Encyclopædias 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.footnote¹ 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.

Jerusalem’s former Deputy Mayor, Meron Benvenisti, has said of these monstrously extended city limits:

I’ve reached the point that when someone says ‘Jerusalem’ I am very cynical about it. This is a term that has been totally emptied of its content. Today there is no geographic concept called ‘Jerusalem’, and instead I suggest using a new term, ‘Jermudin’, which is the territory stretched from Jericho to Modi’in. Someone decided to rub the hills that have no connection to Jerusalem with holy oil, and today we need to deal with a ‘Jerusalem’ region, which is unmanageable and which is held by force.footnote²

But if the cityscape of Jerusalem has no decipherable urban logic, what rationality has shaped its growth? In Benvenisti’s 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.’footnote³ There is much to be said for this hypothesis; but we will have to begin a little earlier than that.

The history of the Old City probably starts around 1,500 bc, when a Canaanite community known as the Jebusites built the first walled fortifications, taking advantage of an elevated location amid fertile lands, raised above the coastal plain, and sited on the mountain aquifer. The walls would be rebuilt, torn down and built again countless times in the centuries that followed, as the city was conquered by the Jews under King David (c. 1,000 bc), followed by the Babylonians (c. 600 bc), the Persians (536 bc), Alexander the Great (333 bc), the Maccabees (164 bc), the Romans (63 bc), the Arabs, under Umar Ibn Al-Khattab (637 ad), the Crusaders (1099), Saladin (1187) and the Ottomans, under Sultan Selim (1517). In the course of this, it is said, King Solomon built the first Jewish temple in the city, Jesus was crucified here and the Prophet Mohammed ascended to heaven. The present walls were built in the 1530s, at the command of Suleiman the Magnificent, encompassing a square kilometre of narrow streets and alleyways. For the next three centuries or so, the life of the city persisted within the walls, only expanding beyond them in the latter part of the nineteenth century.

After the British conquered Jerusalem in December 1917, replacing the Ottomans as the imperial power in the region, the city was subject to more dramatic change. Intensified Jewish immigration raised the proportion of Jews in the British Mandate Palestine population from 10 to 40 per cent and brought Arab–Jewish relations to a nadir. Jerusalem was declared the capital of Mandate Palestine. Construction in the fast-expanding ‘New City’, outside the walls, proceeded apace: the Hebrew University on Mount Scopus (1925), the King David Hotel (1929), where the British administrative and military headquarters were located; the National Institutions House (1930), which lodged the Jewish Agency, the Jewish National Fund and the Jewish Foundation Fund; and modern residential quarters, such as the Jewish neighbourhood of Rehavya (1923) where Benjamin Netanyahu later grew up, and the Arab-Palestinian neighbourhood of Talbiyah (1920), from which Edward Said and his family fled in 1947. By the end of the Mandate period, Jerusalem’s population had risen to 160,000—around 100,000 Jews and 60,000 Palestinians—almost three times more than in 1922, and the New City enjoyed a modernized infrastructure of water, electricity and improved roads. But if Jerusalem’s administrative and political importance made it a locomotive of urban construction in Palestine, it also brought increasing turmoil. Official British estimates number the Arabs killed by security forces during the Great Revolt of 1936–39 in their thousands. In 1946, the Irgun blew up the King David Hotel, killing 91; in 1948, Palestinian militants blew up the National Institutions House, killing 12.

The un Partition Plan of November 1947 assigned 60 per cent of Palestine, including the coastal areas, to the minority population (‘the Jewish State’), and 40 per cent, including western Galilee, to the majority population (‘the Arab State’). Jerusalem was designated a Corpus Separatum, to be ruled by an international body. The Corpus Separatum concept, however, proved to be untranslatable into either Hebrew or Arabic. The Arab Higher Committee objected to the whole idea of the partition of Palestine, while control of Jerusalem—or at least part of it—was a strategic priority for the Zionist leadership under Ben-Gurion, which rejected any form of internationalization.footnote⁴ The un Plan therefore marked the outbreak of the 1948 War, resulting in the creation of the State of Israel and the expulsion of more than 700,000 Arab-Palestinians, the beginning of the ongoing Palestinian Nakba.