Jerusalem Quarterly Issue 85

JQ 85 addresses four Israeli planning schemes in the Jerusalem area whose cumulative impact, while not biologically fatal, may spell the diminishment or death of Palestinian communities in Jerusalem and its environs. It address the history of urban gentrification plans: “The Catastrophe of Silicon Valley in Wadi al-Jawz”; “Gateway to the World”; and a briefing paper by the Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute (MAS) on Israeli zoning plans for East Jerusalem. This issue resumes JQs long tradition of examining biography as a window to the social history of Palestine, and presents three biographies: 1) a life and impact of Elias Nasrallah Haddad, an ethnographer who belonged to Tawfiq Canaan’s circle of folklore studies in the 1920s; 2) new light on Jabra Ibrahim Jabra’s layered identity (Arab-Syriac Palestinian); 3) and a political biography of the “Red Priest of Haifa,” the theologian-activist Rafiq Farah, who passed this year at the age of ninety-eight. Moreover, “The Gateway to the World: The Golden Age of Jerusalem Airport” follows the turbulent history of Qalandiya Airport from its inception as a British military airport in 1921 to its current fate as a “runway” for the Ramallah-Jerusalem bus company, and soon to be a launching pad for an extension to Atarot, the Israeli settlement southwest of Ramallah. In “Iron Caging the Palestinian Home: Child Home Arrest in Occupied East Jerusalem as Lawfare,” the concept of “unchilding” in the endemic practice of house arrest for children in the occupied territory is discussed.