Jerusalem is once again stirring powerful emotions around the world after US President Donald Trump recognised the city as Israel's capital on Wednesday.
Here are five things to know about the divided city:
Current status
Israel seized control of Palestinian's east Jerusalem from
Jordan during a 1967 war and later annexed it. The move was never
recognised by the international community but Israel declared the city
its undivided capital. The Palestinians see east Jerusalem as the
capital of their future state.
No countries [now except
the US] have accepted Israeli sovereignty and have their embassies in
the commercial capital Tel Aviv instead. The city's eastern sector
contains some of the sites holiest to Judaism, Islam, and Christianity.
Divided population in the holy city
Jerusalem's population is divided not only between Israeli
Jews and Palestinians but also within the Jewish population, with over a
third of the city's 542,000 adult Jewish residents defining themselves
as ultra-Orthodox, according to the Central Bureau of Statistics.
The
ultra-Orthodox are the fastest growing segment in the city, with over
two-thirds of elementary school children enrolled in their schools in
Jerusalem.
Palestinians in Jerusalem have Israeli residency and access to services.
Most
Palestinians do not partake in municipal elections and cannot vote in
parliamentary elections. NGOs in support of them denounce what they
describe as the unequal distribution of resources and services in east
and west Jerusalem.
Life in Jerusalem
Alongside the religious sites, institutions, and people,
Jerusalem is host to Israel's top higher education facility, the Hebrew
University, whose founding fathers include Albert Einstein and Sigmund
Freud.
The Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Sam
Spiegel Film and Television School and Nissan Nativ acting studio are
some of the institutions that draw Israel's most talented artists.
The
Palestinian National Theatre is among the rare Palestinian institutions
located in Jerusalem. Israeli authorities do not allow the Palestinian
Authority to operate in the city.
Tourism capital
According to the Central Bureau of Statistics, 78 per cent
of the three million tourists who entered Israel in 2016 visited
Jerusalem.
The most popular destinations were the
Western Wall along with the Christian holy sites at the Church of the
Holy Sepulchre and Via Dolorosa, all in the walled Old City.
Other
popular tourist sites are Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem and the Israel
Museum, home to a collection of nearly 500,000 objects of art and
archaeology, ancient and modern, including the Dead Sea Scrolls which
date back more than two millennia and include some of the earliest texts
from the Bible.
Muslim pilgrims visit the Al-Aqsa mosque
compound, the third-holiest site in Islam. The compound is known to
Jews as the Temple Mount, their holiest site.
Jerusalem Syndrome
Jerusalem is one of the few cities worldwide to have a
psychiatric condition named after it. The rare condition affects
tourists who come to visit holy sites of Christianity, Judaism and Islam
and suddenly find themselves overwhelmed by it all, believing
themselves to be characters from the Bible, Dr Grigory Katz, a
psychiatrist at Jerusalem's Kfar Shaul Mental Health Center and an
expert on the syndrome, said.
The syndrome is rare, but
when it strikes, it usually affects Protestant pilgrims from small-town
America or Scandinavia raised in pious families whose trip to the Holy
Land may be their first ever abroad.
Many of those
afflicted by the condition become convinced they are Jesus Christ, the
Virgin Mary or some other character from the Bible, but symptoms don't
tend to last long, and medication can help bring patients back to
“normalcy” within days.
