Understanding Israel's Rule Over Jerusalem from a Settler-Colonial Perspective

This thesis offers an alternative framework to mainstream discourse and analyses on the reality in Palestine, with a focus on Jerusalem as a case study in the Palestine-Israel context. Drawing upon studies on settler-colonialism, this paper maintains that Zionism, the driving political movement behind Israel’s foundation, is a settler-colonial project that has aimed since its inception to establish full control over Jerusalem and alter the demographic composition of the city as it faced the existence of Palestinians, invoking Patick Wolfe’s logic of ‘elimination of the native’ . The research traces historical events including essentially the British Mandate, the UN Partition Plan, the 1948 Nakba “catastrophe”, Israel’s illegal annexation of West Jerusalem, the 1967 occupation of the remaining parts of Historic Palestine, which illustrate the settler-colonial nature behind the deliberate and continuous disregard of the wishes of Palestinians as indigenous people, challenging misconceptions on Jerusalem as Israel’s united and undivided capital or as a divided capital for Israel and Palestine. The research then focuses on Israel’s instrumentalization of law as a tool to legalise the illegal as depicted by Israel’s unlawful annexation and illegal occupation, as well as a series of discriminatory policies, laws, and legislations that aim to (forcefully) displace Jerusalemite Palestinians through residency revocation, denial of family unification, fragmentation, and displacement which led to a situation of systematic violations on international human rights and international humanitarian law. It also highlights the extraterritorial applicability of international law, which must aspire to solidarity and push third state actors to meet their obligations to ensure (potentially) accountability, emancipation and justice.