“Forty percent of the city’s residents are not citizens of the state, “he says. Meir Margalit is a former soldier and settler turned human rights activist, who researches the history of the Jewish community. Others, including some surprising voices from across the divided community, explain how the Zionist project to establish a Jewish homeland in the territory continues to reinforce inequality and prejudice in Jerusalem today.ĭr. We Palestinians in East Jerusalem are invisible”. “Israel builds walls to hide the highway, so it becomes an invisible part. “This is an apartheid in the 21st century and the world is silent,” he says. These two insightful episodes go beyond some of the common misconceptions, tracing the roots of the occupation and exploring the relationship that Jerusalem’s different communities have with their city and with each other.įor Omar Harami, a young Palestinian Christian, and a lead character in the film, the consequences of Jerusalem’s divisions are too often ignored. To followers of different faiths, Jerusalem is a sacred and spiritual place, to many tourists it’s most famous for its culturally significant monuments, but to those who live here its status is much more complex. The stark, every-day challenges of life in a city shaped by 70 years of Israeli occupation – with its oppressive discrimination, security walls and endless petty restrictions – aren’t always fully understood by outsiders. Here, Israeli Jews and Palestinian Muslims and Christians exist in close geographical proximity and are bound in many ways by a common history.īut as these films reveal, they are also worlds apart.
A Rock And A Hard Place, a remarkable new two-part documentary special from Al Jazeera English, goes behind the scenes with residents from each of the three monolithic faiths who share one of the world’s most extraordinary cities: Jerusalem.