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Abstract
Through ethnographic and archival research centered in Jaffa, this article analyzes how the image of the Jewish-Arab mixed city has been represented and (re)produced in the Zionist historical imagination since the establishment of the state of Israel to the present. Vacillating between romantic historicity and political violence, the image of Jaffa poses a political and hermeneutic challenge to the territorial project of urban Judaization, which ultimately failed to define and establish the national-cum-cultural identity of this “New-Old” city. This failure, I argue, results in a persistent pattern of semiotic ambivalence which, from the Jewish-Israeli point of view, positions Jaffa both as a source of identity and longing (in the distant past) as well as a symbol of alterity and enmity (in the recent past)— an object of desire and fear alike. As such, Jaffa and other ethnically mixed towns (including Ramle, Lydda, Haifa, and Acre) occupy a problematic place in Israeli and Palestinian political and cultural imagination. A bi-national borderland in which Arabs and Jews live de facto together, these cities bring to the fore, on the one hand, the paradox of Palestinian citizens in a fundamentally Jewish state, while simultaneously suggesting, by the very spatial and social realization of “mixed-ness,” the potential imaginary of its solution. Unfolding through four distinct historical modalities of urban Orientalism, this article historicizes the highly politicized image of the Jewish-Arab city and the discourse on its future. These discursive formations reconfigured the public space that enabled, paradoxically since the October 2000 events, new political claims for equal citizenship, bi-national cooperation, and Palestinian presence.
This article is part of a larger historical and anthropological project that analyzes urban space and ethnic relations in Jewish-Arab “mixed towns.” Centered in Jaffa, the research draws on archival sources and ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2001–2003 and 2005–2006. I thank James Fernandez for introducing me to the metaphoric jungle of tropology and to Haim Hazan for his socratic wisdom and poetic insights. I am also grateful to the organizers (Lucia Volk and Bshara Khaldun) and the participants of the workshop “Spaces of Memory” held at EUI, Florence, in 2006. Marina Peterson, Naor Ben-Yehoyada, Arnika Fuhrmann, Eyal Danon, and Scandar Copti have kindly agreed to read drafts of the manuscript with a critical eye. The manuscript was completed when I was a Jean Monnet Fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at the European University Institute. An early version appeared in Hebrew in Zmanim Vol. 106 (2009). Additional funding for this research was provided by NSF, USIP, PARC, Lady Davis Fellowship Trust, Dan David Prize, Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and the Josephine de Kármán Foundation. Final thanks are due to the editors and anonymous referees of Identities for their constructive remarks.
Notes
1. The terminological coupling of “the big place” and “the small place” denotes opposing symbolic planes. “The ‘big place’ is more than a specific site and even more than all sites—it is the idea itself” (CitationGurevitch and Aran 1991). A “big place” is a mythscape, a plane of high values, aspirations, and images; a “small place” is a physical, daily, earthy locality. Jerusalem, for example, is a superimposition of “big” and “small” places: It bears myth and eschatology combined with messy realities and daily activities. For a political and sociological critique, see CitationKimmerling (1992). This quote follows Gurevitch's synthesis of his own work, in http://sociology.huji.ac.il/gurevitch %20research.html (accessed 13 September 2008).
2. The notion of Tel-Aviv as Jaffa's modern “daughter” is central to the Zionist discourse on the city. See the discussion of the article in Citation `Al Ha-Mishmar (21 October 1949) on page 653.
3. The term “mixed towns” refers to the pre-1948 Palestinian leading and “modern” urban centers that were transformed from Arab into Jewish cities during the first years of Israeli statehood. The majority of the Palestinian population (95 percent) in Jaffa, Haifa, Acre, Lydda, and Ramla, including most of the local elite strata, were forced to leave during the 1948 war. Jaffa today has a population of about 65,000, of which 16,000 (24 percent) are Palestinians. The internal composition of the Palestinian community in Jaffa is 70 percent Muslims and 30 percent Christians (Tel-Aviv-Jaffa municipality statistics, 2003). See CitationFalah (1996); CitationMonterescu and Rabinowitz (2007); and CitationTamari (2003).
