West Bank

The West Bank holds one of the densest concentrations of sites sacred to Judaism, Christianity and Islam anywhere, and access to almost all of them is administered as a security question rather than a religious one.

Bethlehem holds the Church of the Nativity, built over a cave identified in the fourth century as the birthplace of Jesus and one of the oldest churches in continuous use in the world, run under the same status quo arrangement as the Holy Sepulchre. Hebron holds the enclosure over the cave of the patriarchs, a Herodian structure venerated by Jews as the burial place of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob with their wives, and by Muslims as the Ibrahimi Mosque. Nablus sits below Mount Gerizim. Jericho, Bethany, Mar Saba and a dozen desert monasteries are in the same territory.

The name itself is contested. West Bank is a modern geographic term describing the land west of the Jordan river; Judea and Samaria are the older names, and their use in modern political speech signals a position on sovereignty. The atlas records the dispute rather than resolving it, and uses the more neutral term for the row.

The situation has been legally disputed since 1967, and religious access has been a recurring flashpoint. UNESCO inscribed the old town of Hebron on the World Heritage list in 2017, a decision that was itself the subject of political protest.

The Ibrahimi Mosque and Cave of the Patriarchs at Hebron is the clearest case anywhere of a religious building physically partitioned between two communities, and of what that costs.

The Herodian enclosure over the cave has been in Muslim use as a mosque since the seventh century, with Jewish access restricted for long periods; from the Mamluk era until 1967 Jews were permitted no further than the seventh step outside. After 1967 the site was opened to both communities under Israeli control, with the space shared and prayer times allocated.

In February 1994 an Israeli settler entered during dawn prayers in Ramadan and shot worshippers, killing twenty nine people and wounding many more before being killed himself. The Israeli commission of inquiry that followed recommended separation, and the building was divided: roughly four fifths allocated to Jewish worship and one fifth to Muslim worship, with separate entrances, metal detectors and soldiers, and a small number of days each year when each side has full access.

The arrangement has held for three decades and satisfies nobody. Palestinian residents describe it as the seizure of a mosque; Jewish worshippers describe restrictions on their own access; the surrounding old city has been substantially emptied by closures and checkpoints. It is included here because it shows what the management of a shared holy place looks like when the status quo model has already failed.