I had to look up the meaning of a new word for me, "palimpsest" and reading a long drawn out technical description about it being about the recycling of parchment in the old days by erasing or scraping them to be reused, I realized that it was used in sh's article to shed light on the erasure of Jaffa from the history of TA and its centennial celebrations; Tel Aviv had been quick to annex Jaffa in 51 for its prized real estate and to erase what Jaffa had been to the Palestinians. It is therefore not surprising that TA omitted any inclusion of Jaffa in the celebrations undoubtedly to avoid shedding light on what it has done to it.
The writing of Israel's short history is filled with slogan-based misconceptions and disinformation such as the malarky about Palestine being a land without a people or that it was a land inhabited by illiterate shepherds or that was overun by bedouin migrants from neighbouring Arab lands after Israel had declared its statehood. This history is clung-to for dear life because it explains away that there was no such thing as a Palestinian people and thereby, the Jews did not really take anything away from anybody since there was no one take it away from.
It wasn't really that way, of course; Sami Abu Shehadeh and Fadi Shbaytah, residents of Jaffa and members of the Jaffa Popular Committee for the Defence of Land and Housing Rights wrote an extensive piece on the history of Jaffa that appeared in the Electronic Intifada of February 2009. The following excerpt taken from their article deals mostly with the history of Jaffa before the Jewish militants got their hands on it; they wrote:
Jaffa was the largest city in historic Palestine during the British Mandate with more than 80,000 Palestinian inhabitants and another 40,000 in the surrounding area. Between the UN Partition Resolution of 1947 and the declaration of the establishment of the State of Israel, the Zionist military forces had displaced 95% of the Palestinian population of Jaffa and neighbouring areas.
Before the Nakba of 1948, Jaffa was the center of the Palestinian economy that had been built mostly around the cultivation of citrus fruit and principally oranges. By the 1930s, it was exporting millions of citrus crates to the rest of the world and providing jobs to thousands. With the success of the citrus exports, the city saw important growth in related sectors, from banks to land and sea transportation enterprises, to import and export firms. As the city grew, Jaffa's entrepreneurs began developing industrial production with the opening of metal-working factories and others producing glass, ice, cigarettes, textiles, sweets, transportation-related equipment, mineral and carbonated water and various foodstuffs.
In addition to commerce and industry, a third major pillar of Jaffa's economy was tourism. As this industry grew, so did its communications infrastructure, and the transportation network connecting it to the rest of Palestine and the Arab world. More investments and jobs were also created for Jaffa's residents through the increasing number of hotels, transportation companies, and the growing number of tourism-related services.
Jaffa was also the cultural capital of Palestine, being home to tens of the most important newspapers and publication houses in the country. The most important and ornate cinemas were in Jaffa, as were tens of athletic clubs and cultural societies, like the Orthodox Club and the Islamic Club that have themselves become historic sites still testifying to the city's cultural history. During the Second World war, the British Mandate authorities moved the headquarters of the Near east broadcast studios to Jaffa, the studios becoming the cultural hub in the city from 1941 to 1948. With the growing cultural importance of Jaffa came increasing cultural exchange and interconnections with the main cultural centers in the region such as Cairo and Beirut, which further established the city as a cultural minaret in the region, lovingly dubbed the Bride of the Sea.
The story of Jaffa's ongoing Nakba is the story of the transformation of this thriving modern urban center into a marginalized neighbourhood suffering from poverty, discrimination, gentrification, crime and demolition since the initial wave of mass expulsion in 1948 to the present day.
And so ends this tragic recounting of Jaffa's history that Tel Aviv is trying to sweep under the rug. How the Israelis went about destroying this vibrant and lovely city can be found in the same article at:
Jaffa: From Eminence to Ethnic Cleansing
by Sami Abu Shehadeh and Fadi Shbaytah
Three things:
ReplyDelete1) I am not certain the centennial does totally ignore Jaffa, so it's best not to make that assumption. I felt that it, along with Sumeil, and other Arab places of residence that were already there and absorbed into Tel Aviv after it was founded would have been a wonderful way to demonstrate the openness and tolerance of many of its residents.
2) Parchment does not absorb what is written or drawn on it, so a layer of work can be peeled off and pasted elsewhere. The Palestinians have their story, the Israelis have theirs. One side is constantly ripping out the history it doesn't like and repasting its own over that of the other. At the most basic level this happens on signposts where the name of a place in one language is sprayed or written over, never mind the practice of simply not signposting. It happens on hoardings. It happens on the ground. That's before you get to educational text books, the designation of "green areas" or "military zones", legislation. The Jews may deny that the Palestinians have an umbilical link to this land, but the Palestinians also deny that the Jews do. Both are utterly convinced, and furiously remove or paste over instead of accepting each others' valid but different link and starting from there. It's like a peeling wall on which infinite layers of paint are visible. That's what I meant by palimpsest.
3) The word Palestinian, until 1948, comprised both Arab and Jewish residents.
sh
My post, sh, was to demonstrate one of the fallacies in Israel's history about when Jews started arriving in Palestine, there were no Arabs there; Golda's canard "land without a people for a people without a land" and the other one on how the Jews put Jaffa oranges on the world map. The word "Palestinian" in this context was used to identify the Arab ones since the Jews of Palestine appeared content to have referred to themselves simply as Jews.
ReplyDeleteWhether Jaffa is ignored or not in TA's centennial celebrations, it won't change the fact that Israel did a lot more than painting over, as you defined palimpsest; it erased the Palestinian-Arab vestiges of Jaffa. You talk of painting or pasting over names in history as if we are discussing graffiti on a wall; Israel attempted to erase a whole people by denying they ever existed and went about executing various plans to reach that goal.
Sh, you use sugar-coated words to describe what Tel Aviv did to Jaffa. Jaffa and other localities were not "absorbed" by Tel Aviv but annexed outright and the city with exception to one neighbourhood, was taken over by Israel under the absentee laws and given to Jews.
The denying on the part of Palestinian Arabs was not aimed at the Palestinian Jews that had been probably living in Palestine for longer than the Palestinian Arabs, but aimed at Jews arriving from Europe and America to displace the Palestinian Arabs. What happened to Jaffa and to 420 other Palestinian Arab villages that were destroyed was much more than mere palimpsest; it was more about vanishing the Palistinians, to use the words of author Ghada Karmi.
You have completely missed the point. One cannot erase. I had hoped to bring other examples of that. What you have shown is only what everyone already knows, or what they think they know about the subject. That's forum stuff.
ReplyDeleteWhat I would like to, what I intended to show is what they do not know because they have pasted their own litany over the litany of the other. I hope you will give me the space to do that in the way I have chosen.
Back to Jaffa here and now:
http://yuditilany.blogspot.com/2009_09_01_archive.html
sh
You want to give an equal voice to the Palestinian version of history without relating it to the Israeli version. I'm saying that the Israeli version of history is based on propaganda rather than on facts and this is more than the simple covering up of actual history with one's own litany. In the end, we may be talking about the same thing but from different perspectives; you want to stick to the big picture and I'm into its the smaller details. Your way satisfies itself by the simple recognition of a wrong done to the people of Jaffa, like applauding a movie about its slums and walking away with a good feeling and my way is to insist on restitution. The sugar-coated jargon describing the mixed versions of history is verbal facadism that Palestinians cannot use to buy a loaf of bread.
ReplyDelete