On paper, East Jerusalem’s roughly 370,000 Palestinian residents are municipal residents of Israel’s self-declared unified capital, entitled to the same city services as their counterparts in the west. In practice, the numbers tell a different story — one measured in blocked sewage pipes, overcrowded classrooms, and social workers who serve caseloads that would be unthinkable on the other side of the city.
For decades, Israeli civil society organisations, most consistently Ir Amim and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), have tracked the gap between municipal rhetoric and municipal spending. What their annual reports document is not a temporary lag in development but a structural, self-reinforcing disparity: East Jerusalem receives an estimated 10 to 12 percent of the Jerusalem municipal budget while accounting for roughly 37 percent of the city’s population.
How the Disparity Is Measured
The figures come primarily from analyses of Jerusalem Municipality budget allocations cross-referenced against population data from the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics and the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics. Ir Amim’s repeated budget reviews, including its detailed Unsafe Space and annual “East Jerusalem” status reports, have tracked line items covering education, infrastructure, welfare, and public works. ACRI’s annual reports on human rights in Israel have corroborated the broad picture across multiple years.
The disparity is not difficult to trace. Municipal budgets in Israeli cities are partially driven by property tax (arnona) collection rates and development history. Because East Jerusalem’s infrastructure was systematically underdeveloped after Israel’s annexation of the area following the 1967 war — an annexation not recognised under international law, including by UN Security Council Resolution 478 (1980) — the baseline from which the municipality operates was already deeply unequal. Low investment produced deteriorated infrastructure; deteriorated infrastructure became the justification for continued low investment.
Sewage, Roads, and the Infrastructure Deficit
The physical consequences are visible across East Jerusalem’s neighbourhoods. Ir Amim has documented that large parts of Silwan, Issawiya, Jabal Mukaber, and Sur Baher lack adequate connection to the city’s sewage network. Residents in some areas rely on cesspits that overflow during heavy rains, creating public health hazards that would trigger immediate municipal response in West Jerusalem.
Road infrastructure follows a similar pattern. The internal road network in many Palestinian neighbourhoods — built, if at all, under Jordanian municipal administration before 1967 and not meaningfully expanded since — is frequently unpaved, unlit, and inaccessible to emergency vehicles. ACRI has noted that this is not simply a historical inheritance: annual infrastructure budgets have continued to allocate disproportionately small sums to East Jerusalem even when the municipality has publicly committed to closing the gap.
Planning restrictions compound the problem. Because the municipality has zoned large portions of East Jerusalem as “green areas” or left them without approved outline plans, Palestinian residents cannot obtain legal building permits. Ir Amim estimates that tens of thousands of housing units in East Jerusalem were built without permits — not because residents preferred informality, but because no legal route to a permit existed. The result is a neighbourhood fabric that the municipality then cites as “unplanned” to justify reduced investment.
The Classroom Crisis in East Jerusalem
Education is perhaps the most documented dimension of the budget gap. According to Ir Amim and ACRI data compiled over successive years, East Jerusalem faces a shortage of thousands of classrooms. A 2022 Ir Amim report indicated a deficit of more than 2,000 classrooms in the East Jerusalem public school system — a figure that translates directly into split shifts, overcrowding, and dropout rates significantly above the Israeli national average.
The Israeli state education system in East Jerusalem operates on a dual track: schools under direct municipality management, and schools run by the Islamic Waqf or private bodies. Under-investment affects both. Teacher recruitment is harder in a system perceived as peripheral; buildings that need renovation sit unrepaired year after year. UNICEF and UNRWA have both flagged the educational environment in East Jerusalem as failing to meet the developmental needs of Palestinian children in the city.
The dropout rate is a downstream consequence. ACRI’s reporting has cited dropout rates among East Jerusalem Palestinian students that are multiples of the rate in Jewish west Jerusalem. For young people who do not complete schooling, the path into formal employment narrows sharply — reinforcing the poverty cycle that the municipality’s own social service data reflects.
Social Services and Welfare: A Per-Capita Gap
The welfare and social services gap may be the least visible but most consequential dimension of the budget disparity. Social workers, welfare offices, youth centres, and community centres are distributed across the city in numbers that do not correspond to East Jerusalem’s share of the population. Ir Amim’s analysis has highlighted that welfare bureau presence in Palestinian neighbourhoods is thin relative to both need and population size.
Poverty rates in East Jerusalem are severe. The National Insurance Institute of Israel (Bituach Leumi) has consistently reported that the majority of East Jerusalem’s Palestinian population lives below the Israeli poverty line — figures that in some years have exceeded 75 to 80 percent of families in the eastern part of the city. Yet the social service infrastructure designed to respond to poverty remains oriented toward the west.
ACRI has also highlighted barriers that prevent East Jerusalem Palestinians from accessing the services that do exist: language barriers in a Hebrew-language bureaucracy, documentation requirements tied to Israeli ID status, and offices located in areas difficult to reach without crossing through Jewish neighbourhoods where many Palestinians feel unwelcome or unsafe.
Structural Inequality and Its Legal Context
International human rights law is unambiguous about the obligations of an occupying power. The Fourth Geneva Convention, to which Israel is a signatory, requires that the occupying authority maintain public health, welfare, and basic services for the occupied population. UN OHCHR and successive UN Special Rapporteurs on the situation in the occupied Palestinian territory have cited Israel’s failure to equitably provide municipal services in East Jerusalem as a violation of these obligations.
Israel disputes the applicability of the Fourth Geneva Convention to East Jerusalem on the grounds that it considers the area annexed sovereign territory — but that annexation is itself the act that international consensus, including the UN Security Council, has refused to recognise. The legal circularity does not resolve the lived reality: 37 percent of the population sharing roughly 10 percent of the budget, in a city whose mayor controls both sides of the line.
For the families in Silwan waiting for a sewage line that has been “under review” for years, or the students attending school in shifts because there are not enough rooms, the budget gap is not an abstraction. It is the texture of daily life under a municipal system that counts them as residents when convenient and funds them as afterthoughts when it matters.
Sources
- Ir Amim, East Jerusalem: The Current Situation and annual status reports (various years), ir-amim.org.il
- Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), Annual Reports on Human Rights in Israel (various years), acri.org.il
- UN Security Council Resolution 478 (1980)
- Fourth Geneva Convention (1949), Articles 55–56
- UN OHCHR, reports of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967
- UNICEF, reports on education in the occupied Palestinian territory
- UNRWA, East Jerusalem education programme documentation
- Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics, Jerusalem Statistical Yearbook (various years)
- National Insurance Institute of Israel (Bituach Leumi), poverty reports (various years)
