US embassy in Arnona neighbourhood

The US embassy is moving from Tel Aviv to the Arnona neighbourhood in West Jerusalem, which Israel captured in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.

Arnona is located within the 1949 Armistice Agreement Line signed between Israel and neighbouring Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria.

The relatively upscale neighbourhood is known as an area where driving schools train their pupils and take them for driving tests. 

Shaped like a balloon, Arnona was a no man's land between 1948 and 1967, with Jordanian officers on the eastern side and Israelis on the western side. 

West Jerusalem is also known to Palestinians as Arab Jerusalem, which consisted of five major neighbourhoods before the 1948 war: al-Talbiyah, al-Baqaa, al-Qatamun, Mamilla, and the German colony.

Historians who studied West Jerusalem showed that during the late Ottoman Empire and at the beginning of the British Mandate in the 1920s, Palestinian families living in the Old City of Jerusalem started to build houses on the western hills of Jerusalem.

This was due to an increase in transportation, banking, mail and franchising, meaning that Palestinian families could afford to live outside the city walls.

Some of the pre-1948 houses in West Jerusalem are still intact, and visitors can still read the names of their Arab owners above the doors, or read verses of the Quran used as a blessing for the house. 

The US embassy would move to a temporary location in Arnona just for the ceremony and to cut the ribbon. A new building, it opened in 2010. The plan is to find a permanent location.