Hey everyone, welcome back to My Weird Prompts. I am Corn, and today we are diving into a topic that is quite literally right outside our front door here in Jerusalem. Our housemate Daniel sent us a prompt that really struck a chord because it is about the ghosts of this city. Specifically, the border that divided Jerusalem from nineteen forty-eight to nineteen sixty-seven. It is February fifth, twenty twenty-six, and even now, nearly sixty years after that border fell, you can still feel the draft coming off those old lines.
Herman Poppleberry, at your service. And Corn, you are right. It is fascinating how a city can have such a massive, physical scar for nineteen years, and then, almost overnight, it is gone. Daniel was asking about the actual process of removing that border, the physical demolition, and what happened to the people caught in the middle. It is a period that feels like it should be heavily documented, but as Daniel pointed out, the transition itself happened so fast that it almost feels like a blur in the historical record. We have the 'before' photos of the walls, and the 'after' photos of the unified city, but the 'during'—the actual dust and the diesel smoke of the demolition—is surprisingly elusive.
It really does feel like a missing chapter. We talk about the Green Line all the time in a political sense, but the physical reality of the City Line, as it was called, was brutal. It was not just a line on a map. It was concrete walls, snipers, minefields, and barbed wire cutting through the heart of urban neighborhoods. Herman, you have been digging into the archives for this. What did that physical barrier actually look like on a Tuesday afternoon in, say, nineteen sixty-four?
It was grim, Corn. Imagine walking down a normal street, and suddenly there is a two-story-high concrete wall blocking your path. The City Line ran for about seven kilometers through Jerusalem. In some places, like the Musrara neighborhood or near the Notre Dame building, the houses on either side were just meters apart, but they were separated by a No Man’s Land filled with ruins and mines. There were snipers stationed on the rooftops of the Old City walls and on the roofs of the Israeli side. People literally lived their lives in the shadow of these walls, knowing that if they hung their laundry too high or stepped into the wrong alley, they could be shot. There was even a spot called 'Death Alley' near the Old City where the walls were so close that a wrong turn meant certain death.
And the 'No Man's Land' itself wasn't just empty space, right? It was a graveyard of the nineteen forty-eight war.
Exactly. It was a strip of land, sometimes only ten meters wide, sometimes hundreds, that belonged to nobody. It was filled with the skeletons of houses that had been bombed out in nineteen forty-eight. Over nineteen years, these ruins became overgrown with thorns and weeds. It became a sanctuary for stray dogs and rats, and it was seeded with thousands of anti-personnel mines. The most famous part was the Mandelbaum Gate, which wasn't really a gate but a fortified checkpoint in the middle of a residential neighborhood. It was the only official crossing point, used mainly by diplomats, clergy, and the occasional convoy to the Israeli enclave on Mount Scopus.
And then came June nineteen sixty-seven. The Six-Day War happens, the city is captured by the Israeli military, and suddenly, the border is technically gone. But Daniel’s question is about the physical removal. Most people imagine a slow, bureaucratic process of dismantling a border. Was that the case?
Not at all. It was actually incredibly aggressive. The war ended on June eleventh, and by June twenty-ninth, the walls were being torn down. Teddy Kollek, who was the mayor of West Jerusalem at the time, was obsessed with the idea of unification through infrastructure. He did not want to wait for a peace treaty or a political settlement to make the city feel like one. He basically ordered the municipal engineering departments to start knocking things down immediately. He famously said that if the walls stayed up for even a few months, they would become permanent in people's minds. He wanted to create 'facts on the ground.'
I remember reading about the bulldozers. It was not a delicate deconstruction. It was more like a demolition derby, right?
Exactly. There is this amazing, though rare, footage of these massive D-nine bulldozers just ramming into the concrete walls that divided the city. They started at the Mandelbaum Gate and then moved through places like the Jaffa Gate and the Mamilla neighborhood. They worked around the clock. Within just a few weeks, the primary physical barriers were gone. But here is the thing most people do not realize: they were not just removing walls. They were clearing out nineteen years of accumulated filth, rubble, and unexploded ordnance in the No Man’s Land. The sheer volume of trash was staggering. We are talking about two decades of garbage that had been tossed over the walls from both sides.
That No Man’s Land fascinates me. We touched on this a bit in episode two hundred ninety-one when we talked about the divided city, but the technical challenge of clearing it must have been a nightmare. You have nineteen years of weeds, collapsed buildings from the nineteen forty-eight war, and literally thousands of landmines right in the middle of a city.
