FOUR VIEWS FROM THE ROOF – WEST
“ […] Zionist propaganda has described the land where we will build our national home as an empty desolate land… This certainty was the foundation for all Zionist methods in building the country, which have everything, but forget one thing – the residents who were already settled in this country.”
Yosef Eliyahu Chelouche, Reminiscences of My Life, 1870 -1930
“At the end of every sentence that you say in Hebrew sits an Arab with a nargila. Even if it starts in Siberia or in Hollywood with Hava Nagila.”
Meir Ariel, Israeli singer – songwriter.
View westwards from the deck. The red tiled roofs mark the border of Neve Tzedek, the first Jewish suburb to be built outside Jaffa.
Westwards, facing the Mediterranean. The sea, about a kilometre away, is always transfixing. Zones of colour and mood shift depending on the hour and the weather. Whitecaps indicate a coming storm, a low haze on the horizon means air pollution, the winter sunsets are spectacular. If I squint and cancel out a row of ugly 1980s office buildings spoiling the view, all that is left in the frame are the red–tiled rooftops of Neve Tzedek and the sea. And if a sailboat happens to glide past on a calm day I can briefly entertain the illusion that I live on a Greek island.
But when I turn in any other direction the illusion disappears. In its place appear the gleaming glass towers of Israel’s business capital to the east, the chain of hotels along the beachfront to the north and the dun lower buildings of Florentin to the south, the view in every direction bristling with cranes building new high rises, hotels and towers. Instead of a Greek island I am back in Tel Aviv (pop. half a million) itself the core of the entire Gush Dan (Dan Bloc) conurbation (pop. four million).
I pivot back to the west, lower my gaze, and focus on the red tiled roofs of an historic Tel Aviv neighbourhood that was built before Tel Aviv itself existed.
Outside Jaffa but before Tel Aviv
Tel Aviv was not the first attempt by the Jews of Jaffa to improve their living conditions and set up separate neighbourhoods in the sand dunes to the north. The influx of Jewish newcomers who remained in Jaffa after their arrival in Palestine lived in squalid and congested conditions, and paid high rents to their Arab landlords. This led among many to a growing appetite to establish their own Jewish suburb. The result was Neve Tzedek, founded in 1887.
The story of Neve Tzedek’s founding is a rough template for what followed in other similar housing projects. A charitable society or housing cooperative is set up and registered with the Ottoman authorities. Land is purchased on the sand dunes to the north of Jaffa but not too far from it, loans are arranged for the first stakeholders, the plots are delineated, neighbourhood regulations are voted in and construction work begins.
Of course, Tel Aviv symbolises far more than just the nuts and bolts of building a neighbourhood and then a city but sometimes the mechanics can shed light on the broader picture. Neve Tzedek might also be seen as the prequel to the saga of Tel Aviv’s spasmodic development as it raced to accommodate the unpredictable waves of Jewish immigration landing in the nearby port of Jaffa.
A street in Neve Tzedek today. Now surrounded by towers, it remains a sort of picturesque village inside the city. In the 1980s plans were made to demolish it entirely.
The main figures behind the establishment of Neve Tzedek were leading Jaffa representatives of the Old Yishuv, the small, traditional, often non-Zionist Ashkenazi and Sephardi communities that preceded the New Yishuv waves of immigration. On the Sephardi, side was Aharon Chelouche a respected Arabic-speaking jeweller, moneychanger and landowner who had managed to purchase a sizeable chunk of land from its Arab owners north east off Jaffa. On the Ashkenazi side, were the Rokach brothers, Shimon and Eliezer, from a family of prosperous Jerusalem Hassidic merchants who had mixed with the First Aliya activists, caught the Zionist bug and with the help of their ‘Ezrat Yisrael’ (Support of Israel) society, were instrumental in establishing Jaffa as the centre of the early Zionist enterprise. The Rokachs raised money to establish a more hygienic Jewish suburb and Chelouche agreed to sell Ezrat Yisrael a section of his land on easy terms, reckoning correctly that once the new neighbourhood was built, the value of the rest of his land would increase. Here, if you will, is the first instance of how free enterprise built Tel Aviv.
Neve Tzedek began with 48 plots: three rows of two roomed terraced houses with small courtyards and toilets that faced the street. Rokach, Chelouche and a few others later built themselves splendid family homes in the otherwise modest new neighbourhood. Despite its humble nature, the excitement over the orderly grid layout of Neve Tzedek, as compared with the chaos of Jaffa, was such that the locals called it “Petit Paris”. Paradoxically the same name might be applied to Neve Tzedek today, considering the large numbers of French Jews who have bought properties in the now chic neighbourhood in recent years. Visitors to Tel Aviv often remark that Neve Tzedek feels like the most ‘European’ part of town.
But back in the late 1880s the novelty soon wore off. Life in Neve Tzedek was isolated, insular and dangerous. The houses were too cramped, the courtyards too small. Nevertheless, later, after Tel Aviv was established, it attracted Jaffa’s leading Jewish intelligentsia and artists, among others Nobel Prize laureate Shai Agnon, author Yosef Haim Brenner ,the “first Modern Hebrew woman writer” Devorah Baron and the painter and illustrator Nahum Gutman who immortalised Neve Tzedek and the ‘Little Tel Aviv” of the 1920s in his works. Tel Aviv’s famous ‘bohema’ started to coalesce in Neve Tzedek and nearby Neve Shalom, another early suburb.
Sixty years later in the 1980s, after decades of neglect, Neve Tzedek would again become a hub for impoverished artists who revitalised the neighbourhood, leading to its advanced state of gentrification today.
