I live in Israel. The city of Tel Aviv, Israel's Big Orange, began celebrating its centenary last April. This means that at this point we are five months into the year-long schedule of special centennial events.
When advance posters came out last spring I wondered how Jaffa, which was absorbed into Tel Aviv in the 1950s and is mentioned in the Book of Jonah, to name just one biblical source, would be handled in the context of the celebration's time-frame. Particularly as I had previously noticed that on the tourist ministry's explanatory historical placard near the refurbished port the 7 or 800 years the population was predominantly Arab is barely mentioned (despite the two stone mosques that dominate its skyline). Here's a list of the special commemorative city walks mapped out in honour of the centennial:
Note that in the blurb, Jaffa's residents prior to Tel Aviv's existence are said to have been "impoverished Egyptian immigrants", "migrant workers" and "affluent Christians". The seashore, these walks tell us, was an "important vacation spot for local Arab residents", this presumably intended to show that what local Arabs there were were not from Jaffa. The port is said to be the oldest in the world and we see reference to Andromeda rock in Greek mythology and the German Templers. A sideways look at the unexplained al-Manshiyeh quarter, in which the picturesque Hasan Bek mosque is found, tells you neither when it was built (it's older than Tel Aviv) nor who its residents were. What you read is that after the minaret (inexplicably?) collapsed, it was rebuilt to twice its former height but it doesn't say why.
The article from which the text below is extracted illustrates the problem well. It tells the story of John Steinbeck's family, why they came to Jaffa and the tragic circumstances (for which 5 Arabs were arrested for rape, murder and pillage) because of which they left.
Its last paragraph shows how much richer Tel Aviv culture would be if only the layering and the neighborhood of Manshiyeh were explained properly, the word Arab was not so loaded and we could take on board that some of those sand dunes were inhabited.
Eight years after the community on Mount Hope was dismantled, the American Colony, headed by George Adams, was established, but most of the community members left two years later. The Templers came to Palestine in 1868 and settled on the ruins of the American Colony, but in 1871 they built the new community of Sarona, next to the present day Defense Ministry complex in Tel Aviv. The neighborhood of Manshiyeh was established north of the Jaffa walls in the early 1860s, and was settled by Egyptian farmers. In 1887, the neighborhood of Neveh Zedek was built, and 22 years later Tel Aviv was established.
Finally, an excerpt from a February 2008 article on an exhibition on Jaffa's history that maybe did, maybe didn't, make a dent in the Municipality's plans for the centennial:
"I've had it up to here with meeting colleagues at conferences in Europe whose only interest is in the Citta Bianca, the White City of Tel Aviv," Bar Or says. "After all, conservation is memory. The cultivation of the Bauhaus heritage has made people forget what is not seen and not preserved. It makes no difference to me that some people claim that to preserve these houses is to anchor the history of the Palestinians. In any case, those people think the orchards of Jaffa and Tel Aviv exist in paintings by Reuven Rubin and Nahum Gutman and in the writings of Brenner, and only there."
Most of the structures were forgotten and neglected, says Bar Or; this is the first time they have been placed in the spotlight with the aim of bringing about a change in their status. "The goal of the exhibition is to put the well houses on the agenda, so the municipality will not roll its eyes and say they do not merit conservation. Just as [Tel Aviv Mayor Ron] Huldai was able to designate 1,200 Bauhaus structures for conservation and persuade UNESCO that they constitute a treasure, he will now discover that there are palaces among these well houses."
Hint of what you can read about further on in the same article:
The Biluim House featured on one of the centennial walks above was the house of one Anton Ayoub, citrus grower who is credited with having "discovered" the first Chamouti orange. One house, two identities.
Read also about Anton Roche's house and the Al-Azi clan's compound.
I hadn't planned to end with a rant, but since I intend to do a few pieces on this subject, I'll explain that it seems to me that as long as parts of our history are routinely omitted or given scant mention in official Israeli tourist literature, the will to make peace cannot be expected to take root. You can't erase history or flatten it under another without warping minds; if people are educated to see only what an authority says is there in spite of evidence to the contrary, there's a psychological problem that won't just disappear. Both translate into a growing national dumbness and numbness that hunkers down behind the illusory or the partial and postpones any day of reckoning. To the charge that Jewish history is rarely mentioned in the history of other countries I will reply that if Jews had comprised 20% of the inhabitants of those countries I would accept that argument. If I hadn't already seen ample evidence that this next argument produces a fat yawn, I'd add that since Jews know what it feels like to be ignored and excluded maybe we should be more scrupulous in avoiding infiicting it on others.
