Drawing on a cultural-topological analysis of sketch-maps and mental maps produced by Jewish-Israeli and Arab-Palestinian locals in Jerusalem/Al-Quds, I examine the socio-mental organization of ethno-national views of place. The analysis identifies two predominant epistemological prisms that sensitize local perception to particular ethno-national spatial relevancies: the residential templates of “village/neighborhood” and the cardinal directions of “east/west.” I conceptualize this pattern as attentional apartheid: a discriminatory regime of perception that foregrounds one ethno-national landscape while backgrounding the other. Taking Al-Quds/Jerusalem as a case study, the talk considers how mundane, taken-for-granted categories are recruited as binary filters to reify and naturalize a polarized ethno-national experience of reality.