4. This leading group of revisionary scholars have articulated a powerful critique of the Israeli “dark side of modernism” (CitationYiftachel 1994). Notwithstanding the undeniable reflexive and political value of this critique, it is predominantly set in a linear conceptual framework, namely, as a permanent institutional system of convergence and discursive consistency that posits Jewish/Arab spatial configurations and social actors as mutually exclusive. Thus in Tel-Aviv, CitationLeVine (2005) and CitationRotbard (2005) point to the discursive “erasure” of Palestinian past superimposed by the “inscription” of Zionist space in the making of the “White City.” Similarly, Rabinowitz masterfully exposes the effects of Palestinian “exclusion” in Natzerat Illit (1997) and the complete removal of Palestinian Haifawiyye from the memory of Jewish-Israeli Haifo'im (2007). In Jaffa, CitationTamari (2003) narrates the “bourgeois nostalgia” of Palestinian exiles who transform the “abandoned city” into a mythical and hence inaccessible and virtual “lieu de mémoire.” In Ein Houd/Hod CitationSlyomovics (1998) poetically dissects the neocolonial “conversion” of a Palestinian village to a Jewish artist colony. Finally, in the case of Lydda, CitationYiftachel and Yacobi (2003) conceptualize “ethnocracy” as the hegemonic land regime that perpetuates Jewish ethnic domination over Palestinian spaces.
5. Throughout this article, “Orientalism” is defined as the dialectic cultural projection of alterity and identity onto geographical space. By the term “Orientalism” Said refers to three related aspects: an academic discourse (fed by an academic representation and reproduction of the orient); a literary-ideational discourse (a mode of thought based on the epistemological distinction disguised as ontological between “East” and “West”); and a Foucauldian discourse (a Western regime of control, manipulation, and authority over the East that has developed since the end of the eighteenth century). The relation between these kinds of discourse, Said argues, is institutionally regulated and coordinated (CitationSaid 1979: 2). For previous attempts to apply Said's insights in the Israeli context, see CitationRabinowitz (1993), CitationPiterberg (1996), and CitationKhazzoom (2003).
6. From an explicit Marxian perspective, Said's denunciation of transhistorical Orientalist discourse has been criticized by Aijaz Ahmad as a bourgeois metropolitan reproduction of a longstanding Nietzschean tradition— “irrationalist, extreme and uncompromising” (CitationAhmad 1994: 195). From Said's anti-Marxian standpoint, he notes, “nothing at all exists outside epistemic Power [and] Orientalist discourse—no classes, no gender, not even history; no sites of resistance [ … ]—and Orientalism always remains the same, only more so with the linear accumulation of time” (1994: 195).
7. The Palestinian suicide-bomber detonated a powerful explosive device at the entrance to a popular night club, leaving twenty youngsters who crowded in line dead and dozens other injured. Among Tel-Avivans, this event is remembered as one of the deadliest attacks that have disrupted their Thursday-night leisure routine. A commemorative monument was erected in the site in remembrance of the deceased, many of whom were teenage newcomers from the former USSR.
8. The worshippers trapped inside the mosque at the time of the attack were recently acknowledged as “Hostility Victims” by the Defense Ministry's committee for compensation on nationalist grounds (Tel-Aviv, 7 November 2003). This is one of the rare instances where Arab citizens were compensated for hatred assault by nationalistically motivated Jews.
9. Respect and honor (kavod) are central Orientalist themes in the film. In the best known song in the movie sound-track Kazablan repeats the refrain: “Everyone knows who has more honor.”
10. In terms of CitationGurevitch and Aran's concepts (1991), for the local merry Jews in Talmi's representations, Jaffa is the “small place” par excellence opposing the mythscape of Jerusalem in every respect.
