As anyone who has visited the Old City of Israel’s capital knows, it is divided into four sections: Jewish, Muslim, Christian, and Armenian. Shlomo Deutsch explores the origins of this division, and how each quarter evolved:

The first map to include names that resemble the names of today’s four quarters (Armenian, Christian, Muslim, Jewish) was produced by the British lieutenants Edward Aldrich and Julian Simmonds in 1841, and later labeled by Rev. G. Williams in 1849. However, some of these names (Christian and Armenian) already appear in European travelers’ writings in 1806.

The Hebrew University professor Yehoshua Ben-Aryeh suggests that each religious group to move into the Old City built its community around focal points significant to its religion. . . . For Muslims, the Temple Mount, which houses the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa mosque, served as a major force of attraction. . . . The Christian community took root around the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.

Armenians, [the vast majority] of whom were Christian, were drawn by the Church of St. James, their most significant church in the Old City. The scope of the Armenian quarter is elusive, some defining it only as a certain walled-off area that was locked at nights.

Initially, the Jewish Quarter spanned from the “Street of the Jews” eastward to the Western Wall (excluding the adjacent Mughrabi neighborhood). . . . At the beginning of the 19th century, the Jewish quarter was almost entirely comprised of Sephardi Jews, with some 2,200 Sephardi Jews and a minimal number of Ashkenazim. Once Ashkenazim began moving in, they chose to settle near the Sephardim, holding their services in several Sephardi synagogues, including the Beit-El synagogue, until the Ashkenazi. community built the Menachem Tzion synagogue in 1837.

If there is to be peace, Palestinians will have to unlearn the hatred of Israel they have imbibed during nearly two decades of Hamas rule. This will be a difficult task, but Cole Aronson argues, drawing on the experiences of World War II, that Israel has already gotten off to a strong start:

The population’s compliance can . . . be won by a new regime that satisfies its immediate material needs, even if that new regime is sponsored by a government until recently at war with the population’s former regime. Axis civilians were made needy through bombing. Peaceful compliance with the Allies became a good alternative to supporting violent resistance to the Allies.

Israel’s current campaign makes a moderate Gaza more likely, not less. Destroying Hamas not only deprives Islamists of the ability to rule—it proves the futility of armed resistance to Israel, a condition for peace. The destruction of buildings not only deprives Hamas of its hideouts. It also gives ordinary Palestinians strong reasons to shun groups planning to replicate Hamas’s behavior.