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Jaffa : City of Strangers
by : Lily Galili and Ori Nir (Ha'aretz)The park at the corner of Yefet and Ehrlich Streets in Jaffa is called The Garden of the Two. "The Two" are Abd al Rano Abd al Krim, a resident of Jaffa, and Ilanit Ohana, a resident of Bat Yam, who were killed in a terror attack on Eilat Street on Purim, 1992. Since then, the park has been named after them, a symbol of the ethos of coexistence that intertwined them in death.During Sukkot, a sulha (reconciliation) tent was pitched in the park, one of many that were put up after the riots throughout the country in October. The tent was located in the northern corner of the park, and many made a pilgrimage to it: Arab public figures, Jewish intellectuals, Arab merchants who came to repair the damage that had been done to their businesses, the new Jewish inhabitants of Jaffa, who are well up on the discourse of "coexistence." Even Minister for Regional Development Shimon Peres was there.
In the southern corner of the small park, there is another kind of tent. In it, an Arab family by the name of Soueif has been living for about two years, The family lost its house in the Ajami quarter in a real estate deal that enriched a number of Jewish firms and business people, but left them homeless. For one year and 11 months, the tent has been home to a father who is a drug addict (and meanwhile has undergone extensive detoxification treatment in Taibeh), a mother who works cleaning an office building in the afternoons, and five teenaged children, four of whom have been placed in special education settings. They get their water from a nearby faucet and their electricity from a line run from a nearby garage. They bathe at neighbors' homes and use the toilet at the barber shop opposite.
During the Sukkot holiday, only about 10 meters separated the two tents - one representing a miserable existence, the other hope for coexistence. None of the visitors to the latter stopped to visit the Soueif family. On the contrary. Cautiously, as if circumventing a minefield, the pilgrims would head for the other tent, there to speak loftily about harmony and good will. The reconciliation tent was folded some time ago, but the Soueif family is still ensconced in its tent in the Ajami quarter, one of the poorest neighborhoods in Tel Aviv.
It used to be that Jaffa was something else. "The bride of Palestine," they called it, because of its beauty and its busy commercial and cultural life. Of all this hardly anything remains. More than any other Israeli city that was once an Arab city, Jaffa is stuck in the Palestinian national memory as an object of longing. There are dozens of Internet sites that tell its story: The blunter ones relate the story of the "ethnic cleansing" carried out by the Jews in 1948; the more poetic ones are devoted to the personal stories of the refugees who abandoned it, and of those who have returned to visit.
In November of 1995, Salim Tamari returned there for a visit. A native of Jaffa and a lecturer at Bir Zeit University, he was a member of the committee on refugees in the multilateral talks. Tamari has documented his impressions of this visit on a Web site, and apparently he did not like what he saw: not the Jews, not the Arabs, and not what he saw as "an easy coexistence between the newcomers and the destitute Arab community. In the middle have remained a few established families of Jaffa, and another dozen nouveau riche Jaffa-ites who made their fortunes from building contracting and drug dealing."
Even if the characteristics of the population Tamari found there still apply, that "easy coexistence" no longer exists. As in all the mixed towns, something has happened in Jaffa in recent months.
"The Jaffa settlement" is how Reno Tsror, a journalist who lives there, describes his neighborhood, using the Hebrew word usually used for Jewish settlements beyond the 1967 borders. "It's hard to forget that day, of a thousand Arabs with axes by my house, helicopters overhead and the muezzin screaming over the loudspeaker. From that moment, a huge rent was torn. Jaffa became a big school for Judaism, because the Jewish identity suddenly became very dramatic."
Six weeks after that day, Jaffa still looks like it is in shock. The 22,000 Jews and the 18,000 Arabs (12,000 Muslim and about 6,000 Christian) are finding it hard to deal with the new situation. It's not only the Jewish hummus-eaters who have fled, but also the buyers of million-dollar penthouses who are now backing out of the deals. Alex Ansky, a broadcaster on Army Radio, which is in Jaffa, relates that he now gets to work from Tel Aviv in five minutes. But Ansky is not praising the improvement in traffic conditions: "Jaffa has become a ghost town," he says sadly. A despondent mood hangs in the air of Jaffa like a palpable new entity that has taken control. Two days of disturbances have led to the disintegration of a fabric that had been basted together over a period of 50 years.
