FORGOTTEN STORIES ABOUT THE JERUSALEM PALACE HOTEL

(in short)​

With the construction of the Palace Hotel Jerusalem at the end of the 1920s, the Supreme Muslim Council (SMC) in Palestine wanted to prove that they were in no way inferior to neither the British colonial oppressors nor the Zionists in the expansion of Jerusalem outside the old walls. The project was intended to become a symbol of identity for Jerusalem‘s (Arab) Palestinians, as well as enhancing the image of the SMC and marking its spatial presence in the New Jerusalem (1). The fact that the building was erected on the site of a former Muslim cemetery was swept under the carpet.

At the time, the building was one of the most luxurious hotels in the region. It was also the venue for two Arab world exhibitions, offering a platform for supra-regional exchange in the Arab region which had been fragmented by its colonial occupiers (namely France and the United Kingdom) after the First World War. Already in 1935, the hotel had to close due to economic constraints and commercial restrictions. It then served the British as an office building (where also meetings of the Royal Peel Commission took place) until it was confiscated by the Israeli authorities in 1948 and used as the seat of various ministries. In 2008, it was finally bought by Waldorf Astoria and renovated until 2014, with only the façade and staircase remaining from the original building. Just a few artefacts of the former interior survived, many others were looted.

Today, the Waldorf Astoria Jerusalem mainly attracts a strictly Jewish clientele, as it offers special facilities for Shabbat and kosher food, among other things.

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(1) term coined by Charles Ashbee, then the civic advisor to the British colonial administration for Palestine