If the form the Tel Aviv celebrations have taken (in fact a great opportunity to illustrate the tolerance this fascinating city boasts) were the only example of the problem, this exercise would not be worth the effort. But travelling the country expressly to try to go beyond what we are told is there, it's clear to me that some of the work can be done by simply telling. This does not mean uncritically adopting the Palestinian or any other narrative that displays some of the same characteristics as ours in the amnesia/distortions department. It would merely attempt to reveal what is still there if you're only willing to lift what's obscuring it and integrate what you find underneath with what you're holding in your hand.
TA missed a good opportunity to bring Palestinians and Jews closer together but it was somewhat predictable since all the centennial brouhaha is also intended to sweep Israel's less elegant face under the rug. It's too bad because TA missed out on an additional 700 years of history that is evidently more colourful than the past 100 years starting from the sand dunes.
ReplyDeleteI don't know about elegant, Walid. Outside Hollywood, bitter chocolate - with disturbing nuances that you have to think about and take time over - is thought to be more elegant than syrup.
ReplyDeletesh
We are often reminded that we can't rewrite history which isn't true; we can and we should to correct misrepresented historical facts. In the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, there has been so much erroneous reporting of history on both sides that until these have been cleared up and rewritten without the propaganda, there can never be a solution to the problem. People from both sides have to dig for the truth and move away from looking only for those things that justify their current beliefs.
ReplyDeletePeople from both sides have to dig for truth and those who do know that definitive versions of history don't yet exist, certainly not for relatively recent events. Another complication is archive material, what those in whose possession it is want to be known and what they do not, what happens to what has been collected in times of war, etc.
ReplyDeleteFor example, Holocaust material is only available for certain of the countries involved, but much has disappeared. This is what allows certain persuasions of people to question whether it happened at all.
As far as Palestinian history is concerned, the fact that there is no central Palestinian archive means that what there is comes from Israel, Britain, France, or from Arab countries more interested in their own struggles than that of the Palestinians, leaving the field wide for fudging and denial. Big subject, lots to read on, and from, both sides.
Does anyone know whether there's ever been an attempt to construct an archive of testimonies by refugees who were here in 1947/48?
sh
Yes, there has been several attempts by Palestinians to gather their history as you suggested, but this has been deliberately thwarted by the Israel because it cannot accept leaving around any proof that the Palestinians had existed on the land and that their properties were stolen from them as this would disprove the Zionist narrative that there was no such thing as a Palestinian people and whatever drifting Bedouins happened to be living on the land were overcompensated for their property by bona fide Jewish buyers.
ReplyDeleteIsrael has pulled that dirty trick of erasing traces of Palestinian history on several occasions with the first happening during the 1948 war when several private collections of books and manuscripts were looted by the Haganah militia and never returned. Several of those collections including the private papers of Khalil el Sakakini ended up in the library of the Hebrew University.
Next, came Israel's raid in 1982 on the Palestine Research Center in Beirut as soon as Israel entered the city. The entire archive consisting of 25,000 books in Arabic, Hebrew and French and served as a depository of Palestine's historical, political, and cultural heritage. Most importantly, it held the records of property and business ownership in Palestine of the refugees that had taken years to compile. After pressure from the Europeans over a 2 year period, Israel returned some of the stolen material but not the records of ownership.
Next in Israel's history of Palestinian identity thefts came in August 2001 on a raid of the Orient House in Jerusalem that had served as the internationally-recognized headquarters of the PLO. The looting included the photo essay collection that had been compiled by the Arab Studies Society was a unique record of Jerusalem's ethnographic relations among its 19th and 20th century population and this theft was an irreplaceable and invaluable archive.
Moving on with Israel's never ending attempts at erasing vestiges of the Palestinians, came the 2002 raids on the interior and education ministries in Ramallah during the siege of Arafat's compound. Israel ransacked the buildings, destroyed computers and confiscated all records and registers of real estate and business transaction as well as all the academic records of the Palestinian population.
So it's not for lack of trying that the Palestinians have little in the way of historical records and it's thanks in good part to Israel. There are undoubtedly several Palestinian organizations that are in the course of mapping out Palestine's history with the help of the few remaining Palestinians that were born before the Nakba. One good repository of Palestinian history that is centered on keeping alive the names and memories of the 420 destroyed Palestinian villages is Palestine Remembered found at
http://www.palestineremembered.com/
The most authoritative inventory of those villages is found in a book by Walid Khalidi called All That Remains.
ReplyDeletePalestine Remembered, the site you link to, relies heavily on it, as do other historians.
http://www.palestine-studies.org/books.aspx?id=591&href=details
sh