In Acre, the disturbances immediately made separation more profound. Haifa has enough natural mechanisms to enable a quicker emergence from the crisis. But in the wake of the trauma, Jaffa is finding it difficult to discover such mechanisms within itself. The problematic composition of its population - weak Arab and Jewish populations that make up certain neighborhoods and the impossible encounter between destitute Arabs and extremely wealthy Jews in other neighborhoods create fierce social tensions that magnify the national split. Over 63 percent of Jaffa's Jews and about 87 percent of its Muslims are in the weakest socio-economic decile of the population; 4 percent of the Jews and less than 1 percent of the Muslims are in the top 5 percent of the scale.
More than in any of the other mixed towns, the Arab inhabitants of Jaffa have a sense of "invasion," and of "colonization by rich liberals."
"We spoil their view," observes Ajami resident Nouha Hamad cynically. In the pictures of her home before it was renovated, one sees the total destruction of a house that had been sealed for years, with empty bottles of narcotic addicts' detoxification drugs strewn around the yard. Hamad is a professional teacher of Hebrew, married to a physician, and her family has lived in Jaffa for generations. Despite her status, Hamad feels uncomfortable with the new Jewish inhabitants.
"They look down on us from above, in every sense of the word," she says, indicating the handsome buildings of the Andromeda Hill project. "I don't have anything in common with those people; they also don't really live with us." Hamad relates that the Arabs at one time used to call Jaffa "the stranger's city," a reference to the many transients who stopped there. Now, "the strangers" in Jaffa are the wealthy Jews, who look as if they do not really belong, and the Palestinian collaborators who have been resettled there, casting a pall of dread and shame over the neighborhood.
Hamad's discourse is more social than national. She has spent all her life in natural proximity to Jews. "Then, there was no need for special 'activities' to have a real life in common," she says, reconstructing the spontaneous coexistence of the 1960s and the 1970s. "Now, everything needs phony planning."
But her relationship with her Jewish neighbor, Dina Li , is perfectly natural. Li, a graduate of Alma College, has been living with her family for three years now in a rented apartment in a building where three Arab families live. Li says that the fact that she rented the apartment from Arab owners has eased her natural integration into the neighborhood. During the days of the riots, the Arab neighbors spoke of protecting her.
"I didn't feel that I was doing anything special or putting on airs when I came to live here," she says. "I wanted to be near the sea and to have a chance to get to know the 'other.' What surprised me about the recent disturbances was the reaction of my liberal friends. What are they so hurt about? What are they punishing the Arabs for now?"
Dr. Danny Rabinowitz , an anthropologist at Hebrew University, supplies an explanation for this reaction. "The privilege of liberalism is the province of those who live far from the border," he says. "This liberalism is the first to crack in a situation of threat. Accepting the 'other' is not enough for coping in situations of conflict. Studies of ethnic violence have shown that the most violent things have occurred when communities collapse into one another, and the neighbor is suddenly perceived as an enemy who had been deceiving you all along."
Meanwhile for the Arabs of Jaffa, the sense of being cheated and oppressed has fermented during years of heavy Jewish dominance. Before the 1948 war, Jaffa was the main cultural center of the Arabs of Palestine. From a large and established community - over 100,000 - only 4,000 remain, mainly the city's poor. In 1950, the defeated city was annexed to the first Hebrew city, and became a minor appendage of Tel Aviv. "They turned us into a marginal minority, whose interests can be ignored," says lawyer Nassim Chacar, one of the leaders of the Arab community in the city, who has been a member of the Tel Aviv-Jaffa municipal council and will again serve on it in the framework of a rotation agreement of the Arab List in Jaffa.
Only in 1993, says Chacar, when the Arabs of Jaffa finally succeeded in getting a representative into the municipal council, did Tel Aviv's local government begin to take them seriously. All at once they stopped calling for the separation of Jaffa from Tel Aviv, and began to demand rights equal to those of the residents of Ramat Aviv and Afeka.
