A racialized space: social engineering in Jerusalem

The Zionist project to remove or ‘transfer’ Palestinians from Palestine began but did not end in 1948; it continues to this very day. Since 1980, Jerusalem has been the central focus of the transfer process: the central hub of the project of coercively removing long-established Palestinian communities in order to make space for new Jewish arrivals. This paper examines the nature and mechanisms of this ongoing transfer from redrawing of boundaries and a system of checkpoints to the legal devices, complexities and manoeuvring employed to achieve the transfer of Palestinians, such as zoning, construction permits and even including documentation of the birth of a child. As the political, cultural and geographical core of the conflict between Zionism and the Palestinians, Jerusalem serves, in effect, as a kind of microcosm of the wider conflict.