Historical Synopsis

The available archeological and historical record suggests that humans first settled in the area of present-day Jerusalem during the fourth millennium BCE and, by approximately 3000 BCE, it came to be continuously inhabited.[i] Like much of the Levant, Jerusalem has experienced numerous local and foreign rulers through the ages and in the process absorbed a continuous procession of demographic and cultural influences.

Its subsequent religious significance and prominence in scripture notwithstanding, Jerusalem was in ancient times peripheral rather than central to the region’s political and socio-economic development; evidence that it ever served as a significant metropolis or imperial capital is notably absent. Rather, it, along with its surroundings, was continuously dominated by more powerful neighbors such as the Egyptians, Babylonians, and Assyrians, or incorporated into the realms of regional powers like Persia, Greece, and Rome.[ii]

Among the earliest to rule Jerusalem were the Jebusites, a Canaanite tribe who during their tenure gave their name to the city. In approximately 1000 BCE, Jebus, as it was then known, was conquered by the Israelites, who contemporary scholarship suggests also initially emerged from Canaanite stock. The Israelites would rule intermittently over the next several centuries, like their predecessors and successors, largely as vassals of more substantial powers.[iii] In a more enduring legacy they also laid the basis for Jerusalem’s centrality to the Jewish faith, out of whose womb Christianity would emerge. The latter would develop a similar devotion to the Holy City, on account of both its role in the Old Testament and prominence in the ministry of Jesus.

By the 7th century CE the population of Jerusalem, previously consisting of Jews and various polytheists collectively derived from an array of ethno-linguistic and tribal backgrounds, had become predominantly Christian under Byzantine rule. Rather than being the result of genocide or mass expulsion, conflict and migration played only a secondary role in this transformation; it primarily reflected the process of conversion to the new state religion and cultural assimilation by the local population.[iv]

A similar trajectory over the next several centuries resulted in the gradual Arabization and Islamization of Jerusalem’s inhabitants. While there had been an expanding Arab presence in the Levant since at least Roman times, Palestine experienced a further influx of peninsular Arabs after the Muslim conquest in 638 CE. However, it would be a mistake to conclude that the new arrivals displaced or outnumbered the native population, which gradually adopted their language and culture, and grafted these upon its own.[v]

As with their Jewish and Christian forebears, Muslims also venerated Jerusalem and assigned it sacred status. In the words of Walid Khalidi:

Because of the perception by Islam of an intimate kinship with Judaism and Christianity, much that is holy to Judaism and Christianity is holy to Islam as well. And much of that is centered in Jerusalem. In addition, Jerusalem is holy for purely Muslim reasons. Thus, for Islam, Jerusalem is thrice holy.[vi]

One can either accept that each of these religions claims a unique and privileged bond with the Holy City and recognize the importance of achieving coexistence and mutual understanding, or engage in polemics designed to demean and delegitimize the existence and aspirations of one community in order to promote the exclusivist ambitions of another. The Crusades, with their attendant bloodshed and destruction over a period of several centuries, are a powerful example of the latter.[vii]

With the defeat of the Crusades Jerusalem reverted to Muslim rule,[viii] which subsequently gave way to Ottoman control.[ix] During the latter era, which spanned more than four hundred years and ended only with the First World War, Jerusalem acquired many of its current geographic features. For example, the Old City’s iconic walls date from a massive mid-sixteenth century public works project sponsored by the Ottoman Sultan, Sulaiman the Magnificent, to rejuvenate the Holy City. During this prolonged historical period Jerusalem’s diverse inhabitants generally coexisted peacefully. Although concepts such as citizenship and equality before the law did not begin to make an appearance until the second half of the nineteenth century, governance and administration was highly decentralized. Ottoman subjects were classified according to their religious (and, where relevant, denominational) rather than ethnic or linguistic affiliation, and within this framework individual communities were granted significant autonomy, bearing responsibility for matters including taxation, education, public charity, faith, and dispute resolution.[x]

Growing competition over ownership, rights, and responsibilities with respect to religious sites in Jerusalem and Bethlehem, primarily between different Christian denominations and to a lesser extent between Christians, Jews, and Muslims, led the Ottoman authorities to attempt to codify the numerous and at times overlapping entitlements. A 1757 Ottoman edict (firman), which ratified existing rights and privileges without further defining them, proclaimed that none could be amended without the unanimous consent of interested parties. This laid the basis for what has come to be known as the Status Quo. Confirmed by a number of further edicts during the next century, and again in both the 1856 Treaty of Paris and 1878 Treaty of Berlin, it has persisted as convention and an international point of reference for Jerusalem to this very day.[xi]

