network.
