Mission Failed

It all started with the UN: in November 1947, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the plan to partition the British Mandate of Palestine – with the exception of Jerusalem. This city, to which all three monotheistic religions laid claim (and still do today), was to be entrusted to the UN. But the 1948 Arab–Israeli War thwarted this plan. Jerusalem was divided into east and west, with an exclave in the north-east of the city.

In this book, historian Yfaat Weiss examines the history of this exclave up to the Six-Day War in 1967, drawing on sources scattered right around the world: the United Nation’s futile attempts to bring peace between the conflicting parties of Jordan and Israel, the claims to sovereignty by both parties that were directed against the UN, the outsourced holdings of the National Library, the abandoned institutes of the Hebrew University, the biblical zoo with its starving animals, the neglected cemetery of Commonwealth soldiers who died in the First World War, the confiscated Augusta Victoria Hospital, and the Palestinian village of Issawiya in the middle of the exclave, where history reaches into the present.