City-Zenship in the Void: How East Jerusalem Palestinians Navigate Human Rights Through Integration and Separation

This paper examines how non-naturalized Palestinians in East Jerusalem articulate claims to rights within the urban sphere, exploring whether these claims are pursued through integration into city life or through group-bounded, separation practices. The study focuses on the ongoing water crisis in Kufr Aqab, where residents experience severely limited access to running water during the hottest months – a condition rooted in disputes between Palestinian and Israeli authorities. Drawing on local documents and interviews, the paper employs the concept of urban citizenship, or city-zenship, to argue that non-naturalized Palestinians legitimize their claims to human rights through their belonging to the city, leveraging this platform to pursue mixed practices of engagement with municipal institutions on the one hand and to form community-based responses on the other. By proposing the urban rights system as a distinct analytical framework, the research examines how rival groups negotiate, contest, and redefine human rights in divided cities. It advances an explanatory account of urban rights claiming among ethno-nationally marginalized groups, identifying the mechanisms of urban citizenship that foster integration across ethno-national lines, and the conditions under which they generate autonomous, community-based responses.