Among the few remaining old houses in Neve Shalom, 2020
Hard on the heels of Neve Tzedek came a string of new Jewish suburbs, situated between Neve Tzedek and Jaffa’s seaside suburb -Manshiyya - to the west. The first, Neve Shalom (1890) was by far the largest. It was also established on Chelouche’s land and expanded westwards until it literally joined up with Manshiyya. In the photo below, taken (in the 1920s) from north to south, the houses on the right hand side (in Manshiyya) paid taxes to Jaffa Municipality while those on the left paid taxes to Tel Aviv municipality. Today, almost no-one has heard of Neve Shalom and almost everyone has heard of Neve Tzedek.
In 1899 came Sha’arei Ahva (another Chelouche sale). Mahane Yehuda sprang up in 1903 (you guessed, Chelouche’s pockets grow a little deeper, he and his sons set up a building and construction materials business in Neve Tzedek), Mahane Yosef followed in 1904, the same year the first windowless wooden shacks were erected in Kerem Hateimanim (The Yemenite Vineyard, next to today’s Carmel Market, Ohel Moshe in 1906 was the last of them to be built before Ahuzat Bayit. These housing enterprises saw themselves as just that: a Jewish housing solution but without any historic or national pretensions.
Kindergarten in Neve Shalom, early 20th C.
The sign, now removed, outside the Chelouche Brothers building materials business in Neve Tzedek, 2008.
For the founders of Ahuzat Bayit (soon to become Tel Aviv) none of these new Jewish suburbs of Jaffa were worthy models, especially when compared to the nearby neat, lush German Templer settlements like the German Colony or Sarona. What they saw in them were more unpaved, dusty or flooded streets, more rows of unhygienic cramped terraces or ramshackle huts that reminded them of the Eastern European Jewish ghettos or oriental slums they were trying to escape. Moreover, by all accounts many of their inhabitants were poor, devoutly religious and Sephardi. In contrast, Ahuzat Bayit’s founders were bourgeois, relatively prosperous, only moderately traditional and overwhelmingly Ashkenazi. One of the few things that seemed to have in common was the mother city of Jaffa.
Kerem Hateimanim 1920s.
Jaffa
View from our building towards the Jaffa promontory, 2009.
Jaffa/Yafo/Yafa the ‘Bride of the Sea’, where Andromeda was rescued by Perseus, lies slightly to the south-west, out of sight but not out of earshot. When the wind is blowing in the right direction, sounds of Jaffa’s life filter up to the rooftop: the roar of the crowd from the Bloomfield football stadium; the muezzin’s amplified call to prayer from the mosques; the church bells; the lifeguards’ announcements from the beach; the wail of a police siren. Jaffa is where Tel Aviv’s story begins and the fact that I can hear it from the roof is a reminder of how closely Jaffa and Tel Aviv are intertwined.
Jaffa’s 4,000 year history spans conquerors from the Canaanites and Israelites via the Babylonians and Persians and (among many others) the Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Crusaders and Mamluks. In 1515 The Ottoman Turks captured Jaffa and controlled it for 400 years until the British took over in 1917. Our story starts at the end of the 19th century and to set the scene, a little context is necessary.
Landing in Jaffa, early 20th century. Ships anchored offshore and passengers were ferried past the dangerous rocks to the harbour.
In the 1880s, two processes took place. First, Ottoman governors modernised Jaffa. They dismantled the town’s walls, allowing it to spread out to the prosperous southern suburbs of Ajami and Jabaliyya and up the coastline northwards into the poorer suburb of Manshiyya. The port was refurbished, new public buildings, roads and markets were built and in 1892 the French-built railway from Jaffa to Jerusalem was inaugurated, linking the city to the rest of the country. Jaffa became Palestine’s largest city and its leading commercial centre. Its wealthier residents built magnificent well-houses surrounded by gardens, orchards and the fertile hinterland of citrus groves, particularly of the peelable Shamouti oranges that were the basis of the local economy. In 1895, a Russian pilgrim Sergei Khotorovo enthused, “The good thing about Jaffa is not the city itself, but the gardens that surround it in a 6-kilometre [3.7 mile] semicircle…I think there are few gardens as splendid as these anywhere in the world.”
Jaffa houses overlooking the port, early 20th century.
The steamship turned Jaffa into a citrus exporting power.
In parallel, Jaffa’s port became the entry point for successive waves of Zionist and often socialist and revolutionary Jewish immigration, mainly from Russia and Poland, which was very different in nature from the small, traditional, Arabic-speaking Jewish community that had existed in Jaffa since the 1820s.
Boustrous Street, one of the first streets of modern Jaffa (today Raziel Street), early 20th century.
Under the British Mandate (1917-1948), Jews continued to live and work in Arab Jaffa which largely continued to prosper and develop a range of community and cultural institutions. However this relatively peaceful co-existence was punctuated by serious outbreaks of violence. These were mainly instigated by the Arab side, infuriated by what they saw as the negative effects of mass Jewish immigration and British collaboration with growing Zionist political and territorial and economic ambitions. Eruptions occurred in 1921, 1929 and in the Arab Revolt of 1936-39 which the British repressed with brutal force. In 1936, in order to gain easier access to Arab fighters based in Jaffa’s Casbah, the British blasted wide anchor-shaped trenches through the historic hill town destroying some 200 houses in the process. With Jaffa’s port off limits to Jews, Tel Aviv took advantage of the opportunity to build its own port to the north and continued its rush to develop and accommodate the latest wave of Jews - those fleeing Nazi Germany - flooding into Palestine.
