Border disorder: On urban boundary work and crime in the divided city

Theoretical background

A brief history of borders in Jerusalem

As noted above, the divided city is not only a theory of urban relations but also the research arena of this study. Delving into the case of Jerusalem requires a brief conceptualization of the long and complex history of the construction and deconstruction of urban borders and boundaries in Jerusalem.

In 1947, Great Britain resolved to terminate its mandate over Palestine and to return decision regarding the territory’s future to the United Nations. In November 1947, the UN General Assembly resolved to divide Mandate Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state. This decision sparked the outbreak of the 1948 war, which concluded with the ceasefire agreements of 1949. These agreements established an armistice line separating Israel from the Jordanian-ruled West Bank and the Egyptian-ruled Gaza Strip, which came to be known as the ‘Green Line’. To illustrate the resulting complex reality, Figure 2 presents the separation map on three different scales, each highlighting the Green Line: (1) the national scale (Palestine-Israel); (2) the regional scale (the West Bank and Jerusalem); and (3) the urban scale of the city of Jerusalem, which the Green Line traverses.

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Figure 2.

The Green Line on three different scales.

In 1949, the city was divided between the nascent Israeli state and the Kingdom of Trans-Jordan (Figure 3), and it remained divided in this manner for the following 19 years. To mark the border between the two countries, a 7 kilometre fence was constructed through the city’s centre, complete with guard posts and fortifications (Narkis, 1986), and landmines were planted across the city.

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Figure 3.

Jerusalem and its internal borders and barriers.

Following the Six-Day War (1967), the fences and mines were removed, although, unlike the Palestinian Arabs living within the Green Line, the Palestinian citizens of east Jerusalem were not offered Israeli citizenship. Rather, their formal status vis-a-vis the Israeli state is that of ‘residents of the city of Jerusalem’. As Wonders and Jones (2019) argue, the ‘doing and undoing’ of borders is related to residents’ formal status as citizens or marginalized groups.

In response to the terrorist attacks of the 1990s, public groups in Israel called on the state to build a wall separating Jerusalem from the West Bank, although the state failed to articulate its position on the idea. In February 1993, Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kollek and Jerusalem District Commander Rafi Peled decided not to wait any longer for state funding and supportive government policy and constructed a wall between Armon Hanatziv (East Talpiot) and Jabel Mukaber, marking the beginning of the genesis of the separation wall between Jerusalem and the West Bank.

During the Second Intifada (2000–2005), also known as the Al-Aqsa Intifada, the tension, killing and destruction reached new heights of intensity. Faran et al. (2005) have claimed that hesitancy and unclear state-level policy was responsible for turning the Jerusalem District into a local policy maker and creating a situation in which decisions regarding how to handle security issues were made at the municipal level.

In July 2001, the Israeli government adopted the ‘Jerusalem Envelope’ (otef yerushalayim) plan, which mandated Jerusalem’s separation from the West Bank ² and had two major effects on the ground: (1) it cut off East Jerusalem from the Palestinian urban continuum and prevented Palestinian access to the holy sites in the city; and (2) it imprisoned tens of thousands of people in a distinct closed-off area (Savitch and Garb, 2006). To sum up this section, we emphasize that the border investigated in this article is not only an urban border but one that previously functioned as an international border, and that the question of its future—that is, whether or not it will ultimately revert to serving as an international border—constitutes a major point of contention in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Ceccato and Haining (2004: 808) stress that urban borders are not the only borders that clarify issues of crime—so do international borders, which symbolize the endpoint of control and enforcement of state institutions. This issue is particularly important in understanding the Jerusalem seam line, as, up to the present, even though Israel formally controls both parts of the city, the enforcement mechanisms operating in each differ significantly from one another.

But physical and political borders are only part of the dynamic of divisions in Jerusalem. The urban texture of Jerusalem, which is full of socially constructed borders that promote separation in the city, is also relevant. This includes the different languages spoken by the city’s diverse population; and, perhaps most importantly, the differing socio-economic status of the city’s different neighbourhoods.