11. The Fools of Prophecy is a New Age World Music band founded in 1998.
12. In Chaouachi's fascinating research on the “world of the narguile,” neo-orientalism manifests itself in the increasing propagation of “orientalized” and commodifed coffee shops, which re-imagine a “dream” to be consumed by tourists and locals alike.
13. This successful TV show features Haim Cohen, a Chef of Syrian descent, who used to own the gourmet restaurant “Keren” in Jaffa.
14. What is commonly known in Israeli public discourse as the “OctoberEvents” or the “October Ignition” (Habbat October in Palestinian discourse) refers to the Palestinian mobilization in Israel in response to the breakout of Al-Aqsa Intifada in the Palestinian Occupied Territories. The violent reaction of the police in the Galilee left thirteen Palestinian dead. In mixed towns, however, for different reasons, these events resulted in no fatal casualties. See CitationRabinowitz and Abu Baker (2005).
15. Zochrot [“Remembering”] is a group of Israeli citizens working to raise awareness of the Nakba and to promote the Palestinian Right of Return. See http://www.nakbainhebrew.org. Ta`ayush's website reads: “We—Arab and Jewish citizens of Israel—live surrounded by walls and barbed wire: the walls of segregation, racism, and discrimination… In the Fall of 2000 we joined together to form “Ta`ayush” (Arabic for “life in common”), a grassroots movement of Arabs and Jews working to break down the walls of racism and segregation by constructing a true Arab-Jewish partnership.” See http://www.taayush.org. Sadaqa-Re`ut (Friendship in Arabic and Hebrew) is a binational political youth movement based in Jaffa to which it relocated in 2003 from Haifa. It brings together Jewish and Arab youth ages fourteen to eighteen in mixed educational groups. In one of their programs, they live together in a shared apartment with programs such as “leaders for change,” “towards a common future,” and “towards a culture of peace”; the organization works for social and political change through the promotion of a bi-national, multicultural, and egalitarian society based on social justice and solidarity. See http://www.reutsadaka.org.
16. Orna Coussin, Ha'aretz, “Waging war against ‘the McDonald's of books’” (9 April 2005); See Aljazeera article http://english.aljazeera.net/English/archive/archive? ArchiveId=25033.
17. The following quotes are taken from the “Autobiography of a City” project website http://www.jaffaproject.org/.
18. Copti's alternative narrative includes among others a play of words on the etymology of 60th St. or Share` Sittin (Arabic) in ‘Ajami—a code number devised by the Israeli post-war administration to map the streets as part of the new urban grid. Mr. Sittin, Copti's told the gullible participants, was originally a Bulgarian Zionist figure; however, he added, the Palestinian residents of the neighborhood maintained that the number actually referred to the sixty martyrs who fell under the Jewish shelling of the city in 1948. They expressed their gratitude to the Tel-Aviv municipality for acknowledging Palestinian sacrifice by naming a street after the martyrs and requested to add a public sign with their names. Once the municipality realized the source of the mistake, Copti concluded, it renamed the street “Kedem” (Antiquity in Hebrew).
19. For the “Peres Peace House” in Jaffa, see www.peres-center.org/ThePeresPeaceHouse.html. The monumental building, constructed virtually meters away from the beach and bordering on a Muslim graveyard, is contested for it dominates the landscape and embodies power's disregard not only to planning norms but to local perceptions of place as well.
20. This call to establish a “mini-municipality” in Jaffa features prominently on the platform of the Arab-Jewish Yafa List—the main local political coalition that won one City Council seat in the 2008 municipal elections.
21. Engin Isin's phrase “acts of citizenship” conceptualizes the performance, enactment, and making of citizens and strangers. Concrete acts of citizenship are those constitutive moments when political rights are claimed, responsibilities asserted, and obligations imposed.
22. “Dialogue and Recognition” is the slogan of the Autobiography of a City project.
Al Ha-Mishmar 21 October 1949. Tel-Aviv and Only Tel-Aviv.(Hebrew)