The articles in this book examine a number of issues related to the transformations undergone by Palestinian cities from the late-nineteenth century until the present. What brings them together is their emphasis on the importance of historical and political factors, specifically the role of Israeli colonialism, in disfiguring Palestinian cities and stunting their historical growth. They analyze the Judaization of those cities in the areas occupied in 1948, including Jerusalem, through systematic policies aimed to transform the Palestinian city inside the 1948 areas into a ghetto (as well as those in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, occupied since 1967).
All of these articles examine several important questions related to the historical evolution of Palestinian cities: the reconfiguration of their urban space; the transformations that impacted these cities’ morphological and demographic composition; the effect of globalization and neoliberal policies on the formation of new class structures; the social impact of the accelerating urbanization and urban expansion witnessed by these cities post-Oslo accords on the components that make up their social structure; the cities’ relationship to their rural surroundings; the mechanisms through which urban resistance movements materialize in them and the role of these movements in strengthening an overall sense of national and cultural identity; and the circulation and intertwining of cultural and political activity from one city to another (for example, from Haifa and Jaffa to Nazareth and Ramallah).