Issue-oriented and thematic papers for PfL’s advocacy work, including statements, campaign materials, articles and updates on developing issues; and links to related resources and information
No. 49 (2008.09.18) – Jaffa’s ‘Renewal’ Aims At Expulsion of Palestinians
Editor’s note:
“Whoever speaks for 60 years about the ‘catastrophe’ befalling them will suffer a real catastrophe in the end” (Israeli Public Security Minister- Avi Dichter) was horrific to say the least. The Palestinians refer to the events of 1948 as the Nakba or catastrophe because that was when the local population was ethnically cleansed to create an independent Jewish State.
It is an irony that the same day (May 15th, 1948) that the Palestinians refer to as the Palestinian Al-Nakba (the Catastrophe), Israel refers to as the “Day of Independence.” To Palestinians, it symbolizes the dispossession, displacement, and uprooting of 800,000 Palestinians from their homes in what then became Israel. Many of these refugees and their descendants, who now number more than 4 million, still languish in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, and surrounding Arab countries. While Al-Nakba embodies the first major wave of forced expulsion of Palestinians from their land, Israel’s premeditated campaign of ethnic cleansing continues to this very day.
Between February 1948 and December 1948 the Israeli army systematically occupied the Palestinian villages and towns, expelled by force the population, destroyed houses, looted their belongings and took over their material and cultural possessions. This was the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. During the ethnic cleansing, wherever there was resistance by the population the result was a massacre. There are at least 30 cases of such massacres where a few thousand Palestinians were massacred by the Israeli forces throughout the operation of the ethnic cleansing.
The Israeli army became a bit tired toward the end of the operation and the Palestinian villages became more aware of what was awaiting them and therefore in the Upper Galilee the Israeli army did not succeed in expelling all of the villages. This is why today we have what we call the Arab-Israelis or Israeli-Arabs.
This is a group of 50 to 60 villages that remained within the state of Israel and its population was steadfast and was not expelled over to the other side of the border—to Lebanon or Syria.
Part of any ethnic cleansing operation is not just wiping out the population and expelling it from the earth. A very typical part of ethnic cleansing is wiping people out of history. For ethnic cleansing to be an effective and successful operation you also have to wipe people out of memory and the Israelis have perfected this.
By building Jewish settlements over the Palestinian villages they expelled and quite often gave them names that clearly suggested that those villages are totally now in the hands of Israel and there is no chance in the world of bringing the clock backwards.
That is a very powerful tool for ‘memorycide’. In fact, much of the Palestinian effort should have been but was never unfortunately—or only recently began—was to fight against that ‘memorycide’ by at least bringing back the memory of what happened.
Despite everything that has happened, it is still possible that Arabs and Jews can still live together in one state and subscribe to one common aspiration. But for this, there needs to be three factors:
- You need closure for the 1948 story—namely you need an Israeli acknowledgment of the crime it committed against the Palestinian people.
- You need to make Israel accountable for this and the only way of making Israel accountable is by, at least in principle, accepting the Palestinian refugees right of return.
- You need the Jewish presence—and that onus is on Israel—to stop acting as a colonial/apartheid type force as the only way of gaining any form of legitimacy. (If Israel wants acceptance, it will have to undo much of what it did over the last 60 years. You cant sweep it under the carpet)
Although there are so many obvious answers to these compelling and complex issues, Israel remains stubborn in its opposition to seeing reason and find solutions that can bring an end to the misery that is now so dominant in Palestine.
The accompanying article shows how the Israeli Government chooses ”quiet” forms of ethnic cleansing, using administrative and legal pressure, to make Jaffa entirely Jewish.
The bridge from occupation to freedom is something that the Palestinians are willing to build. They cannot even begin until Israel abandons war and declares peace with justice. In the context of Israel, it is important to state that until Israel takes the risks for peace; the rest of humanity has to live under the threat of the risks of war.
Jaffa’s ‘Renewal’ Aims At Expulsion of Palestinians
By JONATHAN COOK
2008 SEPTEMBER 15 | THE ELECTRONIC INTIFADA
The ground floor of Zaki Khimayl’s home is a cafe where patrons can drink mint tea or fresh juice as they smoke on a water pipe. Located by Jaffa’s beach, a stone’s throw from Tel Aviv, the business should be thriving.
Mr Khimayl, however, like hundreds of other families in the Arab neighbourhoods of Ajami and Jabaliya, is up to his eyes in debt and trapped in a world of bureaucratic regulations apparently designed with only one end in mind: his eviction from Jaffa.
Sitting on the cafe’s balcony, Mr Khimayl, 59, said he feels besieged. Bulldozers are tearing up the land by the beach for redevelopment and luxury apartments are springing up all around his dilapidated two-storey home.
He opened a briefcase, one of five he has stuffed with demands and fines from official bodies, as well as bills from four lawyers dealing with the flood of paperwork. “I owe 1.8 million shekels [$500,000] in water and business rates alone,” he said in exasperation. “The crazy thing is the municipality recently valued the property and told me it’s worth much less than the sum I owe.”
Jaffa is one of half a dozen “mixed cities” in Israel, where Jewish and Palestinian citizens supposedly live together. The rest of Israel’s Palestinian minority, relatives of the Palestinians in the occupied territories, live in their own separate and deprived communities.