The Alhambra Theatre on Jerusalem Boulevard, opened in 1937. The Egyptian diva Oum Kalthoum appeared here. Today it is a Scientology Centre.
As the clash between Jewish and Arab national ambitions in Palestine became increasingly irreconcilable and violent under the floundering British Mandate, Tel Aviv and Jaffa became bitter rivals. Under the UN Partition Plan, rejected by the Arab side but approved by the UN General Assembly on 29 November 1947, the entire Jaffa area was designated to be part of the future Arab state. The Jewish Yishuv regarded an Arab enclave situated next to Tel Aviv as a strategic and demographic threat. The Arabs of Jaffa, surrounded by Jewish territory on all sides but the sea regarded their future with trepidation and took up a mainly defensive positions. Snipers from Jaffa and snipers from Tel Aviv now peered warily at each other through gunsights, each hoping to unseat the other entirely.
In April 1948, shortly before Israel declared independence, Jewish underground militias joined forces to conquer Jaffa, ending its independent status as a city and causing the overwhelming majority of its 50,000 or so Arab residents to flee. Many of their houses were quickly inhabited by new Jewish immigrants, particularly from Bulgaria. In the 1950s, the Old City of Jaffa on the Jaffa Hill promontory was reconstructed as an ‘artists’ colony’ and its properties, now worth millions, were allotted to Jewish artists and galleries. Jaffa’s Arabic street names were changed to Hebrew ones and its Arab –Palestinian identity was largely erased. In 1950 Jaffa was officially annexed to Tel Aviv and ‘Tel Aviv’ was officially renamed ‘Tel Aviv-Jaffa’. Today, 70% of Jaffa’s population is Jewish.
Jaffa Rebranded
Marketing Jaffa’s exoticism. Advert offering apartments in the Andromeda luxury residential complex, Ha’aretz, August 2021. “Come and Be Reborn” beckons the blurb. The exoticism suggested by the model has no connection to Jaffa’s culture.
A short ride or stroll from central Tel Aviv along the beach promenade with the sea to your right, will transport you to Jaffa’s Clock Square and its main streets – Yefet and Jerusalem Boulevard (formerly Jamal Pasha Boulevard and then King George V Boulevard). Explore the surrounding area and you’ll soon encounter signs of an ancient Mediterranean port city: mosques, churches, bazaars, domes, arches, columns, cavernous subterranean stone basements, old carved wooden doors and intricately wrought balconies. In some neighbourhoods you will still find opulent family villas built in the 1920s and 30s and even modernist buildings like the magnificent Alhambra Theatre (now sadly a Scientology centre). In recent years, as property prices have soared, ostentatious gated communities have also sprung up alongside these treasures. Move further east and the landscape changes to poorly built housing estates thrown up in the 1950s and ‘60s to accommodate mass Jewish immigration from North Africa and the Middle East.
Clock Square early 20th century. The columned building to the right of the clock tower is the Saraya, the Turkish municipality building which was blown up by the Lehi underground in January 1948.
Clock Square (Kikar Ha-Sha’on) today, facing north, with Tel Aviv‘s shoreline in the background. The newly reconstructed columns referencing the old Saraya are just a façade. On the plaque outside the building no mention is made of the 28 Arab civilians killed and 160 injured in the blast.
Suddenly the signs and sounds are in Arabic as well as in Hebrew and the aromas of shish kebab, spices and bitter coffee remind us that, in fact, we live in the Middle East. You may notice that many women are wearing the hijab and long black dresses, a sight that would turn heads in Tel Aviv. But this is an exoticism that is very familiar to us. So Jewish Tel Avivians often visit Jaffa for its culinary institutions; hummus at Abu Hassan, sambusak and breads from Aboulafia, shakshuka at (Jewish, Tunisian) Dr. Shakshuka . But it’s a two way process. Israeli/western culture is also seeping into Arab Jaffa. Between the shops selling pita bread, cheap groceries and toys you will increasingly encounter health food stores, retro boutiques and trendy restaurants.
At Dr. Shakshuka in the flea market area, 2009.
Jaffa feels more “authentic” than Tel Aviv. First, unlike upstart Tel Aviv, it has existed for millennia. If Tel Aviv sometimes feels like it is built on (shifting) sand, Jaffa is at least built on sandstone. Second, the tangible Arab influence. Our “cousins” are consciously or unconsciously acknowledged to be more “authentic” or indigenous than Jews in Israel. Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben Gurion believed that the Palestinian Arab fellahin (peasants) and Jews were related.
Young Jewish bohemian Tel Avivians seeking that authenticity, as well as cheaper rents, started moving into Jaffa in the 1990s. Real estate investors, sniffing gold, soon entered the fray and Tel Aviv-Yafo municipality lent its support. After decades of neglect, the municipality set up a special administration for developing Jaffa and started pouring significant energy and resources into infrastructure and social and educational projects.
In the 1950s, 60s and later, Jaffa had the reputation of a sleazy, dangerous underworld. Partly responsible for this image was a popular song called Nowhere Like Jaffa at Night (Ein Kemo Yafo Baleylot ,Hebrew only). It opens with the lines: ”There’s nowhere like Yafo/ Nowhere in the world/When the chicks walk by/ Their lips red as blood.” With a boozy melody taken from a French source, the lyrics are written from the perspective of a Jewish gang member from the “Big Plot”, the half destroyed slum on old Jaffa’s hilltop. The gang harasses women, gets drunk, frightens off kissing couples, robs a bank and ends up in jail. “That’s the way it goes'' is the tongue-in-cheek complaint in the chorus: “A person gets no trust / When who we are after all/ Is just folks from the Big Plot.”