Jerusalem is one of the poorest cities in Israel (Jerusalem Institute, 2013), with social disparities that are considerably wider than those found in other cities of a comparable level of socio-economic development. As demonstrated in Figure 4, poverty and other aspects of marginality go hand-in-hand with the ethno-spatial divisions of the city, making the city ‘Separate and Unequal’ (Chesin et al., 1999). Poverty rates in East Jerusalem are extremely high, with 77% of all Arab families and 83% of all Arab children in the region living under the poverty line.

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Figure 4.

Jerusalem boundaries: Ethno-national division (left) and poverty (right).

The separation wall cuts off the residents of East Jerusalem from the large cities of the West Bank, thereby disconnecting them from sources of economic opportunity. As a result, the Green Line is not only an urban dividing line between Jews and Arabs but also between haves and have-nots.

Methodology: Crime spatial analysis

This present study’s methodological procedure had three stages: the first was devoted to data collection, which took approximately two years to complete due to the complexity of acquiring the permits necessary to access urban crime data; the second involved the spatialization of this data using a GIS system; and the third focused on interpretation based on fieldwork in the seam line neighbourhood of Musrara.

Stage I was conducted after receiving the necessary permits and after the Israel Police’s Research Department’s provision of data pertaining to reported crime incidents in Jerusalem for the years 2003, 2005 and 2010. ³ The first data file contained a detailed description of the time of each incident, its location in the city and the type of place in which it occurred (e.g. outdoors, in a private home, in a restaurant, etc.). The file was divided into sheets that included the following categories of legal offences: breaking and entering; car theft; sex-related offences; robbery; extortion; knife possession; drug-related offences; destruction of property and other property-related crimes; and murder. The police declined to provide the exact location of each incident but were willing to indicate the statistical area in which it occurred. Although this was initially regarded as a disadvantage, this data turned out to be beneficial for two primary reasons: (1) many areas in which Palestinians live lack street names, and the provision of a statistical area was preferable to a blank space stemming from an inexact address; and (2) usage of the statistical area highlighted the scale of the neighbourhood and evoked neighbourhood-based interpretation.

The methodology also suffered from a number of weaknesses. In the first place, as noted by current research, only 40% of all crime incidents are reported (Pollock, 2012) and much fewer in the case of minority groups, which constitute a large portion of the city’s population. The second weakness stems from the fact that crime is socially defined by law and norm (Pollock, 2012). The spatialization of crime incidents has also come under criticism. For example, Gregory and Pred (2007) have claimed that spatializing phenomena conveys an essentialist perception of ‘place’ and that the analysis it provides is not flexible enough to remind us that place is a result of social construction and is not, in itself, something that invites or inhibits violence. The methodology’s third weakness is effectively conveyed by Comaroff and Comaroff (2007), who argue that crime research frequently uses quantitative data and statistics to create crime scenes, and who are critical of the fetishism of statistical analysis and the manner in which it affects the formation of social reality.

Stage II—the spatialization of crime incidents according to statistical areas, from broad general categories to a focused investigation—involved the collection of data pertaining to all crime incidents in the city during the years in question, and their subsequent mapping in urban space.

Stage III: Interpretation and Analysis — In his article, Weisburd (2015) maps the research discourse of criminology as it appears in the pages of the journal Criminology, showing that most criminological studies are person-based, whereas a smaller (but continually growing) number of studies deal with the criminology of place. The criminology of place, Weisburd maintains, offers an opportunity to establish the status of criminology as a science, as well as general rules that confirm this status. Examples include the law of concentration, which holds that most crime occurs in extremely small parts of the city, and a second law which maintains that most crimes are committed by small groups of people. According to Weisburd, this constitutes a possible ‘tipping point’ in the career of criminology, and the criminology of place strengthens the scientific status of the discipline.