It was a massive engineering feat. The Israeli army’s engineering corps had to go in first to clear the mines. They used these long probes and metal detectors, working inch by inch while the rest of the city was already starting to mingle. Can you imagine that? People were walking across the former border to see their old houses, while just ten feet away, a soldier is flagging a live mine. It was chaotic and dangerous. They also had to deal with the ruins. There were hundreds of buildings that had been sitting in No Man’s Land, rotting since nineteen forty-eight. Most of them were simply leveled to create open spaces or new roads. This is why the 'Seam Line' today has so many wide parks and highways—they are built on the footprint of that cleared-out No Man's Land.
This brings up a really interesting point about the speed of it. If you move that fast, you are bound to destroy things that perhaps should have been preserved. Was there a sense of loss in that reunification process, or was it all just celebration?
That is a great question, Corn. For the residents of East Jerusalem, the removal of the border was a double-edged sword. On one hand, the physical walls were gone. On the other hand, the sudden influx of Israeli planners and bulldozers meant that entire swaths of their neighborhoods were being reshaped without their input. The most jarring example is the Moroccan Quarter, also known as the Mughrabi Quarter. This was a neighborhood right next to the Western Wall that had existed for eight hundred years. On the night of June tenth, nineteen sixty-seven, just as the war was ending, Israeli authorities gave the residents a few hours' notice and then bulldozed the entire quarter—one hundred thirty-five houses and a mosque—to create the large plaza we see today. Hundreds of people were evicted in a single night. So, while the border was being erased, a new kind of displacement was happening simultaneously.
That is a heavy realization. The creation of the plaza we all know today was essentially a lightning-fast urban renewal project born out of war. And what about the families? Daniel asked if families who had been split apart were reunited. We know that for nineteen years, the only way to communicate was often shouting across the No Man’s Land.
The 'Shouting Fences' were a real thing, especially in the Musrara neighborhood. Families would stand on rooftops or balconies on either side of the barbed wire and literally scream news to each other. 'Aunt Fatima had a baby!' or 'Grandpa passed away!' It was the only way to bypass the postal blockades. When the fences came down, the human stories were incredible. There are accounts of people simply walking across the former line and knocking on doors. There was this famous story of a family in the Abu Tor neighborhood. The border ran right through the middle of that neighborhood—literally through people's backyards. Some families had brothers on one side and sisters on the other. When the fences came down, people were running into each other’s arms in the middle of the street, many of them meeting nieces and nephews they had only ever seen through binoculars.
But it wasn't all happy reunions, was it? There must have been a lot of heartbreak when people found their old homes.
Absolutely. Imagine walking back to the house your family fled in nineteen forty-eight, only to find a different family living there, or finding that your childhood home had been turned into a military bunker or simply demolished to make way for a concrete wall. There was a profound sense of 'temporal vertigo.' You are standing in a place you remember perfectly, but twenty years of history have layered over it in ways you can't reconcile. For many Palestinians from West Jerusalem, they could now walk to their old homes, but they couldn't reclaim them because of the Israeli legal system. They were visitors in their own history.
It must have been such a profound culture shock. You have two populations that have lived within walking distance for two decades but have had zero contact. Suddenly, they are sharing the same bus lines and the same markets.
The economic shock was probably the most immediate daily life change. In West Jerusalem, the currency was the Israeli Lira. In East Jerusalem, it was the Jordanian Dinar. Suddenly, you had shops in the Old City trying to figure out exchange rates on the fly. The prices were vastly different. For the first few months, West Jerusalemites flooded into the East because everything was so much cheaper—spices, fabrics, and household goods. Meanwhile, East Jerusalemites were coming West to see the modern shops and theaters they had only heard about. It was this massive, messy, beautiful, and tense social experiment. But it also led to the 'Dinar Crisis' where the Jordanian currency was eventually phased out, wiping out the savings of many East Jerusalem residents who couldn't exchange their money fast enough or at fair rates.
I wonder about the infrastructure, too. We talked about this in episode two hundred four when we discussed the vertical revolution in Jerusalem, but the plumbing and electricity must have been a disaster to connect. You have two different grids, two different water systems, two different sewage layouts that have been separate for twenty years.
