The Ethnic Cleansing of Jerusalem’s Jews Under Jordanian Rule

Today at the UN King Abdullah accused Israel of forced displacement and erasing Palestinian life.

Every one of his accusations are in fact a confession.

When Jordan seized East Jerusalem and large parts of Judea and Samaria during the 1948 war, Jewish life disappeared from the territory it controlled.

The Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City was emptied of its Jewish population. Jewish communities around Jerusalem and in Gush Etzion were destroyed or abandoned amid fighting and siege. The surviving defenders of several communities were taken into Jordanian captivity.

What followed during 19 years of Jordanian rule was not merely a change of sovereignty.

Jewish communities did not return. Synagogues were destroyed or desecrated. The ancient Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives suffered extensive destruction. Jews were barred from the Western Wall and other Jewish holy sites in areas under Jordanian control.

By 1967, there was no functioning Jewish civilian community anywhere in Jordanian controlled East Jerusalem, Judea or Samaria.

The cumulative result was the removal of Jewish communal life from the territory and the destruction of much of its physical religious presence.

Jordan captured and emptied Jerusalem’s Jewish Quarter

The clearest case was the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City.

Jordan’s own official military history describes how the Arab Legion isolated the quarter, attacked it and forced its surrender on May 28, 1948.

The Jordanian account says that the surrender terms provided for Jewish combatants to be taken prisoner while elderly men, women, children and wounded civilians were transferred out of the Old City to Jewish controlled Jerusalem.

The result was unambiguous.

A Jewish community that had existed in the Old City for centuries ceased to exist.

The Knesset’s historical account similarly records that after the Jewish Quarter fell, its defenders were taken prisoner and its synagogues were demolished.

For the next 19 years, there was no Jewish population in Jerusalem’s Old City.

The destruction extended beyond the Old City

The disappearance of Jewish communities was not confined to the walls of Jerusalem.

North of the city, the Jewish settlements of Atarot and Neve Yaakov had become isolated during the fighting. Israeli archival material describes both as Jewish communities cut off within predominantly Arab surroundings during the siege of Jerusalem.

Atarot was evacuated as its military position became untenable, and its defenders withdrew toward Neve Yaakov. Neve Yaakov was subsequently abandoned as well.

South of Jerusalem, the four communities of Gush Etzion also ceased to exist during the war.

Kfar Etzion fell after heavy fighting involving Arab forces and Jordan’s Arab Legion. The remaining settlements in the bloc surrendered, their surviving defenders were taken prisoner and the Jewish communities were destroyed.

The circumstances were not identical in every location. Some Jews were expelled after surrender, others became prisoners of war, and some isolated settlements were evacuated under military pressure.

But the territorial outcome was the same.

Jewish civilian communities that had existed before the war were gone from the areas that subsequently came under Jordanian control.

Jordanian rule did not permit their return

The disappearance of the Jewish population was not temporary.

Jordan controlled East Jerusalem and the West Bank from 1948 until June 1967.

Throughout that period, the Jewish Quarter remained without its former Jewish residents, and the Jewish communities lost elsewhere in the territory were not restored.

A later Israeli statement to the United Nations described Jordanian controlled Jerusalem as a sector in which Jews were not permitted to live and said the Old City’s Jewish inhabitants had been driven out and subsequently prevented from returning even as visitors.

By the eve of the Six Day War, nearly two decades had passed without functioning Jewish communities in the territory.

Dozens of synagogues were destroyed

The elimination of Jewish communal life was accompanied by widespread destruction of Jewish religious property.

After Israel captured the Old City in 1967, an Israeli interministerial committee investigated the condition of Jewish holy sites that had been under Jordanian control.

Its findings were stark.

According to a contemporary report on the investigation, 56 of the Jewish Quarter’s 58 synagogues had been destroyed during the 19 years of Jordanian rule.

Israeli documentation subsequently submitted to the United Nations used a different inventory, counting 35 Jewish houses of worship in the Old City and stating that all but one had been destroyed, pillaged or stripped.

The precise totals vary depending on how religious institutions were categorized, but the underlying finding does not. The overwhelming majority of Jewish houses of worship in the quarter were destroyed or severely desecrated.

Among them was the Hurva Synagogue, one of the most prominent synagogues in the Old City.