A formerly neglected square off Jerusalem Boulevard was transformed after the Gesher theatre company founded by new immigrants from Russia, took up residence at the nearby Noga Theatre in the early 1990s. Creative types moved in and the municipality upgraded the street infrastructure. Today, rents here are high.
It took a while for this image to change but by the second decade of the 21st century, under the stewardship of Tel Aviv-Jaffa mayor Ron Huldai, Jaffa has been rebranded into a fun place to visit. And it has a lot to offer the visitor: a quaint old harbour, a colourful flea market, lots of lovely stone alleyways, trendy galleries and boutiques, lively restaurants and bars, theatres and music venues. The “Big Plot” was turned into the Summit Park in the 1960s and offers a stunning view of Tel Aviv’s shoreline and towers. In some areas decrepit ruins have been replaced by tasteful new apartment buildings that reflect the Jaffa style. Yet in the low-income neighbourhoods, and especially among the minority Arab population, Jaffa still has more people living on the breadline than in Tel Aviv and higher levels of youth unemployment and crime (as immortalised in the film Ajami). Jaffa might have been physically sanitised, but to the Jewish visitor who wanders off the beaten track, it still feels slightly edgy.
Low income housing in Jaffa.
Jaffa is Tel Aviv’s underworld, its dark side where the mix of poverty, crime, politics, religion and history can literally ignite like a Molotov cocktail. Here’s a link to “No Place Like Jaffa” (English subtitles), a music video with a contemporary take on the real problems of today’s Jaffa from the Arab-Jewish rappers System Ali.
From 1921 to 2021
The time is April 2021, I’m swotting up on the history of Jaffa, arrive at the ‘Events of 1921’ and am struck by the coincidence that I am taking an interest in events that occurred almost exactly a century ago.
While the 1921 riots are sometimes referred to in Israel as an example of unprovoked Arab violence against Jews at a time when the idea of a Jewish state was still a dream, they did have a political and a local context. In retrospect, an explosion of violence was only a question of time.
On December 11, 1917, General Edmund Allenby marched his army into Jerusalem, ending 400 years of Ottoman rule in Palestine. Only five weeks later, the British published the Balfour Declaration promising “[…] the establishment in Palestine of a National Home for the Jewish People […]”.This declaration of concrete support for the Zionist cause by the world’s pre-eminent power gave a huge boost to Zionist ambitions worldwide and a parallel uproar throughout the Arab world. In 1920, the Third Congress of the Palestine Arab Congress, held in Haifa, set up an Executive Committee headed by Musa Kazim Pasha al-Husayni. The Congress called for Palestine to become an independent Arab state, condemned the notion of a homeland for the Jewish people and stated its opposition to Jewish immigration. This remained the basic policy of the Palestinian Arabs until 1948. Al –Husayni complained to Whitehall that: “Arabs after the Great War lost all the political rights they enjoyed under Turkey and witnessed Jewish riff-raff introduced from all parts to their country to build a non-existent nation.” Making the threat of a Jewish takeover more tangible from the Arab perspective was a mass influx of some 18,000 Jewish immigrants between 1919 and 1921 and land purchases by the Jewish National Fund that led to the eviction of Arab tenant farmers (fellahin).
So by 1921, as the post-riots British Haycraft Report noted, the Arabs of Palestine had a long list of bottled up grievances. To them it was clear that the British, now led by a Zionist High Commissioner (Herbert Samuel) were following a policy directed towards the establishment of a National Home for the Jews and not for the equal benefit of all Palestinians. There was undue proportion of Jewish influence inside the government pressing the Zionist programme to flood the country with people of “greater economic ability” leaving the Arabs at a disadvantage. Moreover, Bolshevik immigrants were being allowed into the country, leading to social and economic unrest. The immigrant chalutzim (pioneers) offended the Arabs, “by their arrogance and contempt of Arab social prejudices,” something that was confirmed by many Jewish writers at the time.
Urban pioneer carrying bricks to build the First Hebrew City, 1920s
In Jaffa itself, with so many immigrants pouring into the country, there was fierce competition for paid work and the Arabs complained that while the “Russian Bolshevik” Jewish immigrants were granted subsidised public building jobs by the British, they themselves were being shut out of the job market. Beating the drum in the background was the ‘Falastin’ daily, published in Jaffa that took a strong anti-Jewish and anti-British line and at one point was closed down by the British authorities.
Front page of the Falastin daily, May 9, 1936
The bottom line conclusions of the Haycraft Report were that the hotheaded Arabs may have started the inexcusable violence but the Zionist organizations had better start toning down their national expectations, curb the enthusiasm and patronizing attitude of the chalutzim, and take Arab sensibilities into account so as to alleviate their “profound distrust”.
Ironically, the 1921 ‘events’ were unintentionally triggered by a clash between two rival Jewish May Day parades both composed of newly arrived socialist, Russian chalutzim (pioneers) many of whom had recently experienced anti-Semitic pogroms firsthand. The Jaffa-based tiny, anti-Zionist Jewish Communist Party clashed with the mainstream Ahdut Ha’avodah (United Labour) parade, the Jaffa police pushed back the communists, the Arabs of Manshiyya got the idea that Jews were killing Arabs and the Arabs of Jaffa launched an unplanned but bloody rampage of murder, rape and looting against their Jewish neighbors which spread to the surrounding agricultural colonies (moshavot) like Rehovot, Kfar Saba, Petah Tikva and Hadera.
