Mapping Divided Jerusalem

In honor of Jerusalem Day—which falls this Sunday, and celebrates the reunification of the city in 1967—the National Library of Israel has made available historic Israeli and Jordanian maps from the years when the eastern parts of the city were occupied by Jordan. David Cohen describes some of the more notable examples. (Reproductions of the maps can be found at the link below.)

An Israeli tourist map of western Jerusalem from the late 1950s was oriented with east at the top, instead of a standard northward orientation. . . . In other maps, both sides of the city are presented in detail, with the boundary line highlighted in the middle. These maps were designed to present tourists with a full picture of the city, but adapted to the new political realities created following the cease-fire in November 1948.

A pictorial map of Jerusalem, issued by [the distinguished] Steimatzky publishing house in 1955, was printed with the dividing line crossing Jerusalem. This was not a new map of Jerusalem, but a re-publication of a map that was first published about a decade earlier. A Jordanian tourist map that was published in Jerusalem in 1952 also shows the entire city of Jerusalem, with the borderline crossing it. It marks the various parts of the city as “UN-controlled territories,” “Jewish-controlled territory,” and “no-man’s land.”

Read more at The Librarians

More about: Israeli history, Jerusalem, Jordan

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF