The violent events of the summer of 2014 in Jerusalem were a tangible reminder of the explosive tension that characterizes inter-group relations in the contested city. Those events brought to life the lines between Israeli and Palestinian urban spaces, especially in the northern parts of the city, and highlighted them as rigid internal boundaries between the two communities. Michael Dumper’s book, written prior to those events, offers an outstanding and wide analytical overview of Jerusalem’s inner and external borders. From such a borders-research approach one would typically expect explanations regarding the better known friction zones between Palestinians and Israelis such as neighborhoods thresholds or the Separation Wall. Yet, Dumper’s book goes beyond that. It seeks to open up the urban borders concept and use it to explore various aspects of the city's urban geopolitics and everyday life conflicts. In this sense, the book may be read as a tour guide to Jerusalem's visible and invisible borders cutting across the city’s contested sociopolitical, religious and functional spatialities. In this tour, Dumper introduces his readers to the city's “soft” and “hard” borders, security and residential borders, and religious and functional borders. In the process he equips the reader with an innovative perspective on the city's acute political issues. The accumulated effect of this "borders realms" analysis of East Jerusalem formulates and substantiates the book's main argument of Jerusalem as "a many -bordered city". However, for Dumper this term is not only an analytical abstraction of the city’s complex and segregated realities, but also an observation which may contribute to a possible logics of reconciliation.

Organized around the many-bordered city argument, each of the book’s chapters describes and analyzes a different kind of border constituted and constructed by different urban or geopolitical domains. Chapter One deals with what Dumper calls the “hard” borders, referring to the more familiar legal and security borders. The chapter charts the evolution of the city’s borders from the British Mandate and 1947 UN partition plan, through the division between Israel and Jordan in 1948-1967, to the “unification” by Israel since then. Dumper devotes a thorough analysis to the Separation Wall constructed around East Jerusalem since 2002 to separate it from the West Bank, detailing the effects of one of the most devastating measures undertaken by Israel against Palestinian urbanity in Jerusalem.

Chapter Two, titled "The 'softer' borders of the city", offers a non-conventional discussion on urban borders, as it locates them in the functional dimensions of the urban. Here, urban borders are more fluid in character as they are affected by the dynamics of the politics of control, discrimination and resistance. Borders are identified and analyzed in this chapter, for example, around clusters of Palestinians electoral zones and extents of participation, type of school curriculum, residential segregation and clusters of different planning policies, service provision, and economic activities. Each of these draws a different kind of borderline. For example, given the lack of Palestinian participation in Israeli municipal or Palestinian elections, Dumper draws a borderline marking spaces with a lack of political representation. Another soft border is a “curriculum line” which marks areas where public schools teach the Palestinian National Authority curriculum, even though they are subject to the Israeli state system and administration. The curriculum line is apparently closely correlated with the 1949 Armistice line that used to divide the city between Israel and Jordan until 1967. Dumper uses the same logics to draw lines between areas served by Palestinian or Israeli electricity and water providers, or characterized by different architectural styles, and he discusses their meanings and effects on the city's functional and spatial segregation.

Titled "The scattered borders of holiness", Chapter Three is dedicated to the city’s centrality to the three monotheistic religions. Here, too, Dumper traces the edges of the city’s multiple segregated realms in innovative ways. One of these borders is the Eruv line marked by poles and wires stretched around Jewish residential areas. This is a Jewish line beyond which religious restrictions on certain activities apply on holidays and on the Sabbath. At first sight, this line adds little to the discussion of Jerusalem’s borders, since it is more or less congruent with Jewish residential areas, like in most of Israel. Dumper’s sensitive analysis, however, provides insights regarding its unique significance in the Jerusalemite context as a spatial representation of Jewish urban dominance and as a marker of cultural and spatial tension between its Orthodox and secular Jewish communities.

This chapter also offers a detailed analysis of the politics of religion in the city by delving into the various factions and sects within the three major religions and the politics  of the conflict against each other and the state over sacred spaces, administrative autonomy, real estate and other properties, and the preservation of their power and presence in the city. This account explores an entire arena of colliding interests manipulated and regulated by the state within and amongst the sacred spatialities of churches, mosques, extremist Jewish settlements in the Old City, archeological sites and tunnels, and religious institutions. According to Dumper, the political dynamics of the “scattered borders of holiness” leads to a creeping process of '“Hebronization”. This is a “process by which the protection and development of Jewish holy sites also becomes the vehicle or the bridgehead for future encroachments on Muslim property in Jerusalem by the Israeli State” (page 139).

Chapter Four, "The international community and the limits of sovereignty", discusses Jerusalem’s centrality in the global public discourse by examining its popularity through various categories, such as “major city”, “divided city”, or “holy city” and using Google and Facebook indicators. The discussion proceeds with analyses of international actors’ involvement and interests in city politics. Here Dumper refers to the notable presence and activity of UN, media and international community agencies in the city, all disproportionately attentive to and involved in the city’s local and international politics. Dumper is particularly interested in the effect this international involvement may have on Israeli sovereignty, on the "unification" project, and on Palestinian resistance. He suggests that it has the effect of somewhat diminishing Israeli state power and buttressing Palestinian interests in East Jerusalem.