The Arab citizens of the mixed town suffer from a double political weakness. Prof. Majid al-Haj of Haifa University defines them as "the periphery of the periphery." They suffer from discrimination by the government of Israel and also from discrimination by local governments, in contrast to their brothers who live in locales that are entirely Arab, where the local government is also Arab. In Jaffa, more than in any other mixed town, the representation of Arabs in municipal institutions is negligible. It is not by chance that Jaffa is the only mixed town where every two years, there are elections for an Arab representative body - "The League for the Arabs of Jaffa." The Arabs of Jaffa constitute about 2 percent of the population of the Tel Aviv-Jaffa metropolis. "Therefore, our political power depends on the support of the Jewish public," says Chacar, who is one of the heads of this organization.
In general, the Arabs of Jaffa are more dependent on their neighbors than are the Arabs of Acre or Haifa, who live in a more supportive environment. The Arabs of Jaffa are choked off on one side by Bat Yam, where there is no infrastructure for Arab life and from where the hatred emerged in the recent disturbances. On the other, they are closed off by the "city," Tel Aviv, which offers them no opportunities.
"Arabs immigrate to Jaffa in search of job opportunities in the big city, but these pass them by," says Dr. Amalia Saar, a Haifa University anthropologist. "They had been absorbed into services in the municipality, and into restaurants, but from there they have been pushed out by immigrants from Russia, as well as by foreign workers."
The recognition of their utter dependence on Jews from Tel Aviv struck the Arabs of Jaffa in the wake of the violent events of the beginning of October. All of a sudden, the Tel Aviv neighbors stopped coming to the restaurants, the markets and the shops. Even the Dan buses stopped driving along Yefet Street. "There was real shock here," says Said Shadeh, a psychology student. "People were frightened by the force of the violence, the force of the police reaction, and even more so by the reaction of the Tel Aviv Jews, who simply vanished from Jaffa."
About two years ago, Shadeh and some of his friends founded the Arab "National Club" in Jaffa, an organization that aims to increase Palestinian-national awareness and the local patriotism of the Arabs of the city. In the wake of the disturbances, says Shadeh, many parents are pressing their children to stay away from the club's activities. People don't want politics now, they don't want problems," he explains.
What the Arabs of Jaffa do want are solutions to two pressing problems: education and housing. These are issues for Arab communities in all of Israel's mixed towns, but here they are especially acute. Thirty-five percent of the Arabs of Jaffa are children of 14 or younger; in the Jewish population, only 19 percent are in this age group.
There are three educational alternatives for the 4,000 elementary school students in Jaffa: three Arab public schools (where 95 percent of the students are Muslim); three Christian private schools (where nearly all the students are Christians) and one Jewish public school. The latter alternative has become increasingly popular after a ruling by the High Court of Justice against attempts by Jewish parents in Jaffa to block their school to Arab children. Today, 30 percent of the students at the Weizmann School are Arabs, a fact that does not please either side.
Prof. Sami Smooha of Haifa University says that the Arabs of Jaffa have made registering their children for a Jewish school into a tactic. Jews who are alarmed by the process hasten to demand of the authorities a speedy improvement in the Arab school system, in order to prevent the invasion of their own schools.
"The school is getting better, but it still does not fulfill the criteria of a mixed school," says Nouha Hamad. "For years they taught the Arab children spoken [as opposed to literary] Arabic, and had them practice writing ahlan wasahlan [hello and welcome]." Her children are already enrolled in the special Arab school that was established more as a response to Jewish demand than to Arab demand.
The standard at the other Arab public schools is very low. About two years ago, Abed al Halim Satel, the principal of the Arab public high school in Jaffa, related that year after year, he is forced to take in students who cannot read and write or do simple arithmetic. A few years later, one can see these young people driving a BMW or a Mercedes with deafening music blasting from its open windows: Many of them make easy money from the flourishing drug trade in Jaffa.
There has been a housing shortage in Jaffa ever since 1948. Only 40 percent of the Arab residents of Jaffa own the homes in which they live (as opposed to 70 percent of the Jews). The residents of the Arab neighborhoods live mainly in abandoned properties as protected tenants. But the Tenants' Protection Law affords them very little protection and imposes a large number of restrictions. This, together with the absence of public housing projects, causes serious overcrowding.
In recent years, the government has offered housing solutions to 400 qualified Arab families in Jaffa as part of the "build your apartment" project. But only this year, after much lobbying by the Arab community leaders, were the development costs reduced from ,000 to ,000 per family. Despite the reduction, however, it is proving difficult to convince the Arab population of Jaffa, which is suspicious and has had its fill of disappointment, to join the project.