The present article comes in response to a call to deepen our knowledge regarding the criminology of place by means of data-based empirical research and space-related statistical tests. However, I maintain that ethnographic research is necessary in order to provide an interpretive framework, as the identification of spatial patterns in themselves is not the ultimate goal of this study.

Ethnography offers the interpretive framework that best presents and clarifies the ways in which people assign meaning (Geertz, 2008). To this end, I conducted a field study in the tradition of cultural anthropology: that is, an attempt to produce a thick description of a neighbourhood that is documented to the level of transcription in a field diary; spending time in community space and maintaining ongoing trust-building contact with community institutions such as the local community centre, the neighbourhood residents’ committee and a group of artists that was operating in the neighbourhood. My guiding principle was detailed documentation that would enable me to learn the language of the subjects (emic), and analysis of this language in order to learn the internal syntax of their culture.

My fieldwork in the seam line neighbourhood of Musrara included tours, the documentation of neighbourhood events, participant observation in neighbourhood and community centres, and in-depth interviews (eight full documents interviews) and many informal conversations with members of the residents’ committee and other local residents. Most of the interviewees, and the individuals with whom I was in contact, were men of Mizrachi origin between the ages of 50 and 60 who occupy seats on the residents’ committee and other positions at the community centre. Many are also active in right-wing political parties. Following the tradition of urban anthropology, I conducted an urban investigation of the neighbourhood’s planning and architecture. Ethnography is a meeting point between the researcher and the group about which he or she seeks to learn, and I am therefore compelled to say something here about my own sociological profile. I was born to a Mizrachi family; my father and mother immigrated to Israel in the early 1950s, from Iraq and Iran respectively. My Mizrachi background opened the door for me when it came to building trust with the local residents, and I felt as if they saw me as ‘one of their own’. Being a woman was a challenge, as the public figures in the neighbourhood were all males, creating a situation in which I felt insecure. Throughout my work, I maintained the ethical principles of recording conversations only with permission, keeping in contact with the interviewees and sharing later drafts of my work with them to receive their comments.

Findings

The data analysis was conducted in funnel form, progressing from general to increasingly more focused analyses. The first stage was to map all crime incidents, with the aim of spatializing as much data as possible. Using GIS, I examined the distribution of incidents and identified end members to generate a bell curve that most accurately reflected the natural breaks of the incidents. I found one outlier that distorted the bell curve and decided to exclude it from the analysis.

The analysis revealed three general patterns (see Figure 5, right side):

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Figure 5.

A spatialization of crime incidents in Jerusalem: 2003, 2005 and 2010 (right) in three concertation areas.

When considering the absolute numbers, 9008 incidents were recorded in statistical zone 532 (Baqa and Talpiot), similar to Musrara and other seam line neighbourhoods, reflecting numbers that were two to three times higher than in neighbourhoods located farther from the seam line and from commercial and industrial zones. The concentration of crime incidents around commercial and industrial zones is a well-known phenomenon in the criminology of space. However, the pattern I found most interesting was the multitude of incidents along the socio-political boundary, including the ‘ring neighbourhoods’ (large Jewish neighbourhoods that were built in the eastern part of the city and that are surrounded by Palestinian villages, refugee camps and neighbourhoods) and within the Green Line. This pattern was documented in the past and was theoretically framed as an urban ‘edge’ (Brantingham and Brantingham, 1993).

Criminals seeking to maximize profit could be expected to operate in the wealthier, western part of the city, as it contains some of the city’s more established neighbourhoods and is less effectively monitored than the seam line area. However, the findings revealed that fewer crime incidents occurred in this region, and that the perpetrators of crime in the city tended to focus their activity on the meeting points of inequality.

In summary, the findings presented in this section reveal a centralization of crime incidents around Jerusalem’s ethno-national boundaries: the urban seam line and the ring neighbourhoods. The centralization of crime incidents was also observed in the city’s industrial and commercial zones and was identified at varying intensities in different time and offence-type analyses.

