It is common for Palestinians from East Jerusalem to come to the West Bank for work and play. Their friends who live in the West Bank cannot visit them in Jerusalem unless they are given the rare permit from Israel, so East Jerusalemites who work in the West Bank are the main thread connecting Palestinians living on each side of the wall. Palestinians who hold a blue Jerusalem residency card experience the occupation differently from those who hold the green identity card of the Palestinian Authority. Yet, emphasizing the Jerusalem-versus-West Bank division of Palestinians ignores important similarities across the two communities.
The spate of violence over the past month has some wondering: why Jerusalem? Despite the "lone wolf" nature of some of the recent attacks – including the incident at Ammunition Hill, the assassination attempt of Yehuda Glick, and the barbaric killings at Har Nof – many have suggested that the East Jerusalem context, in particular, might be enabling the violence, including some of the most outspoken critics of Israeli policies. Further, some suggest that East Jerusalemites are in a far more desperate situation than their West Bank counterparts. A recent article paraphrases Ghassan Khatib, currently Vice President of Birzeit University, noting "that poverty, unemployment, addiction and many other socioeconomic plagues [are] far worse in East Jerusalem than in the West Bank." Add to that the recent tensions over access to the holy sites, the argument goes, and we shouldn't be surprised that Jerusalem is the epicenter of violence.
Yet, others are surprised that the current conflict has flared most violently in the holy city. After all, Palestinian residents of Jerusalem possess the coveted identity cards that allow them to live in the city that Palestinians view as their future capital. Unlike West Bank residents, they are able to work in Israel, travel freely throughout the country, and access some of the same benefits as Israeli citizens. Arab public opinion expert Shibley Telhami tweeted on October 25: "Those arguing new Intifada unlikely in WB [the West Bank] say WB has too much to lose. But Jerusalem Palestinians have most to lose and they are leading way."
Do East Jerusalemites have more or less to lose than their counterparts in the West Bank from continued violent resistance? First, it is important to clarify what it means to be from "East Jerusalem." Subsequently, a brief analysis suggests that the socioeconomic characteristics and standards of living of the two populations are more similar than we think. Thus, if East Jerusalemites have more to lose from a continued uprising, it is not because they face far greater economic costs than those in the West Bank. Instead, what they risk that West Bankers do not is losing the less tangible, but no less powerful, symbolic benefit of being able to reside in the city that Palestinians consider their ultimate capital.
Jerusalem's Palestinian Residents: Living Between Two Worlds
At the conclusion of the 1967 War, Israel took control of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, and the Golan Heights. While the rest of the West Bank has remained under military occupation, Israel annexed the Palestinian-majority area of East Jerusalem. Jordan had controlled East Jerusalem between 1948 and 1967, but after the war Israeli jurisdiction was extended over the city. The Palestinian population in East Jerusalem was (and is) permitted to apply for Israeli citizenship, but one condition for obtaining it is swearing allegiance to the Israeli state. It is estimated that between 3-5 percent of Palestinian residents of Jerusalem have Israeli citizenship, while the vast majority have been given permanent residency through the possession of special Jerusalem identity cards.
In the early 1990s, Israel began to implement a closure policy whereby West Bank Palestinians needed permits to enter East Jerusalem and could only do so through Israeli-controlled checkpoints. In 2000, the Second Intifada began, setting off a wave of suicide attacks inside Israeli territory. Israel began construction of the separation barrier to deter such attacks, dividing Israel and the West Bank. The barrier does not follow the “green line,” the 1949 armistice lines that had served as the de facto borders between Israel and the Palestinian Territories. Israeli settlements east of the green line (in the West Bank) were mostly included on the Israeli side of the barrier. On the other hand, in the Jerusalem area, some Palestinian neighborhoods that are within the municipal boundaries were left on the West Bank side of the wall. Thus, a number of official Jerusalem residents live on the West Bank side of the separation barrier in neighborhoods such as Kafr 'Aqab, Ras Khamis, and Shua'afat camp, effectively cut off from city services. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) collects data on Palestinians in both "J1", the Israeli-annexed parts of East Jerusalem, and "J2" the Jerusalem-area neighborhoods in the West Bank that were never annexed by Israel and thus come under Palestinian Authority control. According to a PCBS survey in 2010, 11% of those sampled who resided in "J2" nonetheless had Jerusalem identity cards.
