Jerusalem: Abu Dis, the town earmarked for the Palestinian capital in US President Donald Trump’s Middle East peace plan, lies a short distance to the east of Jerusalem’s walled Old City.
A relatively featureless urban sprawl on the old road to Jericho, it has little of the religious or cultural resonance of the historic city centre, which contains sites sacred to the three great monotheistic faiths: Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
Abu Dis belongs to the Palestinian governorate of Jerusalem but is just outside the Israeli municipal city limits set by Israel after it captured East Jerusalem from Jordan in 1967, later annexing it in a move not recognised by most of the international community.
What the neighbourhood does have is a large shuttered building that was constructed in an earlier, more hopeful era to be a site for the parliament of the Palestinian Authority.
That hall now lies abandoned and disused after the breakdown of the Oslo peace process and the outbreak of the second Palestinian Intifada, or uprising, two decades ago.
Since then, Palestinians in Abu Dis have been cut off from Jerusalem neighbourhoods to the west by a high concrete wall that Israel built to stop suicide bombers and gunmen entering the city.
Read the article by Stephen Farrell and Rami Ayyub in the Brisbane Times.