By the time the dust had settled, 47 Jews and 48 Arabs had been killed and 146 Jews and 73 Arabs injured. Most of the Arab casualties resulted from clashes with British forces trying to restore order. Thousands of shocked Jewish residents of Jaffa fled for Tel Aviv where they were temporarily housed in tent camps on the beach. Many of them reported that their own Arab neighbours had attacked them. Some said that Arabs had also defended the Jews and offered them refuge.
A funeral procession at the Herzliya Gymnasium in Tel Aviv during the 1921 riots.
Fast forward to early April 2021. In Jaffa, everything appears to be calm and normal. True, an Israeli TV documentary ‘The Guide to Gentrification’ (here is another report in English that deals with the problem) had recently highlighted the alarming gaps between the gentrifying Jews of Jaffa in their luxurious gated communities and the disadvantaged local Arabs, some of whom were losing title to their public housing. Still, as the COVID pandemic faded in Israel, Jaffa’s restaurants and bars were beginning to reopen. We planned to see some musician friends appear at a new Jaffa restaurant.
Then, on the night of April 19 something happened that changed our plans: Arab protestors clashed with the police and Jewish activists. Nothing serious, a few policemen injured, a few Arabs arrested. The background soon became apparent. In 2008 a national-religious rabbi, Eliyahu Mali, had set up a “settlement nucleus” (gar’in) now numbering 45 families, in the mainly Arab Ajami neighbourhood. This includes a pre-military service yeshiva – Shirat Moshe (the Song of Moses) – catering for several hundred students and a synagogue. The enterprise was part of the new ideology of Israel’s national-religious sector to shift their focus from settlement in the West Bank to “settlement in the heart”: the heart in question being that of the misled secular Israeli who has yet to see the light. The yeshiva’s website states that its goal is to, “strengthen Jewish identity and the voice of the Torah, [and] strengthen [Jewish] communities” in Jaffa. However Rabbi Mali does not beat about the bush when it comes to his intentions: “Our activity is Jewish identity, not activity directed towards co-existence and peace talks… Jaffa is going through some very good processes since we arrived. A lot of Arabs are leaving. I remember the light in people’s [read ‘Jews’] eyes when we arrived.”
The coincidence of this outbreak of violence, albeit minor, exactly 100 years after the 1921 events made me think, “plus de change plus la même chose”. But the feeling soon passed. We are used to occasional violent flare-ups in Jaffa. Life usually quickly returns to “normal”
Except that this time, it didn’t. Instead, by May 11, we found ourselves in the midst of cross-border warfare with Hamas in Gaza and what almost felt like a civil war between Arabs and Jews inside Israel. Wikipedia calls this the 2021 Israel-Palestine Crisis while in Israel it is known as Operation Guardian of the Walls.
Jaffa (Yafa) was now one of several violent flashpoints, otherwise known as Israel’s “mixed towns”, together with Lod (Lyd), Acco (Akka), Ramla and Haifa. All of them formerly Palestinian cities that today have Jewish majorities. Jewish (and Arab) Israelis were appalled as young Arabs torched synagogues, houses and cars, assaulted Jews, ransacked shops and ran rings around the overwhelmed, under-prepared police. Meanwhile, Jewish militias egged on by ultra- right politicians and movements flocked in to ‘defend’ the Jews, by carrying out similar acts against Arabs while the police acted, at best, ineffectually. Some 2,000 people were arrested for rioting, at least 70% of them Arabs.
This mayhem was taking place only a ten minute walk away from our now bourgeois–bohemian neighbourhood of restored old buildings and stylish boutiques. Moreover, the greater Tel Aviv area was cringing under a surprisingly large number of rocket salvoes from Hamas in Gaza. We were advised to stay close to shelter which for us meant staying close to the decrepit bomb shelter three flights down (no lift) on the ground floor. As the sirens became more frequent we forsook our defenceless apartment and crammed into the shelter with our 30-something neighbours, their young children and dogs and the occasional Wolt electric bike messenger, all of us flinching instinctively whenever there was a loud boom.
This is not the first time that we have experienced riots in Jaffa or long range rocket attacks from Gaza but the combination of the two was unprecedented and disturbing. There seemed to be something different about this round.
For the Arabs of Jaffa, many of whom have family relations among the large refugee population in Gaza, the cocktail of fear was even more complex. They were as scared as Jews to leave their homes for fear of being attacked by heavy handed policemen or nationalist Jews and they were as much at risk of being hit by a Hamas rocket as we were. Moreover, their own relations were in danger of death or injury from the Israeli bombing raids.
Israel and Hamas eventually agreed to a ceasefire. As the rest of the world looked on in horror at the devastation Israel’s air force had wreaked in Gaza, a shaken Israel, at least the pragmatic part, seemed to have internalised that it needed to rethink its relations with the Palestinians (Hamas vs PA) and try, despite the inflamed passions on both sides, to rebuild relations with its Arab minority inside Israel proper. One gratifying response was the flood of initiatives from Jews and Arabs from all over the country and from all walks of life to demonstrate their support for peaceful co-existence and a more harmonious common future.
Nevertheless, when I now stand on the rooftop and face Jaffa, I regard it with a more respectful eye, the sort of respect you give to a mugger wielding a knife. Jaffa might be down, its former glory diminished to a colourful, orientalised tourist destination with a gentrification problem, but Jaffa was not out. Jaffa could lie waiting like a sleeping dragon and suddenly snap its jaws. A century has gone by, everything has changed and nothing has changed. Will someone in 2121 look back and say the same thing?
A few days after the violence had died down journalists from the Ha’aretz daily wandered around the almost deserted streets of Jaffa and talked to the local Arabs. They had many explanations for the violent explosion: what had happened in Al Aqsa, the heavy hand of the Israel Police, their own criminal elements, the provocative yeshiva and extreme right pot-stirring Jewish politicians like the ultra-right politician Itamar Ben Gvir and (then) PM Binyamin Netanyahu.
