Jerusalem

Holy to three faiths

For Jews, Jerusalem is the focus of age-old yearnings and the site of the Temple Mount; for Christians, the scene of Jesus’ agony and triumph; for Muslims, the goal of Muhammad’s night journey and the site of one of Islam’s most sacred shrines. The walled Old City, a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1981, has Armenian, Christian, Jewish and Muslim quarters.^[1]

The Temple Mount, called Al-Haram al-Sharif by Muslims, is the platform where the Jewish Temple stood until the Romans destroyed it in 70 CE; since the 7th century it has held the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque. The lower part of its Western Wall, the only remnant of the wall that surrounded the Temple, has been a place of Jewish pilgrimage ever since.^[4]

An ancient capital

People lived on a hill south of today’s Temple Mount by about 3000 BCE, beside the Gihon Spring. The city’s earliest known name, Urusalim, is probably western Semitic and seems to mean “Foundation of Shalem (God)”; Egyptian texts of about 1900–1800 BCE mention it and its Egyptian overlords.^[5]

According to the Bible, David captured the city from the Jebusites and made it the capital of the joint kingdom of Israel and Judah, an event dated to about 1000 BCE. His successor Solomon built the Temple there. In 587/586 BCE the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the city and the Temple and the Babylonian captivity began; in 538 BCE Cyrus the Great of Persia let the Jews return, and the Temple was restored in 515 BCE.^[5]

Alexander the Great’s victory in 333 BCE brought Greek rule. After the Seleucid king Antiochus IV desecrated the Temple, the Jews revolted in 167 BCE under the Maccabees, and Jerusalem again became the capital of an independent state under the Hasmonean dynasty.^[5]

Rome, Byzantium and Islam

Pompey took Jerusalem for Rome in 63 BCE. Under Herod the Great, made client king of Judaea by the Roman Senate in 40 BCE, the city reached its peak: he enlarged the Temple Mount with supporting walls, including the Western Wall, and rebuilt the Temple. Jesus was put to death under the Roman procurator Pontius Pilate.^[6]

The Jews rebelled against Rome in 66 CE, and in 70 the Romans under Titus almost wholly destroyed the city and burned the Temple. After a second revolt in 132–135, the emperor Hadrian built a Roman city, Aelia Capitolina, on the site; its general layout has lasted to this day.^[6]

After the emperor Constantine became a Christian, great shrines were built, among them the church later known as the Holy Sepulchre, and Jerusalem flourished as a Christian city until a Persian invasion in 614 massacred its people and destroyed its churches. In 638 the caliph Umar entered the city; in 688–691 the Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik built the Dome of the Rock. The Umayyads and the Abbasids after them followed a liberal policy toward Christians and Jews.^[6]

Crusaders, Mamluks and Ottomans

Crusaders took Jerusalem in 1099 and launched a reign of terror against Muslims and Jews, who were then barred from living there; the city was the capital of the Crusader kingdom of Jerusalem until Saladin took it in 1187. After brief spells of Christian rule it fell in 1247 to the Mamluks of Egypt. Jews returned and from the mid-13th century lived in their own quarter, and the layout of the Old City’s quarters was fixed in that period.^[6]

The Ottoman sultan Selim I took the city in 1517, beginning 400 years of Turkish rule, and the walls that still enclose the Old City were built in the 16th century.^[6] The sultan Süleyman I had the area by the Western Wall cleared so that Jews could pray there.^[4]

In the 19th century European powers, acting as protectors of the Christian churches, opened consulates in Jerusalem, and under their pressure the Ottomans promised equal rights to Christians and Jews, which many Muslims resisted. Jewish immigration, mainly from eastern Europe and by the 1880s part of the budding Zionist movement, reduced the city’s Muslims to a minority of its population.^[6]

Capital of the mandate

British troops took Jerusalem from the Ottomans in December 1917, and under the League of Nations mandate it was the capital of British Palestine.^[1][2] Arab opposition to Zionist immigration grew, led by the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini. The city grew fast despite bloody clashes between Arabs and Jews in 1920 and 1929; in the Arab revolt that began in 1936, rebels at one stage captured the Old City.^[2]

Between 1945 and 1948 Jewish underground militants bombed British targets; in July 1946 the Irgun blew up a wing of the King David Hotel, then the British headquarters. From 1947 Arabs and Jews fought on a large scale, and atrocities were committed by both sides.^[2]

