ABSTRACT
After the Israeli conquest of East Jerusalem in 1967, a process started in which several Palestinian Old City neighbourhoods were placed in the past and an administratively defined and ethno-religiously exclusive ‘enlarged Jewish Quarter’ was established. This process included not only the eviction of the neighbourhoods’ vast majority of residents, but also a marginalisation on two levels: both the spatial and social restriction of everyday life for those Palestinians who remained in this area (spatial marginalisation) and the fading individual memory and lacking basis for collective memory of those neighbourhoods (temporal marginalisation). Based on biographical case reconstructions of a Palestinian man who was evicted and a woman whose family remained, I show that Israeli policies are driving this process of marginalisation, though it is also connected to inter-Palestinian established-outsider relations. Conceptually, I discuss the relations between biography and place, first, as biographical processes of emplacement, and second, as memories of place within self-presentations in interviews.