Yet none of them had a bad word to say about their Jewish neighbours:
Said: “[…] but day to day people live alongside one another and nothing bad happens. On the contrary, in Jaffa people always lived together and will live together. […]
Nasser: “You see the racism not from the [Jewish] neighbours and the people that live here. It comes from the government. It’s the policemen that take it out on you.”
And how about the Jews who came to live here?
Ibrahim: They are “ahla” (great). They buy here, they eat in the restaurants. I hope that another 100,000 like them come here… [the trouble came from] the yeshiva. What did they come here for? Just to irritate us? It’s their boss who sent them, that son a bitch Ben Gvir. He did it all. Why bring buses full of settlers to Jaffa? […]
Khader: “I tell you that my neighbours are Jewish, they are my friends, you’ll see them sitting here.”
Where are they now?
“A lot of them left until things calm down. Some are still here.”
Will they have what to return to?
“Of course, we are safeguarding their things. They’ll come back and everything will be alright.”
Underneath the empty hyphen
Due west from the roof is a long undulating tongue of green lawns hugging the coast called Charles Clore Park. Unlike the densely built area to its north where hotels were built close to the beach, here the landscape suddenly broadens out. The park separates the coast road from the beach by at least 100 metres. Opposite the northern end of Charles Clore Park is the restored Hassan Beq mosque built in 1914 by the Ottoman governor of the same name. Next to Hassan Beq, the construction of a luxury high rise residential building is underway. Apart from a strip of ugly office buildings and hotels from the 1980s the only other buildings in this large area are Ha-Tachana, the restored Jaffa-Jerusalem train station (1892) and now an entertainment zone, and Beit Haetzel (The Etzel Museum) a hybrid structure with an old stone base and an incongruous black glass cube plunked on top. The rest of the empty landscape is taken up with the undulating dune-like lawns of the park and spacious parking lots. The result is a physical gap in the urban landscape, a “hyphen” separating Tel Aviv and built up Jaffa that starts at the southern end of the park.
The Hassan Beq mosque at the northern end of Charles Clore Park.
South Tel Aviv lacks open green spaces, so this broad expanse of well-tended lawn with the Mediterranean as its backdrop is a welcome resource for Telavivians, especially the less affluent. Charles Clore Park can easily contain outdoor festivals, amateur football games, kite flying, drum circles, children’s playgrounds, exercise machines and barbecue areas with space to spare. However, few of the hundreds of thousands of Israelis - Jewish and Arab - who enjoy using it are aware that underneath the pleasant dune-like hillocks lie the pulverised ruins of one of Jaffa’s largest suburbs - Manshiyya.
Manshiyya, 1935.
Manshiyya was a densely–built northern suburb of Jaffa that developed rapidly from the 1880s onwards after Jaffa demolished its crumbling walls and spread out into new neighbourhoods. The large Arab suburb was soon bordered by a string of small Jewish suburbs like Neve Tzedek, Neve Shalom and, Kerem Hatemanim (Yemenite Vineyard, formerly known as Mahane Yisrael). Manshiyya was by all accounts a relatively poor but lively place containing alongside local Moslems, Christians and Jews, a rich mix of immigrants from all over the Moslem world. The website of the Israeli NGO Zochrot (Remembering ) provides a glimpse of daily life there (my edits).
“ Manshiyya’s HaTahana Street [Station Street named after the Yafa – al-Quds (Jerusalem) railway station located there since 1892 was narrow and crowded, filled with shops, homes, merchants, pedestrians and United Bus Company vehicles, and carriages… [at the northern end was] the area known as the “Jews’ market” which contained a number of shops owned by Jewish merchants, as well as many owned by Arabs… Saleh Masri, who had been uprooted from Manshiyya and today lives in Yafa: “I heard two different stories. The first was that they called it the Jews’ market because of the Jewish merchants, and the second was because of the Jewish prostitutes who worked next to the market, between Manshiyya and Neve Tzedek.” … on the west side of HaTahana Street, on al-‘Ghazali Street, was one of the largest and most famous coffee houses in the area, Café Al’ansharah.. a meeting place for political leaders, public officials and important businessmen… North of Al’Alam Street was the Carmel Market, which still exists today, where Palestinian and Jewish merchants had their shops… …. Al-Manshiyya Street was south of the mosque. There were two schools on the west side of the street, al-Amoya, in which boys and girls studied together, and al-Abassiyya. The Moslem Youth Association, founded in 1924, was next to the schools, and played an important role in raising the national consciousness of the Arab youth and in community activities such as establishing schools and clinics.[…]”
The southern part of the Jewish Market (Souk el-Yahud), Manshiyya, 1929. Photo: Zvi Oren –Oroshkes.
There was also a Jewish residential enclave in Manshiyya close to the beach called Yaffe Nof (Beautiful View) that included the Feingold residential complex and, in the 1920s, a luxury hotel and spa called Bella Vista.
Postcard advertising the Bella Vista Hotel and Hydropathic Establishment on Manshiyya’s beach.
At its peak, before 1948, Manshiyya housed a population of some 13,000, of whom about 1,000 were Jewish. According to a 1944 police report, it boasted 12 bakeries, 20 coffee houses, 14 carpentry shops, 3 bicycle repair shops, 5 doctors, 7 factories, 7 jewellers, goldsmiths and silversmiths, 6 hotels, 10 laundries, 3 pharmacies, 3 printers, 6 restaurants, an electrical power plant and other commercial establishments.