You hit on the real technical nightmare there, Corn. The water systems were completely incompatible. West Jerusalem got its water from the coastal plain, pumped up through the mountains via the 'Burma Road' pipelines. East Jerusalem relied more on local springs like Ein Feshkha and cisterns, as well as water coming from the Ramallah area. When the border fell, the city engineers had to literally dig up the streets to connect pipes that had been capped off since nineteen forty-eight. There are stories of engineers finding old British Mandate-era maps from the nineteen thirties to try and locate where the sewage lines were supposed to meet. It took years to fully integrate the systems. Even the electricity was a mess—East Jerusalem was served by the Jerusalem District Electricity Company, which was a private Arab-owned firm, while the West was served by the national Israel Electric Corporation. They had to build massive transformer stations just to get the two grids to talk to each other without blowing the fuses of the entire city.
That is the thing about erasing a border. You can knock down the wall in a day with a D-nine, but the 'seam' remains. Even now, in twenty twenty-six, you can still see where the border was if you know what to look for. The architecture changes, the street lights change, even the species of trees planted along the road can tell you which side of the line you are on.
Absolutely. If you walk along the Hatzanchanim Road, which follows the path of the old wall, you can see how the city was stitched back together. There is this wide, open space that feels slightly unnatural for an ancient city. That is because it was built on top of the No Man’s Land. They turned a lot of it into parks and highways to act as a buffer or a connector. But the psychological border is much harder to erase than the physical one. In many ways, the 'City Line' just became an invisible barrier of socioeconomic status and municipal neglect. If you look at the sidewalk quality or the frequency of trash pickup today, you can still trace the nineteen sixty-seven line with startling accuracy.
I want to go back to Daniel’s point about the lack of documentation. Why do you think there is so little photographic evidence of the actual transition? We have photos of the division and photos of the unified city, but that middle part—the weeks of demolition—seems sparse.
I think it is because it was treated as a military operation and a municipal emergency rather than a historical event to be curated. People were moving so fast. The municipality was in 'fix it now' mode. Also, you have to remember that in June nineteen sixty-seven, the world’s media was focused on the broader war and the political fallout at the United Nations. The granular details of a bulldozer knocking down a wall in a Jerusalem alleyway probably did not seem like front-page news compared to the shifting borders of the entire Middle East. It was a functional demolition, not a ceremonial one. It was not like the Berlin Wall where people were chipping away at it with hammers for the cameras. It was a city government saying, 'This wall is in the way of our traffic plan, knock it down.'
That makes sense. It was a pragmatic erasure. But that approach had consequences. By treating it as a technical problem to be solved with heavy machinery, they bypassed a lot of the social and emotional processing that needed to happen. For the Jewish residents, it was a return to their holy sites. For the Arab residents, it was the beginning of an occupation that fundamentally changed their legal status overnight.
Exactly. On June twenty-seventh, nineteen sixty-seven, the Knesset passed the Law and Administration Ordinance Amendment Number Eleven. That was the legal 'bulldozer.' It allowed the government to apply Israeli law, jurisdiction, and administration to any area of the Land of Israel it designated by decree. The next day, they issued the decree for East Jerusalem. It was a total legal absorption. One day you were under Jordanian law, the next, you were under Israeli law. No transition period, no transition committee. Just a straight swap. This is why East Jerusalemites today are 'permanent residents' rather than citizens—it was a legal status created in the haste of that June unification.
Let’s talk about that practical side. If you were a resident of East Jerusalem on June twenty-eighth, nineteen sixty-seven, and the wall comes down on the twenty-ninth, how does your day-to-day life change immediately?
Your world expands and shrinks at the same time. It expands because you can now walk to the western part of the city, which was previously a forbidden zone. You can see the neighborhoods your parents or grandparents might have lived in, like Talbiya or Katamon. But it shrinks because you are now under a military government. You have to get new ID cards. Your currency is being phased out. Your schools now have to deal with a new curriculum. And perhaps most importantly, the border did not just 'disappear'—it moved. It moved from the center of the city to the outskirts, effectively cutting East Jerusalem off from its traditional hinterland of towns like Bethlehem and Ramallah. The 'reunification' of the city was also a 'disconnection' from the West Bank.
That is an incredible point. While the city was becoming whole, the region was being fractured in new ways. And for the West Jerusalemites, the change was more about a sense of relief and curiosity. The constant threat of snipers was gone. You could finally walk around the walls of the Old City without being in the sights of a Jordanian Legionnaire. The city felt 'breathable' for the first time in two decades. Before nineteen sixty-seven, West Jerusalem was essentially at the end of a long, narrow corridor of Israeli territory. It was a dead-end city. After the border fell, it became a hub again.