Nineteenth-century Jerusalem was affected by a number of additional developments. These included significant population growth and urbanization, resulting from improvements in medical care, public hygiene, and infrastructure; geographic expansion into new neighborhoods outside the walls of the Old City (known as the New City); increasing efforts by European powers (particularly Great Britain, France and Russia) to acquire a recognized, formal role in the affairs of the Holy City; the development of Arab, Palestinian, and Turkish nationalism; and, towards the end of the century, the emergence of the Zionist movement and growth of European Jewish immigration. Seeking to strengthen its sovereignty and control, the Ottoman government administratively detached Jerusalem (and much of the remainder of Palestine) from the province of Syria into which it was previously incorporated and made it directly subordinate to Istanbul.[xii]

The abovementioned developments were accompanied by demographic changes. At the beginning of the nineteenth century Jerusalem’s population, even as it was consistently augmented by foreign religious pilgrims, consisted primarily of Ottoman subjects who were mainly Arab Muslim, along with their Arab Christian and Jewish neighbors, as well as Armenians, Ethiopians, and Greeks, who constituted the main non-Arab communities. By the end of the First World War this remained true for the Jerusalem district as a whole, while urban Jerusalem saw a substantial growth in its foreign Jewish population as a result of Zionist immigration.

The conclusion of the First World War brought about the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and replaced it with Franco-British domination of the Middle East. Various negotiations were conducted over the future status of the region, including both Palestine and Jerusalem; some of these effectively recognized the right to national self-determination of the existing population, while others, like the Balfour Declaration of 1917, were expressly designed to circumvent it. Also among the latter was the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement, which divided the Middle East between Britain, France, and Czarist Russia. Unable to reach agreement on the status of Jerusalem, they allotted it to an “international administration”, the form of which was to be decided on the basis of consultations with the victorious powers and the Arab leadership.[xiii]

In 1917, the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia and renounced this agreement as an illegitimate imperial venture, and Great Britain, which occupied Palestine at the conclusion of the Great War, outmaneuvered France to establish sole suzerainty over Jerusalem in the context of a League of Nations mandate. In what is broadly interpreted as a confirmation of the Status Quo, Article 13 of the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine endowed the Mandatory power with

All responsibility in connection with the Holy Places and religious buildings or sites in Palestine, including that of preserving existing rights and of securing free access to the Holy Places, religious buildings and sites and the free exercise of worship, while ensuring the requirements of public order and decorum […][xiv]

Article 14 called upon the Mandatory power to establish a “special commission” to “study, define and determine the rights and claims in connection with the Holy Places and the rights and claims relating to the different religious communities in Palestine.”[xv] That it was never implemented by the British reflects the enormous difficulties of translating the Status Quo into a detailed, consensual document.

During the Mandate (1923-1948) Great Britain actively promoted the ascendancy of the Zionist movement, which sought to transform Palestine into a Jewish state. In ensuing developments that in significant part reflected British decisions to exclude nearby Palestinian localities but incorporate more distant Jewish ones within the municipal boundaries of the city, Jewish immigrants, residing predominantly in the New City, would come to number more than half of the population of urban Jerusalem.[xvi]

In this context, religious sites, particularly in Jerusalem, acquired increasingly political and nationalist significance and symbolism. In 1929, for example, an attempt by Zionist militants to revise the Status Quo at the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount in their favor – the first of many in a process that continues to this day – provoked riots in which over 250 people were killed in the space of a week.[xvii]

Presaging such tensions, the British High Commissioner in Palestine’s first report to the League of Nations in 1925 had stated:

All the chief shrines sacred to Christendom are here; Islam sends pilgrims to mosques in Palestine which rank next only to the Kaaba at Mecca and the Tomb at Medina; there are spots round which are entwined the strongest affections of Judaism. The access to these places, their ownership and care, have given rise to controversies through the centuries. Local disputes have often caused disturbances; the support, given by great Powers, to one party or another, has been a factor in diplomacy, and sometimes a contributory cause of enmity and of war.[xviii]

[i] See, for example, Eric H. Cline, Jerusalem Besieged: From Ancient Canaan to Modern Israel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), p. 16; J.J. Franken, “Jerusalem in the Bronze Age, 3000-1000 BC”, in K.J. Asali (ed.), Jerusalem in History (New York: Olive Branch Press, 2000), pp. 11-41.