A divided city

The UN’s partition plan of November 1947 would have made Jerusalem and its surroundings, Bethlehem included, a corpus separatum, a “separate entity” under a UN governor. It was never carried out. In the war that followed Israel’s proclamation in May 1948, Israel held west Jerusalem and Transjordan took the Old City and most of East Jerusalem. Arabs fled the west of the city and Jews the Jewish quarter of the Old City.^[2]

In December 1949 Israel proclaimed Jerusalem its capital; none of the great powers recognised it. Until 1967 barbed wire, lookout posts and walls split the city, and crossing between the halves was possible only at the Mandelbaum Gate, mostly for diplomats. Nearly all the holy places of the three faiths were on the Jordanian side; Christians could visit theirs at festivals, but in general Jews could not, and Israel kept only an enclave on Mount Scopus.^[2] Israelis could not reach the Western Wall from 1948 to 1967, the most significant restriction on Jewish visits to the site in centuries.^[4]

Israeli rule since 1967

On 7 June 1967, in the Six-Day War, Israeli forces entered the Old City, the first time since before the rise of Islam that a Jewish government had held all of Jerusalem.^[4] Israel dissolved East Jerusalem’s council, extended the city’s boundaries into the West Bank and governed the whole as part of its sovereign territory, unlike the rest of the West Bank, which it held under military occupation. Most countries, siding with the Palestinians, regard East Jerusalem as occupied.^[2][1]

The defence minister, Moshe Dayan, left the Temple Mount in the hands of the Islamic waqf, the religious trust that had long run it, and Israel’s 1994 peace treaty with Jordan recognised the “special role” of Jordan’s royal family at the city’s Muslim holy sites.^[4] Under Teddy Kollek, mayor from 1965 to 1993, Israel entrenched its control of East Jerusalem while urging sensitivity to its Arabs, and relations between the communities were generally amicable through the 1970s.^[2]

In 1980 the Knesset passed a basic law reaffirming the united city as Israel’s capital. The UN Security Council’s resolution 478 then called on states to withdraw their diplomatic missions from Jerusalem, and those that had embassies there left.^[2][7] East Jerusalem’s Arabs, most of whom see themselves as Palestinians, can vote in city elections, but few do, because most refuse to recognise Israeli sovereignty.^[7]

After Oslo

The Oslo Accords of 1993 left the city’s future to final-status talks, and for a time some shared governance seemed achievable. Britannica describes what followed as Israeli policies meant to keep a 70:30 Jewish majority, among them settlement in the east of the city, closing it to Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza, demolishing Palestinian houses and revoking the residency of Palestinian Jerusalemites living outside the boundary, and violent Palestinian responses, including deadly attacks by militants on Israeli civilians.^[2]

In 1996 Muslims fought running battles with the Israeli army after the government opened an entrance to the Hasmonean tunnel, an underground Jewish historical site, in the Muslim quarter. Final-status talks failed at Camp David in July 2000, and a visit to the Temple Mount that year by the opposition leader Ariel Sharon set off rioting across Jerusalem, Gaza and the West Bank. In the following decade Palestinian areas, about a third of the city’s people, received about a tenth of municipal spending.^[2]

From 2003 Israel built a barrier around the eastern parts of the city, in response to bomb attacks on Israeli Jews by militants from the West Bank; its route cut about 100,000 Palestinian Jerusalemites off from the city. In 2004 the International Court of Justice ruled the route illegal.^[2] Clashes at the Temple Mount during Ramadan in 2021 helped set off an 11-day conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, and in January 2023 Itamar Ben-Gvir became the highest-ranking Israeli official to visit the compound since Sharon.^[4]

Where the embassies are

On 6 December 2017 US President Donald Trump recognised Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and announced that the US embassy would move there, while saying the United States took no position on “the specific boundaries of Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem”.^[8] Two weeks later the UN General Assembly voted 128 to 9, with 35 abstentions, that decisions altering the city’s status were “null and void”, and called on states not to set up missions there.^[9]

The US and Guatemala opened the first embassies in Jerusalem since 1980 in May 2018.^[7] By September 2026, when Nauru opened one, nine countries had embassies there, including Honduras, Kosovo, Paraguay, Papua New Guinea and Fiji; most still keep theirs in Tel Aviv, often with smaller consulates in Jerusalem.^[3]

In 2024 the International Court of Justice advised that Israel’s presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, which it took to include East Jerusalem, is unlawful. The UN Secretary-General repeated the UN’s position that Jerusalem should be the capital of both an Israeli and a Palestinian state.^[10]

“The specific boundaries of Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem are subject to final status negotiations between the parties.”^[8]