Although the Ajami and Lev Jaffa neighborhoods were included in Project Renewal in 1987, they still look quite neglected. The decision to rehabilitate the neighborhoods is perceived by many Arab residents of Jaffa as aimed at turning them into an attraction for Jews. "The Arabs of Jaffa are facing an existential danger - that the Arabs will be kicked out with the aim of Judaizing the city," says Nassim Chacar.
Sami Elbo, the chairman of the Lev Jaffa neighborhood, located between Yefet Street and Jerusalem Boulevard, represents the Jewish mirror image of the problem. Here too there are issues of housing and education, and the fear that the Arabs will take control of the city. Elbo represents 15,000 residents, 60 percent of them elderly and from the weaker segments of the population. Elbo has been living in Jaffa for 43 years, ever since he immigrated to Israel from Turkey, and he feels a sense of ownership about the place. Sometimes it seems as though his biggest problem is not the Arabs of Jaffa but rather its suspicious Jewish residents.
"They say that the people from North Tel Aviv are more enlightened, and we Sephardim are hewers of wood," he says. "If you ask me, it is we who are doing real coexistence - we live in neighborhoods with the Arabs, send our children to joint schools. The Arabs also accept me as an existing phenomenon, because we spend all our lives together. We played together in the courtyards."
He feels himself to be a real Jaffa man, one who has prevented an extreme right-wing party, which he refuses to name, from forming militias there in order "to prevent street fights." Elbo is very disturbed by what is going on in Jaffa: by the emigration of middle-class Arabs from Ajami to Lev Jaffa, a process he says disturbs the existing balance of 60 percent Jews and 40 percent Arabs in the area; and by the continued neglect of Jaffa's veteran Jewish population. From his perspective, the major investment by the establishment is in the Arabs, as they are perceived as a "problem."
"I'm also a problem," he says. "If my daughter wants to live in Jaffa, there is no housing solution for her. This angers some of the Jewish population here."
According to Elbo, the "build your apartment" project, which was initially intended for those who fit the criteria of the Housing Ministry, has in effect become a program for Arabs only. "It is important to me that Jaffa be Jewish," he says, "unless someone decides that there will be an Arab city next to Tel Aviv, like Nazareth and Upper Nazareth. But as it is now, Jaffa is neither Jewish nor Arab. It's just a neglected and problematic place, to the point that everyone who hears that I live in Jaffa asks me whether I'm normal."
No one asks Rakefet Lapid whether she is normal. Her beautiful home on the seam between Ajami and Lev Jaffa can easily explain the choice she made five years ago. Lapid, who is a professional in the film industry, is definitely one of the "northern do-gooders" who have become a phenomenon here. She is constantly occupied with the problems of her Arab neighbors and goes around declaiming their troubles. Thus, the place she has chosen to live has changed from a natural private corner into a constant concern with the Israeli experience at its deepest levels.
"It's true," Lapid confirms. "This is a kind of life in which you are always rubbing up against the 'other' and against existential problems. If you are indifferent, you could just carry on; if you are not indifferent, you simply work on it all day long."
For Lapid, this is not just a metaphor. As the coordinator of educational activities of Yafo Yafat Yamim, an organization that aims at achieving cooperation among the various population groups in the city, she does indeed deal with the issue all the time.
Then there are the pangs of conscience that go along with the choice of an Arab house that once belonged to someone else. Before she bought the house, she checked to make sure that the property had never been claimed, and found out that the family that had lived there left in 1947 and was now in Lebanon. One day, a woman from Lebanon showed up on her doorstep, hysterical and fraught, and did not want to speak. "I would never live in Gush Katif or even in Gilo," says Lapid firmly. "But what can be done? We won that war, and I'll live wherever I want to in my own country."
If the past few weeks have put the entire country onto a figurative psychiatrist's couch, the return to the most basic existential question is particularly evident in the mixed towns, among Jews and Arabs alike. Jaffa's identity crisis can be summed up in an anecdote: Not long ago, Lapid went into the neighborhood grocery store, run by Michel, an Arab. A little girl handed him a shopping list, written in Arabic. Michel cannot read Arabic, because he studied in a Christian school. So Lapid called in Khaled, the neighbor's son, to help. He could not read Arabic either: He attends the Weizmann School. (Ha'aretz 27.11.2000).
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