Jerusalem

• 1. Introduction

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  Jerusalem sits on a plateau in the Judaean Mountains, about 60 kilometres east of the Mediterranean and 35 kilometres west of the Dead Sea. In that relatively modest stretch of highland, a city has been continuously contested, built, destroyed, and rebuilt across more than five thousand years. The numbers alone are staggering: destroyed at least twice, besieged 23 times, captured and recaptured 44 times, attacked 52 times. No other city on Earth carries a comparable ledger of violence and reverence in the same breath.

  What draws people back, century after century, is not just geography. Judaism has held Jerusalem sacred for roughly three thousand years. Christianity has revered it for around two thousand. Islam has counted it among its holiest cities for approximately fourteen hundred years. That layering of devotion inside a walled area of only 0.9 square kilometres makes the Old City one of the most concentrated religious landscapes in human history.

  And yet Jerusalem is also a twenty-first century city of nearly a million people, split by contested sovereignty, reshaped by demographic pressures, and wired into global technology networks. How a Bronze Age settlement beside a single spring became the most disputed address on the planet is a story that touches language, faith, conquest, law, and the competing claims of peoples who all regard the city as their own.

• 2. A Name Older Than History

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  The word Jerusalem is rooted in the Semitic verb meaning "to found" or "to lay a cornerstone," combined with the name of a Canaanite deity called Shalem. Shalem was the god of dusk in Canaanite religion, and his name shares the same three-letter root, S-L-M, from which the Hebrew word for peace, Shalom, derives, as well as the Arabic Salam. The city's name has therefore carried the resonance of peace inside it for at least three thousand years, even as the city itself was anything but.

  The earliest possible written reference comes from the Egyptian Execration Texts of roughly the 19th century BCE, which mention a place rendered in various transcriptions as Rušalimum or Urušalimum. A more secure early mention appears in the Amarna letters of Abdi-Heba from the 1330s BCE, which name a city called Urušalim. By the time the name appears in the Book of Joshua in its Hebrew form, Yerushalem or Yerushalayim, it already carried the dual ending that led some scholars to suggest the city originally sat on two hills.

  One of the earliest extra-biblical Hebrew inscriptions using the name Jerusalem was discovered in 1961 at Khirbet Beit Lei, near Beit Guvrin, and dated to the sixth or seventh century BCE. The inscription reads: "I am Yahweh thy God, I will accept the cities of Judah and I will redeem Jerusalem." A papyrus from the 7th century BCE contains an even earlier example. The -ayim ending, which marks the dual in Hebrew, appears on a column found about 3 kilometres west of ancient Jerusalem, dated to the first century BCE.

  Arabic arrived at a different path to holiness. The city was originally titled Bayt al-Maqdis, and today is most commonly known in Arabic as al-Quds, meaning "the holy" or "the holy sanctuary." Official Israeli policy requires both names to appear together in Arabic: Ūrušalīm-al-Quds. Palestinian Arab families from the city are often called Qudsi or Maqdasi, carrying the city's name as an identity rather than merely an address.

• 3. Conquest Upon Conquest

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  Settlement near the Gihon Spring dates to around 3000 BCE. By the 17th century BCE the city had grown into a fortified Canaanite town with walls protecting its water system. During the Late Bronze Age it became a vassal of ancient Egypt, as documented in those Amarna letters.

  King David's capture of Jerusalem from the Jebusites around 1000 BCE launched a new phase. David made the city the capital of the United Kingdom of Israel, and his son Solomon built the First Temple on the hill now called the Temple Mount. The kingdom split after Solomon's death, and Jerusalem became the capital of the smaller Kingdom of Judah until 586 BCE, when the Neo-Babylonian Empire destroyed the city, burned the Temple, and carried the Jewish population into exile.

  The Persian king Cyrus the Great reversed that catastrophe in 539 BCE, allowing the exiles to return and rebuild. Alexander the Great arrived in 332 BCE, bringing Hellenistic culture. A revolt by the Hasmoneans in 164 BCE briefly restored Jewish sovereignty. Then Pompey captured the city for Rome in 63 BCE.

  Herod the Great, a client king under Rome, transformed the Second Temple into one of the largest sanctuaries in the ancient world. Tensions between the Jewish population and Rome erupted into the First Jewish Revolt, and in 70 CE the Roman general Titus besieged and destroyed Jerusalem along with the Second Temple. The city was rebuilt as the Roman colony Aelia Capitolina, named for the emperor Hadrian and the deities of Rome, and Jews were banned from it following the Bar Kokhba revolt of 132-136 CE.