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| Geographic Definitions of East Jerusalem. Source: Terrestrial Jerusalem, "Jerusalem Atlas." |
East Jerusalem and West Bank Compared
For good reason, most existing research has focused on comparing the living standards and opportunities of Israeli Arabs to their non-Arab counterparts. Similarly, the status of Palestinian residents of Jerusalem is often benchmarked against the status of Jewish residents of the city. Since East Jerusalemites do have residency claims in Israel, it is fitting to examine their opportunities and challenges in comparison to Jewish Israeli citizens. However, below I draw on multiple data sources to illustrate how socioeconomic outcomes compare between East Jerusalem Palestinians - who comprise about 300,200 in number as of 2012 - and West Bank Palestinians. This brief summary only paints a partial picture of an extraordinarily complex situation but, in broad terms, the two communities face a shared set of challenges.
Educational facilities and educational outcomes in East Jerusalem are often described as exceedingly poor. Existing research points to severe shortage of classrooms and substandard facilities for students in East Jerusalem. There is a lot of different data to contend with here, so the following may confuse more than clarify. The Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies (JIIS) 2013/2014 data reports similar average student-per-classroom rates (around 27-28) across Arab and Hebrew-language schools at the kindergarten, primary, and junior high school levels, however this appears to not include private schools. PCBS presents data on about 30,000 Palestinian students at the primary and secondary level living inside Jerusalem's municipal boundaries, of which 66% are in private schools. In private East Jerusalem schools, according to PCBS, the average student-teacher ratio is 19.3. The average number of students per classroom in these schools in East Jerusalem is 25.3. Yet, in 2012, Ir Amim and ACRI cite Jerusalem Education Administration data noting an average of 32 students per classroom in official elementary and high schools in East Jerusalem, compared to an average of 24-25 for West Jerusalem.
How do educational measures compare for those on the West Bank side? Palestinian students in "J2", the areas surrounding Jerusalem that were not formally annexed, are distributed more evenly across public, private, and UNRWA schools, but the majority (56%) are in government schools run by the Palestinian Authority. In government-run "J2" schools, the student-teacher ratio is 18.0. According to UNESCO data, the overall pupil-to-teacher ratio in lower secondary schools across the West Bank and Gaza is 20.9, but Gaza likely brings up the average. In PA-run "J2" schools, the average number of students per classroom is 24.5. These data suggest that classrooms and schools in both East Jerusalem and the West Bank may suffer from overcrowding. Of course, measuring students per classroom or teachers per student does not speak directly to the quality of education.
We also see similarities in terms of school completion. According to UNESCO statistics, dropout rates in lower secondary education in Palestine were around 13% in 2011, not including East Jerusalem. In East Jerusalem, Ir-Amim and ACRI report that the total dropout rate for all students was estimated at 13%, but the rates were higher when focusing exclusively on the secondary school-age population. For example, by 10th grade, an estimated 20% of children of the appropriate age were not enrolled in school. The PCBS reports an 11.1% dropout rate for 15- to 17-year-olds throughout the West Bank in 2011. Thus, this initial review suggests that dropout rates are indeed higher in East Jerusalem than the rest of the West Bank, but perhaps not by much.
Unemployment has historically been higher in the West Bank because Jerusalemites have the opportunity to work in either Israel or the West Bank, whereas West Bankers cannot work in Israel as easily, especially after the Second Intifada. In 2012, overall unemployment in the West Bank was 23.0%. While Israeli data does not disaggregate unemployment in Jerusalem between groups, unemployment rates are likely lower in Jerusalem. PCBS data shows that unemployment for the whole Jerusalem area, including non-annexed areas in the West Bank, was 17.6% as of 2013. However, part of the reason Jerusalemites are less likely to be unemployed is because they can access jobs in the West Bank. There are obvious costs to Jerusalemites working in the West Bank – i.e. the time, monetary, and even psychological costs of commuting to work each day. While the outcome is still better than being unemployed, it is worth noting that the marginal value of a given wage may be lower for a Jerusalem resident than a West Bank resident due to these costs. Those Jerusalem residents working in the city and Israel are concentrated in unskilled and low-wage (by Israeli standards) positions.