How do seam line neighbourhood residents cope with crime?

Ethnography in a seam line neighbourhood

With these spatial statistics of crime incidents in hand, I ventured into the field to ascertain how local residents perceived and coped with the high rates and centralization of crime. To this end, I engaged in fieldwork in the Jewish neighbourhood of Musrara, located just west of the seam line (the experiences and perspectives of Palestinians living just east of the seam line are currently under investigation).

The people whom I met during my fieldwork, Jewish residents of Musrara, focused on two primary aspects of the phenomenon: the ethno-national aspect (reflected in remarks such as ‘the Arabs come [here] to commit crime’) and the spatial aspect (reflected in remarks such as ‘they come from there, the eastern part of the city’). As shown by Comaroff and Comaroff (2007), disorder has its place, which in this case is in the east. This interpretation is also clearly manifested in the perceptions of residents, who have the impression that Arabs are the sole perpetrators of crime incidents along the seam line, despite the police data that reflects that this is not the case. In actuality, Musrara residents and Jews from neighbouring areas are responsible for approximately one-third of the crime incidents perpetrated in the neighbourhood, with the other two-thirds divided equally between Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinian residents of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. When I shared these figures with the members of the residents’ committee, they were surprised and did not accept them as fact, ⁵ reinforcing Lysaght and Basten’s (2003: 226) conceptualization of ‘sectarian crime’ and ‘sectarian spaces’; from the residents’ perspective, crime has to do with ‘them’, the Arabs, who come from ‘over there’, from the east.

Border nostalgia

This is where the border ran, and for me it is still a border. Up to here it’s ‘us’, and from this point on it’s ‘them’ [. . .] There was a protective wall here [. . .] The war ended, they dismantled the wall, and now it’s open. But when I look at it, I see it as it was when I was a child [. . .] It’s still a border.

The above quote by S reflects the effectiveness of ethno-national borders in indicating where ‘they’ end and ‘we’ begin. Even though the physical border was dismantled in 1967, the urban border still exists as a sociological apparatus and continues to affect the residents’ experience of fear of both crime and terrorism:

I am 58 years old and unashamed to say that I am afraid to go to the Old City like I used to as a child [. . .] Since the Intifada, ⁶ you don’t feel safe walking around freely, and you truly are in danger [. . .] that all kinds of extremists will see someone with a skullcap and want to stab me.

It was particularly surprising to discover that numerous residents missed the border, which appears to contradict the fact that many neighbourhood residents who were interviewed for the study are supporters of right-wing parties that support a ‘unified Jerusalem’ and the idea of the ‘Whole Land of Israel’. In their everyday lives as residents of a seam line neighbourhood, however, they seek to fortify the border and, by doing so, to reinforce their separation from their Palestinian neighbours.

Also surprising was the extent to which the border of the past still exists in the collective consciousness of neighbourhood residents. Indeed, as Sibley (1995: 32) suggests, boundaries provide residents with a sense of security, as reflected in the following words of a local community centre employee:

When there was a border there were no thefts. I used to live with Arabs. There was friendship. They were different people. Now it’s all over. It’s all hatred. But you can’t blame them. They grew up with nearly 40 years of hatred. We used to live in poverty but in peace. An [international] border is better. We should give them everything [they want] on the condition that we won’t see even one Arab.

The above quote touches on a number of issues that help us better understand residents’ interpretations of the situation. This interviewee also maintains that the international border provided security for neighbourhood residents by effecting their clear separation from the Arabs, thus strengthening the traditional sociological and anthropological theories that perceive disorder as a state of contamination. With the dismantling of the border, the possibility of friendship with the Arabs vanished as a result of decades of hatred. An Arab’s entry into the neighbourhood creates an internal split and a sense of anarchy, and the absence of a physical border between East and West Jerusalem creates a perception of lawlessness. This offers further support of the theory that views the desire for order and purity as the origin of the demand to construct a border.