  Constantine the Great's support for Christianity in the Byzantine period drew pilgrims and sponsored the construction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. In 638 CE the Rashidun Caliphate took the city, and the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque were built under the Umayyad caliph Al-Walid in the decades that followed. The Crusaders seized the city in 1099. Saladin recaptured it in 1187. Ayyubid, Mamluk, and then Ottoman rule followed, until in 1517 Jerusalem entered the Ottoman Empire, where it would remain for four centuries.

  In 1538 Suleiman the Magnificent rebuilt the city walls for the last time. Those are the walls that still stand today, enclosing what we call the Old City.

• 4. Three Faiths in 0.9 Square Kilometres

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  The 2000 Statistical Yearbook of Jerusalem counted 1,204 synagogues, 158 churches, and 73 mosques within the city limits. That number gives some sense of the density of devotion packed into a relatively small urban area. Inside the Old City, the concentration is even more intense.

  For Judaism, Jerusalem has been the holiest city since David proclaimed it his capital in the 10th century BCE. The name appears in the Hebrew Bible 669 times. The Temple Mount, site of both the First and Second Temples, is the holiest location in Judaism. The Western Wall, a remnant of the wall surrounding the Second Temple, draws over 10 million visitors each year. Daily Jewish prayers are recited facing Jerusalem and the Temple Mount, and synagogues worldwide are built with the Holy Ark oriented toward the city.

  Christianity locates some of its most foundational events here. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is generally regarded as the most important church in Christendom, enclosing both the site of the crucifixion and Jesus's tomb. The Cenacle, the traditional site of the Last Supper, stands on Mount Zion. The church has been a pilgrimage site for around two thousand years.

  Islam holds Jerusalem as its third-holiest city, after Mecca and Medina. For approximately a year in the early period of the faith, Jerusalem was the qibla, the direction Muslims faced for prayer, before that was permanently shifted to the Kaaba in Mecca. The city's enduring centrality in Islam traces to Muhammad's Night Journey, described in the Quran's Surat al-Isra, in which Muhammad was miraculously transported from the Great Mosque of Mecca to the Temple Mount, then ascended to heaven. The Al-Aqsa Mosque was built on the Temple Mount under the Umayyad caliph Al-Walid to mark this tradition. Islamic tradition places this journey around 620-621 CE.

  The Temple Mount is simultaneously the holiest spot in Judaism and the third holiest site in Islam. That single overlapping geography has made it a continuous source of friction across centuries, a fact that no administrative arrangement has yet resolved.

• 5. Divided City, Contested Sovereignty

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  Under the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine, Jerusalem was to become a corpus separatum, an internationally administered territory under United Nations oversight, with a referendum after ten years to let residents decide its future. Neither outcome happened.

  During the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, West Jerusalem came under Israeli control while East Jerusalem, including the Old City, was occupied and annexed by Jordan. In December 1949, Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion declared West Jerusalem Israel's eternal capital, a position the United States opposed at the time, insisting that Israel's capital remain in Tel Aviv. On the 5th of December 1949, Ben-Gurion further clarified that only the war had compelled the government to seat itself in Tel Aviv, and that Jerusalem had always been and would always be the one capital of Israel.

  The Six-Day War of 1967 changed the physical reality. Israel captured East Jerusalem from Jordan and, on the 27th of June 1967, extended Israeli law and jurisdiction over it. The Jordanian waqf retained administrative control of the Temple Mount compound. In July 1980, Israel passed the Jerusalem Law as a Basic Law, declaring the city the "complete and united" capital of Israel. The United Nations Security Council responded with Resolution 478 on the 20th of August 1980, declaring the law a violation of international law and calling on states to withdraw their diplomatic representation from Jerusalem. Of the 24 countries that then had embassies in West Jerusalem, 22 relocated them to Tel Aviv. Costa Rica and El Salvador followed in 2006.

  On the 6th of December 2017, US President Donald Trump officially recognised Jerusalem as Israel's capital and announced the relocation of the American embassy. The US moved its embassy on the 14th of May 2018. A resolution condemning that decision was supported by all 14 other members of the UN Security Council but was vetoed by the United States. Today, five embassies, those of the United States, Guatemala, Honduras, Papua New Guinea, and Kosovo, are located within Jerusalem's city limits.

