Jerusalem, Israel Middle and Modern Ages
According to SHOPPINGPICKS, the city Jerusalem remained under the control of the Eastern Roman Empire until the Muslim expansion in the 7th century, to later be conquered in 1099 by the Christian armies that promoted the Crusades, creating the Kingdom of Jerusalem. After the disaster in the Horns of Hattin (1187), Saladin took the city again that same year and, except for a short interval of new Christian domination between 1228 and 1244, the crusaders did not retake the city.
After the Mamluk domination, the Ottoman Turks took control from the year 1517. The wall that surrounds the Old City today was built at the beginning of this period by Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent.
These walls have eight gates. Seven are open and one remains sealed. The four main gates – the Gate of Jaffa, of Damascus, of the Lions and the Gate of Zion – were built according to the four cardinal points, and are directed towards the main cities of the country.
The Golden Gate, the only one that is sealed, is called in Hebrew and Arabic the “Gate of Mercy.” According to Jewish tradition, through this gate the Messiah will enter Jerusalem.
Contemporary age
In the middle of the 19th century, Jerusalem began to expand outside the walls. In the 1860s, the first neighborhoods outside the walls, Mishkenot Shaananim and Imin Moshe, were founded with the donation of the philanthropist Moisés Montefiori. Montefiori had seven windmills built in the area – today there are only two – to encourage the residents to leave the walls and join the new neighborhoods. With the creation of the Zionist movement and the encouragement of Jewish migration at the turn of the century, Jerusalem expanded even further. In 1925 the Hebrew University of Jerusalem was founded on Mount Scopus, with the inaugural lecture in German by Albert Einstein.
In 1917 the British armies deployed in Egypt, led by General Allenby, advanced along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea, after overcoming strong Turkish resistance in the framework of the First World War. After the contest, the League of Nations granted the territory to the United Kingdom as a Mandate. Jewish paramilitary groups demanded an independent Jewish state and the free entry of Jewish refugees from Europe Tension between British and Jews increased after the end of World War II, as the collaboration between Jews and British in the fight against the Nazis ended, and as the British restrictions on Jewish immigration, set out in the ” White Paper “, worsen. In 1946, the Etzel paramilitary group, led by Menahem Begin, blew up the British city offices at the King David Hotel in one of the largest attacks ever to occur in Palestine.
The British withdrew the 14 of maypole of 1948, although the territory was previously submitted to an approved by the General Assembly partition UN, the 29 of November of 1947, in which two states were established, one Arab and one Jewish, leaving the city of Jerusalem internationalized. The proposal was approved by the Jewish authorities but rejected by the Arab authorities. The partition was never carried out for real purposes, due to the civil confrontation that took place at that time, and the so-called Israeli War of Independence (1948), the city was divided in two: the western part was left on the Israeli side, while the eastern part remained in the hands of Jordan, including the Old City, but with the exception of an Israeli enclave on Mount Scopus, where the Hebrew University and Hadasa Hospital were located, institutions that suspended their activities in that area until after the Six Day War.
Resolution 303 of the UN General Assembly, of December 9, 1949, establishes that: “The city of Jerusalem will be established as a corpus separatum under a special international regime and will be administered by the United Nations.”
In East Jerusalem is the Old City, with the main religious sites of Christianity and Judaism – the Church of the Holy Sepulcher of the Christians and the Wailing Wall, the only remnant of the Second Temple of Jerusalem of the Jews – and Mount of the Temple or Esplanade of the Mosques, also a sacred place for Muslims, [8] located behind the wall in the place where the Temple of Solomon once stood, with the Dome of the Rock as one of the prominent places of the Islamic religion, for being considered the place from which Muhammad ascended to heaven.
In 1948, before the creation of the State of Israel, the New City had an area of 19.3 km², compared to 0.8 km 2 of the Old City. The Arab property in it was 40%, the Jewish 26.12% and the Christian communities 12.86%. Government and municipality properties were 2.9%, the rest (17.12%) corresponded to streets, highways and railways. As a result of the 1948 war, 84% of the modern city became part of the state of Israel. In those little more than 16 km 2, Arab ownership was 33.69% compared to 30% Jewish ownership.
Since 1967, the new municipality that emerged after the Six Day War extended the city limits by annexing Arab-owned lands from the rest of the West Bank.
Today the city is home to almost half a million Jewish residents, of which 180,000 are settlers in the East Jerusalem settlements. The Palestinian residents of the city number 200,000, the vast majority of whom at the time of the Israeli annexation of their territory refused to accept Israeli citizenship in exchange for swearing allegiance to the Jewish state, indicating the majority refusal to accept the Israeli sovereignty in the city. Today they live with the status of permanent residents, which does not guarantee them the same rights as if they had Israeli citizenship.
The status of Jerusalem remains one of the key points in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Capital of Israel
Israel proclaimed Jerusalem the capital of state in 1950, and installed there the seat of the presidential residence, the Israeli Parliament (Knesset), the Supreme Court and other administrative institutions. As the city had been divided between Israel and Jordan after the armistice of the Arab-Israeli war of 1948, this declaration of capitality only affected the western part of the city, which was the one administered by Israel. In the Six Day War (1967), Israel also conquered the eastern part of the city – called East Jerusalem.
He immediately segregated it from the West Bank and de facto annexed it to the rest of the municipality. In 1980, Israel encompassed both parts, east and west, in its national legislation, proclaiming it as its “eternal and indivisible capital” through the Jerusalem Law (July 1980). However, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 478 immediately thereafter, in August 1980, by which it declared the Israeli Jerusalem Law void and advised its member states to locate their embassies in Tel Avivas a measure of punishment for annexation.
Most, with the exception of the Netherlands and 12 Spanish-American countries, had already transferred their embassies to Tel Aviv before the resolution was approved. El Salvador announced on August 25, 2006 his transfer to Tel Aviv. Paraguay and Bolivia maintain theirs in the Jerusalem suburb of Mevasseret Zion. [9] As for the United States, its Congress passed a law in 1995 declaring that “Jerusalem must be recognized as the capital of the State of Israel; and the US Embassy in Israel must be established in Jerusalem no later than May 31, 1999. ” The transfer, however, has not yet been carried out.
