What is good about the city

Eight policy areas are open and every one of them was opened by something going wrong. That is how the pipeline works, and it has a predictable failure mode: a platform built entirely from grievances ends up describing a city nobody would choose to live in, and then proposes to govern it. The person giving these accounts has lived here by choice for ten years.

So this page records the other half of the account, in the same voice and to the same standard — which is to say, unverified.

The account

Jerusalem is a slower pace of life than Tel Aviv. And for all the challenges, there is a certain easy familiarity about the city. You run into people you know.

The market is really nice.

It is the central point of Judaism and of Jewish thought, and there are some genuinely great institutions here: government, think tanks, policy. Potentially — at least sometimes, during good times — it is a very livable city.

I came from a city called Cork in Ireland, the smaller of the two, with much the same dynamic that Jerusalem has with Tel Aviv. I recognise the shape of it.

The part that is a strategy argument

I think there is great potential in Jerusalem for remote work, given that we now have good fibre penetration. And I think the Tel Aviv versus Jerusalem outlook is outdated: fast, reliable trains connect Jerusalem to Tel Aviv and to the rest of the centre, so Jerusalem is not the distant, out-of-the-way backwater it may once have been thought. It is very connected to government and very connected to Tel Aviv.

A lot of people seem to be hitching their plans for Jerusalem to the back of a wave of diplomatic events — the opening of embassies. That couples Jerusalem’s destiny, its vitality and its capacity to political developments, and I think that is a strategic mistake.

Why this page exists, and what it is not

It is not balance for its own sake, and it is not a disclaimer attached to the criticism. It does two things the policy areas cannot.

It names what a proposal must not break. The pace, the familiarity, the scale at which you run into people you know — those are the things a building programme of the kind described in housing supply and construction disruption puts at risk, and a platform that only counts the costs of the works will not notice when a proposal trades one of them away.

It supplies the alternative the criticism implies. The complaint in capital priorities is that the city banks on tourism, which is volatile and undiversified. The same objection is made here to banking on diplomatic events. Both are exogenous — the city does not control either, and neither responds to anything a mayor does. Remote work, fibre and rail connectivity are offered as the diversified alternative: things that serve residents whether or not the embassies open.

That symmetry is the useful part. “Do not bank the city’s future on events it does not control” is one argument appearing twice, and it is the closest thing in this material to a positive economic thesis. It is also completely unverified.

What would have to be established

#	Question	Status
1	Fibre and broadband penetration in Jerusalem, by neighbourhood, against national figures — and whether the municipality had or has any lever over deployment	[UNVERIFIED]
2	Actual journey times and service frequency on the Jerusalem–Tel Aviv rail line, and its reliability record. “Fast and reliable” is the load-bearing word in the connectivity argument	[UNVERIFIED]
3	Whether remote and hybrid work has measurably changed where people working for centre-of-country employers live, in Israel specifically	[UNVERIFIED]
4	Whether a municipality has any real lever over a remote-work economy — workspace, childcare, connectivity, licensing, its own procurement — or whether this is a national and market question the city can only market itself into	[UNVERIFIED]
5	What share of Jerusalem’s economic strategy and capital actually is coupled to diplomatic and tourism events, as opposed to that being an impression from public messaging	[UNVERIFIED]
6	Whether the institutions named — government, think tanks, policy bodies — translate into local employment for residents, or are a commuter and expatriate economy	[UNVERIFIED]
7	Whether any published measure of livability or resident satisfaction exists for Jerusalem, and what it says. This bears directly on the argument the city is having	[UNVERIFIED]
8	The Cork comparison, if it is to be used at all rather than left as a personal observation: whether the second-city dynamic has a literature and whether any of it transfers	[UNVERIFIED]

The vantage point behind all of it is the one set out in whose account this is, and it applies to the positive claims exactly as much as to the complaints. An anglophone immigrant who finds the city livable is not evidence that it is.