Materializing an ‘Arab Jerusalem’: narrating the Jerusalem Airport 1948–1967

The dominant narrative of 1948–1967 Arab Jerusalem, if there is one at all, is of a marginalized city with passive citizens, decimated by the extraction of its vibrant heart in West Jerusalem, constrained politically by new state structures and generating little autonomous urban development. This assumption is simplistic and inaccurate. There is a counter-narrative available, however, if one listens to the oral history told by Jerusalemites, examines rare archival records and diaries, scans the newspapers of the time, and investigates spatial transitions in its urban landscape across two decades. Unexpectedly, this alternative story reveals the centrality of the Jerusalem Airport to the agentic empowerment of the inhabitants of al-Quds as they reshaped space and place post-al Nakba. The multiscalar relations empowered by this transport infrastructure materialized a vibrant ‘Arab Jerusalem’, an emanant Arab metropolitan space thickly connected into the urban circuits weaving together the wider Arab region. Such integrative effects enhanced the cosmopolitanism of its street life, opened up political space, generated transformative investment, reshaped its neighborhoods and created exciting opportunities for personal and communal development.