Who ruled Jerusalem?

Jerusalem sits on a limestone plateau in the Judaean hills, between the Mediterranean coast and the Dead Sea. It has no great river or harbour; a reliable spring, defensible ridges and its place on routes through the hill country explain its early growth. What sets it apart is its religious meaning. It is the holiest city of Judaism, the place of Jesus's death and resurrection in Christianity, and the third holiest city of Islam, and control of it has been contested for three thousand years.

The first settlement grew up near the Gihon Spring by about 3000 BCE, and the city appears as Rusalimum in Egyptian texts of around 2000 BCE. In the 14th century BCE its Canaanite ruler wrote to the pharaoh in the Amarna letters. According to the Hebrew Bible, David took the city from the Jebusites and made it his capital, and Solomon built the First Temple there; historians date these kings to the 10th century BCE but still debate how large the city then was. It later served as the capital of the kingdom of Judah. In 587 or 586 BCE the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II destroyed the city and the Temple and deported much of its elite.

After the Persian conquest of Babylon, exiles returned and completed the Second Temple around 516 BCE. Jerusalem passed to Alexander's successors, and the Maccabean revolt of the 160s BCE created an independent Jewish state under the Hasmonean dynasty. Rome took control in 63 BCE, and Herod the Great rebuilt the Temple on a vast platform. Jesus was crucified outside the city walls around 30 CE. A Jewish revolt against Rome ended in 70 CE when Roman forces destroyed the city and the Second Temple. After a second revolt in the 130s, the emperor Hadrian refounded the city as a Roman colony, Aelia Capitolina, and barred Jews from it.

When the Roman Empire became Christian, Constantine built the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and Jerusalem became a pilgrimage centre. Arab forces took the city around 638 under the caliph Umar. Under the Umayyads the Dome of the Rock was completed in 691 or 692 on the Temple platform, known to Muslims as the Haram al-Sharif, and the al-Aqsa Mosque was built beside it. In 1099 the armies of the First Crusade captured Jerusalem and killed many of its Muslim and Jewish inhabitants. Saladin retook it in 1187. Apart from brief periods, it then stayed under Muslim rule, passing to the Mamluks and, in 1516, to the Ottoman Empire. Suleiman the Magnificent built the walls that still enclose the Old City.

In the 19th century the population grew and new neighbourhoods spread beyond the walls. British forces captured the city in December 1917, and it became the capital of Mandatory Palestine. The 1947 UN partition plan proposed placing Jerusalem under international administration, but the war of 1948 left it divided, with the west held by Israel and the east, including the Old City, held by Jordan. In the 1967 Six-Day War Israel captured East Jerusalem and later applied Israeli law there.

The city's status remains one of the central issues of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel regards the whole city as its capital. The Palestinians seek East Jerusalem as the capital of a future state of Palestine. The UN Security Council and most countries consider East Jerusalem occupied territory and keep their embassies elsewhere, though the United States recognised Jerusalem as Israel's capital in 2017 and moved its embassy there in 2018. The city has about a million inhabitants, roughly three-fifths Jewish and two-fifths Arab.