Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 2025, ISBN: 978-965-217-468-0, 300 pages.

THE REPOPULATING OF ISRAELI JERUSALEM AND THE HOUSING OF ITS INHABITANTS, 1948-1967 [HEBREW]

The 1948 War ravaged Jerusalem. A year of fighting left the city defeated, dwindled, deprived – and divided. This book attempts to outline the subsequent repopulation of the Israeli sector of the city and the housing of its residents during the years leading up to the 1967 Six Day War – an arduous process challenged by a host of financial, logistical, social, political and security hurdles. 
A detailed introduction covering the spatial, legal, demographic, political and security framework in which Israeli Jerusalem grew and developed in the interwar period is followed by a chronological-thematic description of the four-step process through which its veteran and new residents were housed. Refugees, demobilized soldiers, civil servants and newly-arrived immigrants were settled in abandoned non-Jewish neighborhoods and villages on the city’s outskirts, hastily built transit camps and semi-permanent huts, and finally in new and permanent neighborhoods, mostly on the city’s western and southern outskirts. This utilization of the various housing solutions was usually linear, but proved difficult given the circumstances, especially the acute lack of capital, time and experience gained from a long tradition of city-building. The complex, even monumental, undertaking was ridden with delays and indecision but eventually more than doubled the city’s population and its built area. The residential map of Israeli Jerusalem on the eve of the watershed Six Day War was far from the result of typical and incremental development, based, as in other cities, on purely urban considerations; rather, it was a reflection of Israel’s hopes and anxieties regarding the city, as well as the tensions among its residents, among decision-making bureaucrats (elected and otherwise) and between both groups. Furthermore, it was the cumulated spatial expressions of political, public and financial capital held by various interest groups, from powerful state authorities to humble residents.

Eldad Brin is a post-doctorate research fellow at the University of Haifa.