There are records of people being shocked at how small the city actually was. When you are separated by a wall, the 'other side' becomes this vast, mysterious, and often terrifying place in your imagination. When the walls came down, people realized that Jerusalem is actually quite compact. You can walk from the heart of West Jerusalem to the heart of the Old City in fifteen minutes. That physical proximity made the nineteen years of separation seem even more absurd in retrospect.
It reminds me of that story Daniel mentioned in his email—the one about the nun and her dentures. It sounds like a legend, but it actually happened, right?
Oh, the Notre Dame story! Yes, it is a classic of the divided city era. Sister Sophie, a nun at the Notre Dame de France convent, which sat right on the border, accidentally dropped her dentures out of a window and they landed in the No Man's Land. Because that strip of land was filled with mines and snipers, she couldn't just go get them. It actually became a diplomatic incident. They had to coordinate with the United Nations and the Red Cross to get a search party out there. A French officer and a group of soldiers eventually went into the weeds to find a set of false teeth. It took days of negotiation between two hostile armies just to get a nun her teeth back. It perfectly illustrates how absurd the division was. The fact that a pair of dentures could become a international negotiation is just... Jerusalem in a nutshell.
It really is. And it makes you appreciate the fact that today, if you drop your teeth, you can just walk over and pick them up yourself. That is progress, I suppose. So, if we look at the legacy of this today, what are the takeaways for someone trying to understand Jerusalem in twenty twenty-six? We still talk about East and West. We still have the Seam Line. Did the removal of the border actually unify the city, or did it just hide the division?
I think it created a 'transparent' border. The physical walls are gone, but the socioeconomic and psychological barriers are still very much there. If you look at a map of municipal investment, or the quality of the roads, or the presence of police, you can still trace the nineteen sixty-seven line. The city is unified in name and law, but it is still two very different urban experiences living side-by-side. The light rail, which we use every day, was designed specifically to 'stitch' these areas together, but even on the train, you can see the demographics shift as you cross that invisible line.
It is a reminder that you can change the physical landscape much faster than you can change the human landscape. You can clear a minefield in a month, but clearing the mistrust and the history of conflict takes generations, if it happens at all. And for Daniel, who was asking about the documentation, I think the 'lack' of photos is actually part of the story. It tells us that the focus was on the future, on the 'new reality,' and that there was a collective desire—at least on the Israeli side—to erase the memory of the division as quickly as possible. They did not want to document the border; they wanted it to never have existed.
That is a powerful thought. The erasure was not just physical; it was an attempt at an archival erasure too. But the city remembers. The buildings that were pockmarked by bullets are still there. The weirdly wide roads are still there. The ghosts are still there. If you go to the Seam Line today, especially in neighborhoods like Musrara, you can see these 'memory projects' where they have placed plaques and old photos of the walls. It is almost like the city is finally comfortable enough to look back at that period, now that it feels like ancient history to the younger generations.
Well, Herman, thank you for digging into the technical details of the demolition. I think we gave Daniel a bit more of the 'how' and 'why' behind that missing chapter of history. For anyone listening who is interested in how these divisions shape a city, I highly recommend checking out episode two hundred ninety-four, where we looked at the Israel-Syria DMZ. It is a very different kind of border, but it shares that same sense of a 'frozen' landscape.
And if you are in Jerusalem, take a walk from the Notre Dame building down towards the New Gate. Look at the stones. Look at where the new pavement meets the old. You are walking right on top of nineteen years of No Man’s Land. It is a heavy feeling once you know it is there.
It really is. Well, that is all for today’s deep dive. If you have been enjoying My Weird Prompts and find these explorations valuable, we would really appreciate it if you could leave us a review on your podcast app or on Spotify. It genuinely helps other people find the show and allows us to keep digging into these strange, niche topics.
Yeah, it really does help. We love seeing your feedback and hearing what prompts you want us to tackle next. You can find all our past episodes, including the ones we mentioned today, at myweirdprompts dot com. We have a full archive there and a contact form if you want to send us your own weird prompt.
Huge thanks to Daniel for sending this one in. It definitely made me look at my morning commute a little differently this week. Alright, let's get some lunch. I hear there is a great hummus place right on the old border line in Musrara.
Of course there is. Lead the way, Corn. Just watch out for any invisible walls.
Very funny, Herman. Very funny. This has been My Weird Prompts. We will see you next time.
Until next time! Bye everyone!