Median income in East Jerusalem is certainly higher than the rest of the West Bank, but so is the cost of living. A 2012 National Insurance Institute report, drawing on data from Israel Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) Expenditure Survey, finds that Arabs in Jersualem had the highest incidence of poverty of any population in Israel: an estimated 75% of both families and individuals are in poverty. (The group with the next highest poverty rates was Arabs in Haifa and the North.) In general, nearly 60% of Arabs in Israel were defined as poor before taxes and transfers, and 54% after taxes and transfers. This compares to 26% of Jews in poverty before taxes and transfers and 14% after. The poverty line for the Israeli study NIS 2,256/month, and the poverty numbers for East Jerusalem have been criticized as being inflated since prices there are quite a bit lower than elsewhere in the country. By comparison, the poverty line for the reference household in the West Bank (2 adults plus 3 children) in 2011 was 2,293 NIS according to the PCBS methodology, and only 17.8% of West Bankers are below the poverty line after receiving assistance (20.2% before) in 2011.
Beyond Material Grievances
Clearly, there are many reasons violence may be most acute in Jerusalem rather than the rest of the West Bank that are not captured in a quantitative comparison of living standards. First, one cannot ignore the religious and symbolic dimensions of the most recent upsurge in violence – dimensions which are especially accessible and salient for Jerusalemites.
Second, there are organizational factors at work that are exploiting grievances and opportunities for violence. Groups such as Hamas and PFLP (both of whose members have been implicated in recent attacks) may be assisting and inciting populations in Jerusalem more than the West Bank for any number of reasons. (One possibility is that they would rather face the Jerusalem police than Fatah-affiliated Palestinian security forces and/or the IDF in the West Bank.) Third, in the urban agglomeration of Jerusalem, Jewish and Arab residents are living side-by-side in a way that not even Israeli settlers and Palestinians in the West Bank are. This presents plenty of opportunities for friction and violence in civilian areas.
Finally, the conflict is, of course, interactive: Israel responds to Jerusalem violence by blocking entrances to Arab neighborhoods, demolishing houses, and increasing surveillance and patrolling. These responses may increase likelihood of future altercations, and these continued interactions may best explain why conflict in Jerusalem has been simmering continually, albeit with a recent spike, since the killing of 16-year-old Mohammed Abu Khdeir in July. As long-time Jerusalem analyst Daniel Seidemann recently pointed out to me (in Twitter-speak): "Israeli policies in E Jslm since [19]67 have been: buy 'em (carrot) break 'em (sticks). Both work temporarily, fail over time." Now, as we are deep in the midst of a sequence of actions and reactions in Jerusalem, Palestinian actions cannot be understood absent the context of Israeli government's response. However, it is notable that Palestinians in the West Bank – with the notable exception of the car attack at Gush Etzion earlier this month – have remained relatively nonviolent by comparison, following the October deaths of two young teenagers at protests in Beit Liqya and Silwad, respectively, and incidents of settler violence, such as the recent mosque burning outside Ramallah and the torching of a woman's home in the village of Khirbet Abu Falah. Yet the often overlooked similarities in the socioeconomic contexts of Jerusalem and the West Bank, and the continued interaction between populations on both sides of the wall, provide a constantly renewable source of solidarity across the divide. Thus, we should not be surprised if events in the West Bank follow the trend set by Jerusalem, for better or for worse, in the coming weeks and months.
Note: I am grateful to Daniel Seidemann for comments on an earlier version of this piece. I have made minor modifications to the section on citizenship opportunities for East Jerusalem residents and the discussions of poverty and education data upon his suggestion.