With the approval of the UN Partition Plan in November 1947, Palestine was immediately plunged in a state of civil war. Arab snipers fired incessantly at their Jewish neighbours along the border killing dozens with hundreds more injured. The Freud Hospital situated a few yards away from us at Yehuda Halevi 9, treated many of them. Some of the most effective sniping came from the Hassan Beq mosque. Many Jewish residents were evacuated, and billeted in schools and public buildings and Jewish forces were deployed to defend Tel Aviv. In addition to the need to rid Tel Aviv of Arab snipers there was fear that Egypt would land forces in Jaffa and act against the emergent Jewish state.
Tel Aviv residents taking cover from sniper fire, 1948
These considerations convinced the Revisionist underground organisation the Etzel (Hebrew acronym for The National Military Organisation, known as the Irgun in English) to launch an offensive against Jaffa even before the British departed, so as to ensure that it would become part of the Jewish state. The strategy was to first capture Manshiyya, cut it off from the rest of Jaffa, halt the sniping and then take the rest of the city. All this under a constant mortar barrage designed to disrupt enemy military transport and cause a terrified mass Arab exodus. Etzel’s leader, Menachem Begin, set up his headquarters at the Freud hospital at 9 Yehuda Halevi.
The Freud Maternity Hospital, two doors up from our building, where Menahem Begin set up his HQ during the offensive against Jaffa. Photo: Dr. Avishai Teicher. Pikiwiki, Israel
The Etzel launched its attack on 25 April 1948 and quickly found itself fighting not only effective irregular Arab defenders but also British troops stationed there to hand Jaffa over to the Arabs at the appropriate time. Their aim was to prevent a Jewish takeover and an Arab flight similar to the exodus from Haifa that had occurred a few days earlier. But by the end of a bitter three day battle, led on the Etzel side by its operations officer Amichai (Gidi) Paglin, the Arab defences collapsed, the British withdrew, Manshiyya fell into Jewish hands and like the whole of the Jaffa area, became part of the Jewish state.
No man’s land in Eyn Ya’akov Street in Neve Shalom, close to Manshiyya 1948. Photo: Dmitri Kassel
Estimates of the population of Jaffa on the eve of the attack range between 50,000 and 90,000 with some 20,000 people having already left the town. According to Wikipedia: “By 30 April, there were 15,000–25,000 remaining. In the following days a further 10,000–20,000 people fled by sea. When the Haganah took control of the town on 14 May around 4,000 people were left. The town and harbour's warehouses were extensively looted. The city surrendered to the Haganah on 14 May 1948 and shortly after the British police and army left the city. The 3,800 Arabs who remained in Jaffa after the exodus were concentrated in the Ajami district and subject to strict martial law.”
Zochrot writes that, “Some of Manshiyya’s inhabitants were expelled to Jordan, and others were sent by sea to Gaza and Egypt. A few were transferred to Yafa and later lived in the Ajami ghetto, alongside refugees from Yafa and the nearby villages.”
Four days after the start of the offensive, the Revisionist daily HaMashkif (The Observer) published the following description of Manshiyya:
“Piles of ruins wherever you look, gaping holes in walls, ruined belongings, streams of water flowing from open faucets in destroyed buildings and…deathly silence. ‘That’s what Manshiyya is like today. The silence is broken from time to time by a shot…fired by our reconnaissance forces’ – is the explanation provided to us by Gid’on, the commander who led the heavy fighting with the Arabs and poured heavy fire on the attackers from their ‘Spandaus’ and ‘Brens.” In most cases, the attacking Etzel forces advanced using engineering tactics by breaking through the walls of buildings, into the heart of Manshiyya…at other times, when the attackers captured a position, they dragged the sandbags they found there as they advanced, using them as shields from enemy fire. When the attackers reached Al’Alam Street, in the heart of Manshiyya, they confronted two dangerous positions on either side of the road, and the advancing waves were halted. Then the lads blew up the masses of buildings on each side of the street, the firing positions collapsed and piles of ruins covered the road.”
After the war, Tel Aviv municipality wanted to demolish Manshiyya completely. But as early as June 1948, Jewish immigrants moved into the abandoned homes as they did in other parts of Jaffa, and half-ruined Manshiyya became a Jewish neighbourhood. In the 1950s, Tel Aviv municipality had plans to turn Manshiyya into a new city centre but ran up against legal opposition from its Jewish residents. After a period of intentional neglect and its decline into an uninhabitable wreck, a new development plan in 1963 allowed the authorities to demolish Manshiyya entirely (apart from the Hassan Beq mosque) push the rubble into the sea and cover everything in undulating green dunes meant to symbolise the Zionist dream of making the desert bloom
The problem of what to do with destroyed Arab settlements was not particular to Tel Aviv. This early iteration of “greenwashing” was common practice in Israel’s first decades as it bulldozed hundreds of abandoned Arab villages, often covering them with forests and parks in an effort to erase evidence of the Nakba.
When we moved to the area in the mid -1990s and started visiting what was Manshiyya’s beach (today called Charles Clore Beach or Alma Beach) there were still a few remnants that the bulldozers had overlooked or that the sea had washed up. I remember a short flight of stone stairs leading nowhere. We still have a few broken ornate floor tiles that we picked up on the beach in those years. But now, apart from the Hassan Beq mosque, nothing is left of Manshiyya and nowhere in the area is a sign or a plaque mentioning the people, Arab and Jewish , who once lived there.