  The Oslo Accords deferred the final status of Jerusalem to negotiations. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has said that any agreement not including East Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital would be unacceptable. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has stated that Jerusalem will remain Israel's undivided capital. The Israeli government has built 12 settlements in East Jerusalem since 1967, with a population of around 220,000 Israeli Jewish settlers as of 2019, a presence the international community considers illegal under international law.

• 6. A Living City of a Million People

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  In 2020, Jerusalem's population reached 951,100. Jews comprised 570,100 of those residents, Muslims 353,800, Christians 16,300, and 10,800 were unclassified. The proportions have shifted across decades: in 1967 Jews accounted for 74% of the population, a figure that had dropped by roughly nine percentage points by 2006.

  Haredi, or Ultra-Orthodox, Jews make up a significant and growing share. In 2010-61% of all Jewish children in Jerusalem were enrolled in Haredi schools. The Haredi birth rate is high, and Haredi families have on average more children than secular or Arab families. Meanwhile, secular Jewish residents have left the city in notable numbers; some 20,000 departed over a seven-year period ending around 2012, and they now make up 31% of the population, roughly the same share as the Haredi community.

  Palestinians in East Jerusalem occupy a distinctive legal position. They hold residency status rather than citizenship, which entitles them to Israeli healthcare and social security benefits and the right to vote in municipal elections, but not in national elections. Jerusalem-born Palestinians who leave the city can lose their residency status, a constraint that shapes daily life. A poll conducted in 2011 by the Palestinian Centre for Public Opinion found that 39% of East Jerusalem Arab residents would prefer Israeli citizenship, while 31% opted for Palestinian citizenship.

  Urban development has long been uneven. Between 1996 and 2000, a World Bank report found that recorded building violations were four and a half times higher in Jewish neighbourhoods, but demolition orders were issued four times less often in West Jerusalem than in East Jerusalem. Since 1991, Palestinians who make up the majority in East Jerusalem have received only 30% of building permits. In East Jerusalem, 52% of the land has been excluded from development and 35% designated for Jewish settlements, leaving 13% for Palestinian use, almost all of which was already built upon.

  Poverty is acute: in 2011-37% of Jerusalem families lived below the poverty line, and by 2012 a report by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel found that 78% of Arabs in Jerusalem lived in poverty, up from 64% in 2006.

• 7. Old City, New Skyline

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  The Old City, enclosed within Suleiman's 16th-century walls, was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1981. It also sits on the List of World Heritage in Danger. Since 1860, Jerusalem has grown far beyond those walls, and since the 19th century the Old City has been conventionally divided into four quarters: Armenian, Christian, Jewish, and Muslim.

  The city's building regulations carry an unusual legacy from the British Mandate period: all construction must use Jerusalem stone, preserving a visual consistency across old and new districts alike. That rule is still in force. Industrial zoning is deliberately limited; only about 2.2% of Jerusalem's land is designated for industry and infrastructure, compared with double that in Tel Aviv and seven times that in Haifa.

  Jerusalem has traditionally had a low-rise skyline, with roughly 18 tall buildings concentrated in the downtown area when no clear policy existed. One of them, Holyland Tower 1, rises 32 stories and qualifies as a skyscraper by international standards. A new master plan envisions clusters of high-rise towers along Jaffa Road and King George Street. One proposed tower on King George Street, the Migdal Merkaz HaYekum, is planned at 65 stories. Near the entrance to the city, 12 towers of between 24 and 33 stories are planned as part of a complex that would include a new underground train station.

  In August 2015, the city council approved a 344-foot pyramid-shaped skyscraper designed by Daniel Libeskind and Yigal Levi, set to break ground by 2019. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, founded in 1925, counts Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud among its former Board of Governors members, and the university's associated library opened in 1892, over three decades before the university itself was established. Al-Quds University, founded in 1984, describes itself as the only Arab university in Jerusalem and operates a campus of 190,000 square metres in Abu Dis.

  In 2023, Israel opened EasTech, a technology park in East Jerusalem employing local Palestinian engineers in facilities shared with companies including AT&T, Nvidia, and Unity. The Jerusalem Light Rail began service in August 2011, and a high-speed rail line connecting Tel Aviv to Jerusalem became fully operational in 2019, reaching a new underground station 80 metres deep near the Central Bus Station.