Despite the image of coexistence cultivated by the Israeli authorities, Jaffa is far from offering a shared space for Jews and Palestinians, according to Sami Shehadeh of the Popular Committee for the Defence of Jaffa’s Homes. Instead, Palestinian residents live in their own largely segregated neighbourhoods, especially Ajami, the city’s poorest district.
Only last month, Mr Shehadeh said, the Jewish residents’ committees proposed creating days when the municipal pool could be used only by Jews.
Although Jaffa’s 18,000 Palestinian residents constitute one-third of the city’s population, they have been left powerless politically since a municipal fusion with Jaffa’s much larger neighbour, Tel Aviv, in 1950. Of the cities’ joint population, Palestinians are just three per cent.
After years of neglect, Mr Shehadeh said, the residents are finally attracting attention from the authorities – but the interest is far from benign. A “renewal plan” for Jaffa, ostensibly designed to improve the inhabitants’ quality of life, is in fact seeking the Palestinian residents’ removal on the harshest terms possible, he said.
“The municipality talks a lot about ‘developing’ and ‘rehabilitating’ the area, but what it means by development is attracting wealthy Jews looking to live close by Tel Aviv but within view of the sea,” he said. “The Palestinian residents here are simply seen as an obstacle to the plan, so they are being evicted from their homes under any pretext that can be devised.
“Some of the families have lived in these homes since well before the state of Israel was established, and yet they are being left with nothing.”
The current pressure on the residents to leave Ajami has painful echoes of the 1948 war that followed Israel’s declaration of its existence. Once, Jaffa was the most powerful city in Palestine, its wealth derived from the area’s huge orange exports.
As Israeli historians have noted, however, one of the Jewish leadership’s main aims in the 1948 war was the expulsion of the Palestinian population from Jaffa, especially given its proximity to Tel Aviv, the new Jewish state’s largest city. Ilan Pappe, a historian, writes that the people of Jaffa were “literally pushed into the sea” to board fishing boats destined for Gaza as “Jewish troops shot over their heads to hasten their expulsion”.
By the end of the war, no more than 4,000 of Jaffa’s 70,000 Palestinians remained. The Israeli government nationalised all their property and corralled the residents into the Ajami neighbourhood, south of Jaffa port. For two years they were sealed off from the rest of Jaffa behind barbed wire.
In the meantime, Jaffa’s properties were either demolished or redistributed to new Jewish immigrants. The heart of old Jaffa, next to the port, was developed as a touristic playground, with palatial Palestinian homes turned into exclusive restaurants and art galleries run by Jewish entrepreneurs.
The Ajami district, on the other hand, was quickly transformed from a distinguished neighbourhood of Jaffa into its most deprived area, which became a magnet for crime and drugs. “The municipality showed its disdain for us by dumping all the city’s waste, even dangerous chemicals, on our beach,” Mr Shehadeh said.
The residents—even those who continued to live in their families’ original homes—lost their status as owners and overnight became tenants in confiscated property, forced to pay rent to a state-controlled company, Amidar. Today, Amidar wants the families out to make way for wealthy Jewish investors and real estate developers. Over the past 18 months, it has issued 497 eviction orders against Ajami families, threatening to make 3,000 people homeless.
“The problem for the families is that for six decades they have been ignored,” said Mr Shehadeh, who is standing in the local elections to the council next month.
“Four-fifths of Ajami’s population is Palestinian and no investments were made by the municipality. Amidar refused to renovate the homes, and the planning authorities refused to issue permits to the families to build new properties or alter existing ones.”
Faced with crumbling old homes and growing families, the residents had little choice but to fix and extend their properties themselves. Now years, sometimes decades, later Amidar is using these alterations as grounds for eviction, arguing that the residents have broken the terms of their rental agreements.
Mental Lahavi, vice-chairman of the local building and planning committee, recently admitted to the local media: “The municipality froze all [building] permits in the area for a long period and would not even let people replace an asbestos roof. They turned all the residents of the neighbourhood into offenders.” Mr Khimayl has amassed large debts because he used parts of his home that, according to Amidar, were not covered by his contract—even though the house has been owned by his family since 1902.
Amidar has also been waging a legal battle over a minor alteration he made to the property.
Many years ago, Mr Khimayl rebuilt the dangerous external stone steps that provided the only access to the house’s second floor. In 2005, Amidar inspectors told him he had broken the terms of his contract and should remove the new steps.
Unable to reach his home in any other way, he replaced the stone steps with a metal staircase. Another inspector declared the staircase a violation of the agreement, too.
Mr Khimayl is currently using a metal staircase on wheels, arguing that the moveable steps are not a permanent alteration. Nonetheless, Amidar is pursuing him through the courts. Other families face similar problems.
A recent report by the Human Rights Association in Nazareth concluded the government was seeking to use a “quiet” form of ethnic cleansing, using administrative and legal pressure, to make Jaffa entirely Jewish. Amidar has said it is simply upholding the law. “In cases in which the law has been broken, the company acts to protect the state’s rights, regardless of the value of the property or the religion or nationality of the tenants.”
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest book is “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press). His website is www.jkcook.net. This article originally appeared in The National (www.thenational.ae), published in Abu Dhabi.
Palestine Update is an occasional mailing edited by Ranjan Solomon and sent out by Goa-based Alternatives on behalf of Alternatives/Badayl
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