ABSTRACT This article aims to analyze the history of the Musrara neighborhood in Jerusalem from its foundation to the period following the Six Day war, adopting the perspective of urban microhistory. Using Musrara as a lens of analysis makes it possible to highlight how the constant reconfiguration of Jerusalem’s urban space reflects not only the social, political, and cultural dynamics of the region, but also the specific ways in which these processes acquired distinctive meanings within the boundaries of the neighborhood itself. Through oral history and direct testimonies, this article retraces the lives of Musrara’s new Mizrahim residents against the backdrop of ethnic and socioeconomic discrimination and the Arab Israeli conflict, while also examining the development of a political consciousness among them.
Musrara was a Palestinian bourgeois neighborhood until 1948, a frontier zone of a marginalized Mizrahi subproletariat between 1948 and 1967, a theatre of war and social conflict, and eventually a concrete and symbolic hinge between East and West following the Six Day War. The transformation of urban space thus sheds light on the interaction between national conflict and the ethno-social question—two crucial aspects for a more analytically comprehensive historical reconstruction of Israel and Palestine, the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, and the different degrees of subalternity produced by social hierarchies and nationalism.
issue 29 / n.1 (2026)
