Abu Dis, Palestine: A Jerusalem Hill Town and Its Palestinian History
Abu Dis, Palestine takes its name from a puzzle no historian has fully closed. Abu Dis (أبو ديس) may come from a Roman-era village recorded as Beta Budison, or from a Greek phrase meaning "mother of ten villages," or from an Arabic reference to the wild trees that once grew on its slopes. What is certain is the ground itself: a hill town on the eastern edge of Jerusalem, close enough to see the Old City and, since 2004, cut off from it by a concrete wall. That same eastern hill country carries the same tatreez traditions and hand-worked craft that Palestinian heritage apparel at FALASTIN is built to honor. Ottoman tax registers from 1596 already counted 80 Muslim households paying tax on grain, olives, and beehives in Abu Dis, and archaeologists have since found Byzantine-era grape presses and cisterns cut into the same hillside, proof that people have been working this land for far longer than any modern border has existed.
Abu Dis, Palestine: A Name Still Argued Over
TL;DR
Abu Dis (Arabic: أبو ديس) is a Palestinian town on Jerusalem's eastern hill country, roughly three kilometers from the Old City. Ottoman tax records from 1596 already counted 80 households there, and its population has grown from about 600 in 1896 to 12,251 at the 2017 census. Since Israel's separation wall was built through the area starting in January 2004, Abu Dis has been physically cut off from Jerusalem even though the Palestinian Authority still counts it as part of the Jerusalem district. The town is home to a campus of Al-Quds University and to the unfinished Palestinian Legislative Council building, construction on which began in 1996 and stopped for good in 2000. Its economy still runs on olives: 530 of its 544 recorded fruit trees are olive trees.
French explorer Victor Guerin passed through Abu Dis in 1870 and recorded a prominent sheikh's house standing over the village. Near the old village mosque, known as Maqam Salah ad-Din, a marble grave slab carved with a poem in naskhi script and dated 1878 still marks the ground. By 1922, the first British Mandate census counted 1,029 residents, all of them Muslim; by 1945 that number had reached 1,940. The town's growth was interrupted in July 1927, when an earthquake centered near Jericho damaged every home in Abu Dis and cracked every cistern in the village, a disaster its immediate neighbor Bethany, just half a mile away, largely escaped.
How Did Abu Dis Become a Divided Jerusalem Suburb?
Jordan annexed the West Bank, Abu Dis included, in 1950, and the town's population reached 2,640 by the 1967 census, the same year Israel occupied the West Bank in the Six-Day War. After the Oslo II Accord in 1995, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators split Abu Dis's own land between two zones: 85.2 percent placed under full Israeli control as Area C, and only 14.8 percent left as Area B, where the Palestinian Authority holds civil authority but Israel still controls security. That same round of diplomacy is why Abu Dis holds a building that has never once been used for its intended purpose.
Construction on the Palestinian Legislative Council building began in 1996, during the interim years of the Oslo process, when a Jerusalem-adjacent parliament seemed like a workable compromise: the site sat outside Israel's declared municipal boundary for Jerusalem, yet the Palestinian Authority still counted it as part of the Jerusalem district, and its upper floors were built with a view toward the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound. Work stopped in 2000 when the Second Intifada began, and it has never resumed. Israel's separation wall, construction on which started on January 13, 2004, was built just a few meters from the building, severing it from Jerusalem for good. The barrier's route through Abu Dis cut off more than 6,000 dunums of the town's 28,332 dunums of arable land from the built-up center where people actually live.
Tatreez and the Craft of Jerusalem's Hill Villages
Before 1948, a Palestinian woman's dress could name her village before she said a word, the pattern stitched across her chest panel in a language read by anyone who knew it. The villages ringing Jerusalem, Abu Dis, Silwan, and Bethany among them, shared a hill-country tradition of tight geometric cross-stitch, distinct from the couched gold work of Bethlehem or the deep reds of Hebron further south. That tradition and its meaning are explored at Tatreez: The Language of Palestinian Embroidery, and the regional differences between hill-country, coastal, and desert styles are laid out at Traditional Palestinian Clothing: Regional Styles and Patterns. Abu Dis sits only three kilometers from Jerusalem itself, close enough that the wall's route through the town is, in practice, a wall through the same hill country that produced this craft.
Why Abu Dis's Numbers Still Tell a Story
Abu Dis has kept growing even as the wall closed around it. Its population climbed from 3,631 in 1961 to 12,251 by the 2017 census, and today it hosts a campus of Al-Quds University, one of the main Palestinian universities in the Jerusalem area. Its economy stayed rooted in the land through all of it: of the 544 fruit trees recorded in and around the town, 530 are olive trees, the same crop the 1596 Ottoman tax registers taxed. Roughly 80 percent of the workforce still works in government or private employment based in the town itself, not across the wall in Jerusalem. The parliament building nobody uses and the olive trees nearly everybody still tends sit less than a kilometer apart, two different answers to the same question about what stays and what waits.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Abu Dis part of Jerusalem?
Not officially. Abu Dis sits outside the municipal boundary Israel has declared for Jerusalem, though the Palestinian Authority still counts it as part of the Jerusalem district. Since January 2004, Israel's separation wall has run through the town, physically cutting it off from the city.
Why is there an unfinished parliament building in Abu Dis?
Construction on the Palestinian Legislative Council building began in 1996 during the Oslo peace process, when Abu Dis was seen as a workable Jerusalem-adjacent site for Palestinian government institutions. Work stopped in 2000 when the Second Intifada began and never resumed. The separation wall now runs a few meters from the abandoned building.
What does the name Abu Dis mean?
The origin of the name is disputed. Proposed explanations include a Roman-era village recorded as Beta Budison, a Greek phrase meaning "mother of ten villages," and an Arabic reference to trees that grew on the site. No single theory is settled.
Abu Dis is a Palestinian hill town three kilometers from Jerusalem, old enough to have paid Ottoman taxes on olives in 1596 and young enough to hold a parliament building nobody has ever sat in. Its wall did not arrive by accident and its olive trees did not either; both are part of the same history the town's own name still cannot fully explain. What survived the earthquake of 1927, the borders of 1950 and 1967, and the wall of 2004 is the same thing that survived in the stitched dresses of the hill villages around it: a place that kept being worked, taught, and lived in, no matter what was built around its edges.
At FALASTIN, we aim to keep that heritage alive through our Palestinian Clothing collection.
100% of profits from FALASTIN are donated to the United Palestinian Appeal.