One long-time resident depicted the dismantling of the border as the point at which all the problems started, as it allowed drugs to begin entering the neighbourhood: ‘After 1967, when the border was opened, there was an epidemic of drugs [. . .] It was very difficult. Even those who weren’t into it were forced to—even children.’ The outcome of the Six-Day War in 1967 resulted in the elimination of the international border and the city’s ostensive ‘reunification’. However, the findings of the present study indicate that the border’s physical removal actually achieved the opposite result: though physically ‘unifying’ the city and doing away with the threat posed by Jordanian snipers, it posed a new threat for neighbourhood residents: crime and, two decades later, large-scale terrorist attacks and a nationalist uprising. Paradoxically, the removal of the international border, which was perceived as a victory on the Jewish-Israeli national level, ultimately emerged as a source of insecurity for neighbourhood residents due to its disruption of Jerusalem’s urban ethnocracy (Yiftachel and Yacobi, 2003). According to one community centre employee: ‘[y]ou see an Arab near your house. You ask him what he’s doing here and he says he’s looking for a job. He’s lying. He came here to steal.’

Under conditions of equal ethno-national status and unequal social status, border zones become points of contact and friction, not separation (Anzaldua, 1987). And the wider the disparities, the fiercer and more demanding the attraction is to the weaker side. This dynamic is reflected in the assertion, made by the above-quoted community centre employee, that ‘you can’t contain these Arabs—they come to you’, and in the following words of a salesman in a neighbourhood antique shop:

Today, an Arab is allowed to sit in the public garden. The municipality built benches for the residents. So he comes and sits. You can’t say anything to him. I didn’t have a problem with this until the number of thefts and robberies became too much. They take everything and leave nothing; they even dismantle copper wires, which they can sell.

Bring back the border, bring back the order

Field research conducted in the neighbourhood revealed active ‘boundary work’ (Gazit, 2010) by residents aimed at reinstating the border. Moreover, residents did not perceive the construction of the wall as an action taken from a position of political strength but rather a solution they were dragged into for two reasons. One was their sense of powerlessness with regard to municipal and regional geopolitical issues: ‘What can you do to them? Transfer them? You can’t. The Supreme Court protects them and you can’t act against it. So what else can you do? Build a wall.’

These findings are interesting, particularly in light of the fact that the research literature commonly perceives separation and border construction by dominant groups as a manifestation of power and exclusion (Sibley, 1995: 16). In this case, however, we note the weakness of the powerful—the point at which the dominant majority confronts the limitations, or borders, of its power. The residents’ boundary work has a political alibi. It was originally planned as an ‘acoustic wall’ to protect them from the noise created by Rt 1, which, according to Pullan et al. (2007), functions as an internal border:

The wall is located on the route of the international border. It’s something psychological. If there is an Arab in the neighbourhood, he will immediately be asked what he is doing there. You defend yourself so you don’t have to be aggressive. They know this is the system, like in America, where everything has a system.

Residents’ second explanation for demanding a wall was even more intriguing. Asking them about their understanding of the concentration of crime in their neighbourhood prompted them to speak about the socio-economic conditions on both sides of the Green Line: ‘I was here at the time of the Black Panthers’, explains one resident. ‘We struggled because we faced hardship. But when we had children we were concerned about them and raised them to be good kids. In our days, an Arab didn’t dare walk through here.’ Such statements on the part of neighbourhood residents reflect the perception of a reverse relationship between the socio-economic and cultural conditions of the neighbourhood and its residents on the one hand, and their relationship with their Arab neighbours on the other hand. That is to say, when things improved and the next generation were raised as ‘good kids’ (as opposed to rougher, more street savvy youth who did not refrain from using violence to deal with problems), it marked the beginning of the end of the neighbourhood. In the words of one active resident: ‘[t]he neighbourhood will be gone. I predicted it. The children lack the strength to deal with it.’