The destruction was not simply incidental damage left over from the battle of 1948. Israeli documentation described synagogues that survived the fighting as having subsequently been stripped or put to profane uses during Jordanian rule.

The Mount of Olives cemetery was extensively desecrated

The Mount of Olives contains one of the world's oldest and most important Jewish cemeteries.

During the Jordanian period, it suffered catastrophic damage.

Israeli documentation submitted to the United Nations after 1967 reported that tens of thousands of tombstones had been removed, broken or reused as construction material. Areas of the cemetery were leveled, while gravestones were reportedly incorporated into roads, steps and other construction.

A later Israeli statement at the United Nations put the figure at approximately 38,000 damaged or removed tombstones.

The 1967 Israeli investigation likewise described the cemetery as having suffered near total devastation.

The significance went beyond physical destruction.

For centuries, the Mount of Olives had been a central Jewish burial site overlooking the Old City. Under Jordanian control, Israeli Jews could neither freely visit the cemetery nor continue normal use of it.

Jews were denied access to the Western Wall

The disappearance of Jewish communities was accompanied by exclusion from Jewish holy sites.

The 1949 Israel Jordan armistice arrangements envisaged access to religious sites, including Jewish holy places in Jordanian controlled territory.

In practice, Jews from Israel could not visit the Western Wall during the 19 years of Jordanian rule.

They could not freely reach the Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives either.

Israel repeatedly raised the issue internationally and accused Jordan of violating the access provisions of the armistice agreement.

Whatever the broader diplomatic dispute between the two states, the outcome on the ground is undisputed. From 1948 until Israel captured the Old City in June 1967, Jews living in Israel could not pray at the Western Wall.

For a people whose historical and religious connection to Jerusalem stretches back millennia, that exclusion was not a peripheral detail.

Jewish Jerusalem was reduced to the western half of the divided city

The effect of the 1948 war was to divide Jerusalem physically and demographically.

West Jerusalem remained under Israeli control and retained a large Jewish population.

East Jerusalem, including the Old City, came under Jordanian control.

Barbed wire, walls, military positions and minefields separated the two halves.

Inside the Jordanian held sector, however, the prewar Jewish civilian presence vanished.

Jordan’s own military history acknowledges the capture of the Jewish Quarter and the removal of its civilian population following surrender.

The Jewish religious landscape then suffered extensive destruction over the following 19 years.

This combination matters.

The historical record is not limited to Jews losing a battle or temporarily evacuating a war zone.

A territory containing longstanding Jewish communities came under Jordanian rule. Its Jewish civilian population disappeared. Jews were prevented from returning. Major Jewish religious sites were destroyed or desecrated. Access to remaining holy places was denied.

That condition persisted until Jordan lost the territory in 1967.

The Jewish presence returned only after 1967

The situation changed during the Six Day War.

After fighting began between Israel and Jordan in June 1967, Israeli forces captured East Jerusalem and the Old City.

For the first time in 19 years, Jews could again reach the Western Wall.

Jewish burial on the Mount of Olives eventually resumed.

The Jewish Quarter was reconstructed and repopulated.

Jewish communities were also reestablished in areas where communities had existed before 1948, including Gush Etzion and Neve Yaakov.

Those developments remain at the center of the modern political dispute over Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria.

But that contemporary debate should not obscure what preceded them.

A Jewish population disappeared under Jordanian rule

From 1948 to 1967, Jordan ruled a territory from which its prewar Jewish civilian communities had disappeared.

The Jewish Quarter had been emptied.

The Jewish settlements of Atarot and Neve Yaakov had ceased to exist.

The communities of Gush Etzion had been destroyed.

Jewish residents could not return to the Old City.

Dozens of synagogues were destroyed or desecrated.

Tens of thousands of graves on the Mount of Olives were damaged.

Jews were barred from praying at the Western Wall.

And for 19 years, no functioning Jewish civilian community existed in Jordanian controlled East Jerusalem, Judea or Samaria.

Those facts provide the historical basis for describing the period as the ethnic cleansing of the Jewish population from the territory that came under Jordanian rule.

The terminology is politically charged.

The demographic result is not.

A Jewish presence that had existed across parts of Jerusalem and Judea for generations was eliminated from Jordanian controlled territory in 1948 and did not return until Jordanian rule ended in 1967.