Abstract
At first glance the two cities seem utterly different: Belfast, a small Ulster town which became an important industrial city in the nineteenth century; Jerusalem, an ancient Middle Eastern centre for three world religions. Yet as cities now divided by ethno-national conflicts about surrounding territories and statehood they display some remarkable similarities. Tony Hepburn succinctly characterised them as ‘The failure of chronic violence: Belfast’, and ‘The failure of acute violence: Jerusalem’1 (Figure 11.12). This chapter3 compares these ‘failures’ by locating the cities in terms of how the respective national conflicts arose, the roles the cities played, and how they became demographically ‘divided’.
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Notes
A. C. Hepburn (2004) Contested Cities in the Modern West (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). The late Tony Hepburn generously supported our project on ‘Belfast, Jerusalem and other divided cities’.
O. Yiftachel (2006) Ethnocracy: Land and Identity Politics in Israel/Palestine (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press).
D. I. Kertzer and D. Arel (2002) Census and Identity: The Politics of Race, Ethnicity and Language in National Censuses (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
O. Mc Eldowney, J. Anderson, and I. Shuttleworth (2011) ‘Sectarian Demography: Dubious Discourses of Ethno-national Conflict’, in K. Hayward and C. O’Donnell (eds.) Political Discourse and Conflict Resolution: Debating Peace in Northern Ireland (London and New York, NY: Routledge), pp. 160–176.
See M. Dumper (1997) The Politics of Jerusalem since 1967 (New York, NY: Columbia University Press), pp. 23, 107–108.
J. Abu-Lughod (1971) ‘The Demographic Transformation of Palestine’, in I. Abu-Lughod (ed.) The Transformation of Palestine: Essays on the Origin and Development of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press), pp. 139–163, p. 140;M. Gilbert (1985) Jerusalem: Rebirth of a City (London: Chatto & Windus), p. 216;R. Davis (1999) ‘Ottoman Jerusalem’ in S. Tamari (ed.) Jerusalem 1948: The Arab Neighbourhoods and their Fate in the War (Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies), pp. 10–29, p. 11.
T. Mayer (2008) ‘Jerusalem In and Out of Focus: The City in Zionist Ideology’, in T. Mayer and S. A. Mourad (eds.) Jerusalem: Idea and Reality (London and New York, NY: Routledge), pp. 224–244.
J. Anderson and L. O’Dowd (2007) ‘Imperialism and Nationalism: The Home Rule Struggle and Border Creation in Ireland, 1885–1925’, Political Geography 26(8), 934–950.
B. O’Leary (2007) ‘Analysing Partition: Definition, Classification and Explanation’, Political Geography 26(8), 886–908, p. 888.
I. Pappe (2007) The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oxford: Oneworld), p. 42.
J. Whyte (1991) Interpreting Northern Ireland (Oxford: Clarendon Press), pp. 124–125.
H. Kendall (1948) Jerusalem: The City Plan — Preservation and Development during the British Mandate 1918–1948 (London: HMSO), p. 34.
I. Pappe (2006) A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 52;J. Rose (2004) The Myths of Zionism (London: Pluto Press), p. 104;R. Davis (1999) ‘The Growth of the Western Communities’, pp. 30–67 in S. Tamari (ed.), p. 38;Tzfadia (2008), p. 57.
R. Khalidi (2006) The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood (Boston: Beacon Press), pp. xi-xxii.
G. Piterberg (2008) The Returns of Zionism: Myths, Politics and Scholarship in Israel (London, New York, NY: Verso), pp. 53–56;Abu-Lughod (1971), pp. 147, 151;Tamari (1999) ‘The City and its Rural Hinterland’, pp. 68–83 in S. Tamari (ed.), p. 73.
V. Tilley (2005) The One-state Solution: A Breakthrough for Peace in the Israeli-Palestine Deadlock (Manchester: Manchester University Press), pp. 214–215;Taylor (1971), p. 25.
B. Morris (2004) ‘On Ethnic Cleansing’, New Left Review 26, 37–51, 40–44.
B. Walker (2012) A Political History of the Two Irelands: From Partition to Peace (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 67–68.
M. Farrell (1980) Northern Ireland: The Orange State (2nd Edit., London: Pluto Press), pp. 83–84;H. Patterson (2006) ‘In the Land of King Canute: The Influence of Border Unionism on Ulster Unionist Politics, 1945–1963’, Contemporary British History 20(4), 511–532, 528–529;Hepburn (2004), p. 176.
D. Barritt and C. Carter (1962) The Northern Ireland Problem: A Study in Group Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 57, 108.
J. Anderson (2008) ‘Partition, Consociation, Border-crossing: Some Lessons from the National Conflict in Ireland/Northern Ireland’, Nations and Nationalism 14(1), 85–104.
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© 2013 James Anderson
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Anderson, J. (2013). Imperial Ethnocracy and Demography: Foundations of Ethno-National Conflict in Belfast and Jerusalem. In: Pullan, W., Baillie, B. (eds) Locating Urban Conflicts. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137316882_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137316882_11
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