The fifth and last chapter, "Jerusalem in the twenty-first century", aptly discusses future options by which the city’s sovereignty and governmental structure may be shared by two political entities. Propositions of this kind have been made frequently in studies of the city, especially during the 1990s' peace process. Dumper is well aware of the severe geopolitical changes during what we can now term the post-Oslo era. Before analyzing two proposals for sharing the city – the Geneva Initiative and the Jerusalem Old City Initiative – he frames the discussion by an important realistic observation regarding the city’s current geopolitical constellation: Israel does not need an agreement with the Palestinians over Jerusalem and given the current regime's security, economic, and political agenda, business as usual is the preferable and perhaps the only viable option.

Despite this bleak but sobering insight, the book ends with a detailed proposition for sharing the city by creating an “open city zone” in the spatial heart of the conflict – the Holy Basin around the Old City. This special zone will keep the balance of power through a special regime of shared power that will enable protecting both sides' religious needs and rights while keeping the city as a viable open urban unit – contrary to a re-division option. The idea is based on the assumption that either a two-state or a one-state solution with shared sovereignties will rely on high degree of cooperation between the parties, and that this could be well-served by creating special spatio-governmental arrangements.

To conclude, Dumper seems to support a bi-national model for Jerusalem. Understanding it as a city of many borders which are "not sacrosanct and immutable" but fluid and elastic embodies the possibility to reconfigure borders, power, and authority over disputed spaces in the Holy Basin, as well as in urban functional domains.

This is Dumper's third book about Jerusalem and his thirty-year research experience  on the city and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is strongly evident in his extensive and in-depth analysis and knowledge. Overall Jerusalem Unbound offers the most comprehensive description and analysis of the city's politics since the publication of Menachem Klein’s book in 1999 (trans. 2001) and Hillel Cohen's book in 2008 (trans. 2013).

Based on my research of the city, however, I would like to briefly make two important comments regarding the book’s methodology and some of its conclusions. These aim to complicate the borders approach usually ascribed to the "divided cities" discourse in relation to Jerusalem, presented so persuasively in Dumpers' book, and perhaps also to other cities labeled as such (for example, Belfast, Mostar, and Nicosia).

The first comment refers to the book's core methodology of using the border concept as an epistemological lens for researching the city. This is a useful line of inquiry since segregation is a central phenomenon that manifests itself in its most extreme form in divided and contested cities. However, while Dumper demonstrates in his book the advantages of developing the border concept as a tool for urban inquiry, this methodological course has also a certain weakness in that it may create some blind spots concealing additional and important layers of observation and analysis. Since the basic function of borders is to mark and classify people, spaces and things, this may reinforce an urban segregation perspective, while downplaying other key urban processes and dynamics that involve, for example, urban flows of knowledge, power, budgets, and hybrid activities.

In East Jerusalem, for example, a “beyond borders” approach may add useful and important perspectives, considering that since the collapse of Oslo Accords and the erection of the Separation Wall  the Palestinian side of the city has been subjected to a progressive process of forced adaptation to the Israeli state system order and norms. This process is evident in growing affinities between Palestinian urban systems and services and their counterparts in Israeli state administration, as well as between Palestinians residents and the Israeli state’s social order.

This process is evident for example in the education system, which Dumper describes as one of the manifestations of the city’s soft borders. In the last decade there has been a growing tendency to introduce the Israeli curriculum in Palestinian schools by Israeli officials, but also by Palestinian parents and pupils who seek to facilitate future participation in the Israeli labor market [1].  It is also evident in the growing demand for Hebrew studies among Palestinians and low-volume enrolment to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem [2].

This brings us to the second comment regarding Dumper's observation of international involvement as counteracting the effects of Israeli sovereignty over Palestinian urbanity. This may be supported by empirical observations of a modicum of Israeli self-restraint in new settlement construction and the expropriation of Palestinian lands – which may be traced and analyzed via the soft borders approach. Looking at sovereignty beyond the borders approach, however, for example as a manifestation of state’s ability to enforce public administration on space and population, reveals a progressive intensification of effective Israeli sovereignty in East Jerusalem in the last decade or so.  This process is evident, among other things, in the growing Israeli involvement in Palestinian urban services and systems such as transportation, public health and education, and religious courts.

These two comments by no means aim to challenge the validity and important contribution of the divided city discourse and its border approach to Jerusalem research, but rather to suggest a fine-tuning of its methodological array. For in order to approach the dynamics and complexity of urban conflict from a broader perspective, expanding the methodological tool kit may be required to reveal additional and important explanatory dimensions.

To conclude, Michael Dumper’s book excels in demonstrating the depth and reach of the multiple borders of the contested city of Jerusalem in relation to urban, (bi)national and international politics, and everyday life. It is definitely a must-read for Jerusalem researchers and an important contribution to the bookshelf of anyone interested in the the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or, more broadly, in the political and urban geography of contested cities.