Once the neighbourhood rebelled and some of the residents moved away, those who remained appear to have felt abandoned and in need of a protective wall:

Teddy Kollek [the mythological former mayor of Jerusalem] wanted to construct Rt 1. The architects presented a 9 metre wall, with a terrace overlooking Damascus Gate, a bridge and a waterfall. They wanted to build gates in every neighbourhood to facilitate crossing. I asked them to close off the neighbourhood and the terrace. Teddy Kollek told them to do what I said but to leave the waterfall. We still have a border because we built the wall. That’s the border. We asked for the wall. Twenty-five years ago, before the Six-Day War, there was a fence. They built the wall on the exact same spot.

(Former chairman of the Musrara neighbourhood community committee)

In this context, it is important to emphasize that the architect’s intention was not only to provide for an acoustic wall but also to establish links and encourage connectivity between the two parts of the city, with entry points that would facilitate passage from one side of the city to the other. Local residents, on the other hand, fought to keep the wall sealed (Figure 6).

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Figure 6.

The wall that was built on the historical border between East and West Jerusalem, separating the Old City (near Damascus Gate) from Musrara. Photograph by the author, Oct. 2013.

According to the current chairman of Musrara’s residents’ committee: ⁷

They wanted to build a tunnel to the other side, but we were concerned that it would attract junkies and danger. They wanted to build a passage in the middle of the wall, and we objected. We didn’t want people crossing over directly into our homes, robbing the elderly, committing burglaries and stabbings. They finished the project in the early 90s. The city engineer said that when they build the gate, they’ll call it the ‘Gate of Peace’. I told him that when there will be peace, we will open the gate.

The reconstructed border in its current form is not a hermetically sealed international border but rather a physical border with narrow passages that can easily be sealed off by barriers and monitored by cameras as deemed necessary. But the wall nonetheless serves as a border that sustains and enhances the power of the route of the former international border. The wall also furthers the neighbourhood’s interest in creating order and restoring its ethno-national purity, and at the same time runs counter to the state’s aim of creating and maintaining a unified Jerusalem. This study sheds light on the manner in which local residents operate on the neighbourhood scale and, in so doing, reshape the geopolitics of Jerusalem.

Conclusion

Setting forth from a spatial crime analysis that revealed a concentration of incidents along Jerusalem’s internal urban seam line, this article proposed a deconstruction of an intriguing urban dynamic. My fieldwork offered insight into the manner in which residents have been coping with the concentration of crime incidents, enabling me to trace the social dynamic of the boundary work that reproduces and reshapes urban divisions. Sociologically speaking, the boundaries of Jerusalem are becoming real in their consequences (Thomas and Thomas, 1928). The concentration of crime incidents endows the boundaries with strength and physical expression in the built environment.

The urban transformation under examination here was the product of work by the neighbourhood residents’ committee, which presented its demand for a border to the professionals charged with planning the seam line. They demanded a border not out of a sense of power but rather out of a sense of helplessness in contending with frequent crime incidents, a task which they do not trust the police to carry out effectively. For a variety of reasons, they ruled out other possible solutions, such as ‘transfer’, vigilantism and moving out of the neighbourhood. Under these conditions, when they could turn to no one else to effectively guard the neighbourhood, boundary work appeared to them to be the only solution: ‘[y]ou defend yourself so you don’t have to be aggressive’.

Perhaps most interesting is the fact that the border work undertaken on the neighbourhood level ran counter to state policy and official right-wing ideology, which seeks to maintain a ‘united Jerusalem’. This dynamic is one more milestone in the historic urban dynamic discussed above: the city’s internal logic and its residents’ demand for ‘order’ and security, as a force that plays an important role in reshaping the internal divisions of the divided city. Indeed, the fact that this grassroots boundary work ran counter to Israeli state policy regarding ‘Greater Jerusalem’ and disrupted the connection between East and West Jerusalem attests to its practical significance. This, in turn, offers new insight into the relationship between bordering and boundary work and contributes to our understanding of borders in divided cities in general and Jerusalem in particular.