[iii] Beatty, op.cit. pp. 16-17.

[vi] Walid Khalidi, “Islam, The West, and Jerusalem”, Occasional Papers (Washington, DC, Georgetown University Center for Contemporary Arab Studies & Center for Muslim Christian Understanding, 1996), p.5.

[viii] See further Robert Hillenbrand and Sylvia Auld (eds.), Ayyubid Jerusalem: The Holy City in Context, 1187-1250 (London: Al-Tajir World of Islam Trust, 2009); Michael Burgoygne, Mamluk Jerusalem: An Architectural Study (London: Al-Tajir World of Islam Trust, 1987). See also, for example, Amnon Cohen, Economic Life in Ottoman Jerusalem (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Dror Ze’evi, An Ottoman Century: The District of Jerusalem in the 1600s (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996).

[ix] For a detailed study of Ottoman Jerusalem see, for example, Sylvia Auld and Robert Hillenbrand (eds), Ottoman Jerusalem: The Living City, 1517-1917, 2 vols. (London: Al-Tajir World of Islam Trust, 2000).

[x] See, for example, Donald P Little, “Jerusalem under the Ayyubids and Mamluks, 1197 – 1516 AD”, in Asali, op. cit., pp. 177-199; K J Asali, “Jerusalem under the Ottomans, 1516-1831 AD”, in Asali, op. cit., pp. 200-227.

[xi] The 1929 Cust Report, produced by the former British District Officer for Jerusalem, Archer Cust, who attempted to describe the historical background, practices, and privileges that collectively constitute the Status Quo. See L.G.A. Cust, The Status Quo in the Holy Places (with an Annex on The Status Quo in the Church of the Nativity, Bethlehem, by Abdullah Effendi Kardus) (Jerusalem: Printed for the Government of Palestine by His Majesty's Stationary Office, 1929). Available at: https://ecf.org.il/media_items/1486.

[xii] See, for example, Alexander Scholch, “Jerusalem in the 19th Century (1831-1917 AD), in Asali, op.cit., pp. 228-248. Among those establishing consular missions in Jerusalem during this period were Great Britain (1839), France and Prussia (1843), the United States (1844), the Austro-Hungarian Empire (1849), and Russia and Greece (1862).

[xiii] Martin Kramer, “Sykes-Picot and the Zionists”, The American Interest 19 May 2016. Available at: https://www.the-american-interest.com/2016/05/19/sykes-picot-and-the-zionists/.

[xiv] League of Nations, Mandate for Palestine together with a Note by The Secretary-General Relating to Its Application to the Territory Known As Trans-Jordan, Under the Provisions of Article 25. (London: His Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1922), p. 5. Available at: https://archive.org/stream/mandateforpalest00leaguoft#page/4/mode/2up.  

[xv] Ibid., p. 7.

[xvi] For further information on the demography of Jerusalem during the late Ottoman and British Mandatory periods, see Justin McCarthy, The Population of Palestine: Population History and Statistics of the Late Ottoman and the Mandate (New York, Columbia University Press, 1990).

[xvii] For a contemporaneous account by a visiting American journalist see Vincent Shean, “Holy Land 1929” in Khalidi, From Haven to Conquest, op. cit., pp. 273-301. The British authorities held a formal inquiry into the events (the Shaw Commission). See Secretary of State for the Colonies, Report of the Commission on the Palestine Disturbances of August, 1929 Cmd. 3530 (London: HMSO, 1930). Available at: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015066430987;view=1up;seq=7.

[xviii] Report of the High Commissioner on the Administration of Palestine (1920-1925). London, 1925 (Colonial No. 15), page 48. Cited in United Nations, Special Committee on Palestine, Official Records of the Second Session of the General Assembly: Supplement No. 11 (Report to the General Assembly, Volume 1) A/364 (3 September 1947) Available at: https://unispal.un.org/DPA/DPR/unispal.nsf/0/07175DE9FA2DE563852568D3006E10F3.

عن المؤلف

Mouin Rabbani joined IPS as Senior Fellow in 2008. He is an independent analyst, commentator and researcher specializing in Palestinian affairs, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the contemporary Middle East. He is Co-Editor of Jadaliyya, Contributing Editor of Middle East Report, Associate Fellow with the European Council on Foreign Relations, and Policy Advisor to Al-Shabaka —The Palestinian Policy Network. A graduate of Tufts University and Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Rabbani has published, presented and commented widely on Middle East issues, including for most major print, television and digital media.