Fragments of old tiles smoothed by the sea that we found on Manshiyya’s beach
Unless of course you include that strange hybrid building, the Etzel Museum or Beit Gidi (named after the Etzel’s operations officer). The museum’s centrepiece is the story of the key role the Etzel played in the conquest of Jaffa as well as commemorating its 41 fighters who were killed in the Jaffa campaign. So, on the one hand, here at least is a real remnant of an old Manshiyya house or houses made of local limestone (and originally built in 1900 by an immigrant Jewish businessman). And of course every country dedicates monuments to its heroes who fell in battle. On the other hand, it is hard not to see a museum dedicated to the military group responsible for Manshiyya’s destruction on the site of that destruction as the victor sticking a finger in the eye of the vanquished.
And whatever the distinctive modernistic black cube stuck incongruously on top of it is supposed to be telling us is open to individual interpretation. One critic described it as, “one of the most ambivalent architectural objects, not only in Israeli architecture but in world architecture.”
The Etzel Museum in Charles Clore Park
There is a plaque in Charles Clore Park, just a few yards away from the Etzel Museum, a round stone plaque: “In honor of American Christian Lovers of Zion who arrived by sea on the “Nellie Chapin” on September 22, 1866 bringing wooden houses from Jonesport, Maine, to establish the American Colony in Yafo.” Someone in Tel Aviv municipality thought it appropriate to commemorate the arrival of a weird Christian sect led by an alcoholic ex-actor, that set up the ill-fated and short lived American Colony but not the 13,000 Arab and Jewish residents of Manshiyya who by all accounts lived together fairly harmoniously, Jewish prostitutes and all, for about half a century. Would the sky really fall if a corner were set aside for some information and photos of Manshiyya as it once was?
This zone of Tel Aviv-Jaffa contains several plaques noting the location of this or that attack in the Jaffa offensive by members of this or that underground (Haganah, Etzel, Lehi). On these plaques, the Arab side is relegated to the status of “rioters”, never, for example, “defenders”. Sometimes, embarrassing details are omitted. The plaque outside the Saraya on Clock Square mentions that the building served as, “a command post for the local Arab rioters and the Iraqi Expeditionary Force that invaded the country following the UN decision to partition Palestine.” There is plenty of evidence to show that neither assertion is true. Moreover, no mention is made of the 28 Arab civilians killed and 160 injured in the blast. Needless to say, nowhere on these plaques are the words “Palestinian” or “Nakba” to be found. The denial or, at best, official downplaying of any sign of Palestinian cultural and physical heritage, speaks for itself.
The area that was once Manshiyya in 2011 with the Jaffa promontory in the background.
Some 6,000 Jews, 2.4% of the Jewish population of Palestine. died in the War of Independence, many of them Holocaust survivors. It is only natural that a new country that struggled and made such heavy sacrifices to gain its independence should want to glorify its heroes, burnish its achievements and strengthen its national narrative. But the War of Independence happened 74 years ago, light years in terms of Israel’s rapid evolution into a significant first world state with purportedly liberal and democratic values. Yet any mention of the Nakba or attempt to show the Palestinian side of the war is immediately denounced as “deligitimization”. As long as mainstream Israel refuses to acknowledge the existence of the Palestinian society that preceded it, to say the words, show the documentation and spark interest and empathy, Israeli society will be unable to engage constructively with even the most moderate elements on the Palestinian side. The same might be said for the strict adherence on the Palestinian side to a narrative that denies any legitimacy whatsoever to Jewish historical and religious attachment to Eretz Israel/Palestine.
In a speech he gave a few years ago Tel Aviv-Jaffa mayor Ron Huldai said that, “Tel Aviv believes in democracy, pluralism, freedom of expression and tolerance…..Tel Aviv –Jaffa has always been a lighthouse of human rights.” In 2020, Eitan Schwarz, the city’s spokesperson said, “In the last decade Tel Aviv has become a Lighthouse City – a city whose expression of values shines, projects and influences the outside world.” Would not a rethinking of how to describe and acknowledge the Palestinian heritage of Jaffa in the public space of Tel Aviv-Jaffa constitute an appropriate “expression of values” for a city that aspires to project its moral light into the surrounding sea of darkness?
Tel Aviv is a strong city with a national role but it’s not Israel’s de Klerk. When it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict it is apparently not strong enough to pioneer critical engagement with its own narrative and acknowledge that there were other sides to the story. If ever it does so, we will have entered a phase of Israeli political maturity so lacking currently.
View north from Irsheed, (founded by Egyptians from Rasheed in Egypt) located just south of Manshiyya. 1930’s.
What motivates this Israeli self-censorship? Is it the fear that cracks in the Israeli narrative could snowball into renewed demands for the Palestinian Right of Return? I don’t think that there is a memo from the government on this. But I do think that Israel suffers from a national guilty conscience regarding the circumstances of its birth. This translates into denial and self-censorship, a fear of upsetting the righteous role in which we have cast ourselves: always the victims, never the instigators of aggression, always humane, progressive and western with, “the most moral army in the world”. Any chink in this armour of self-righteousness is denounced as treason.
And then there is a fear of provoking unnecessary controversy in a country already riven by controversy internally and is the subject of controversy internationally. Why stir up the Palestinian refugee question again and provide the anti-Zionists and anti-Semites with ammunition? After all, if a plaque were to be placed in Manshiyya there would need to be a plaque in the other forgotten Arab satellites of Jaffa like Abu Kabir, at the southern end of today’s Herzl Street; Shaykh Muwannis, the site of the Tel Aviv University campus; Summayl the site of a new up-market housing and commercial development in north Tel Aviv) or Salama the low-income Jewish neighbourhoods of Shechunat Hatikva and Kfar Shalem.
And if there, then why not in another four hundred locations in Israel?