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Jaffa once was a cosmopolitan city, the closest port to Jerusalem and a crossroads linking North Africa, West Asia, and Europe. It had a rail line to Damascus, a feminist movement, aristocrats and laborers, and a thriving civic and cultural life. Then, within a few years after 1948, it was gone.
Of the 120,000 Palestinians who had lived in Jaffa and its surrounding villages, only 4,000 at most remained. The new Israeli state seized and repurposed the city’s institutions — its banks, theaters, athletic fields. The Palestinians who remained were confined behind barbed wire in a ghetto and assigned rooms in houses that were not theirs, while their own properties were confiscated under laws designed to make that dispossession permanent. Within a few years, and until the turn of the century, one of the Arab world’s most vital cities had turned into the slums of Tel Aviv.
Abed Abou Shhadeh is a community organizer and researcher raising his own children in Jaffa, the city his great-grandfather refused to leave.
In this episode, released on the 78th anniversary of the Nakba, we speak with Abou Shhadeh about how the catastrophe of 1948 unfolded specifically in Jaffa. He interrogates the dominant image of the Nakba as one defined primarily by the depopulated villages of rural Palestine, arguing that understanding what happened in the cities — and to the Palestinians who remained there — is essential to understanding Palestinian life in Israel today.
Abou Shhadeh also reflects on the parallels he sees between the ethnic cleansing of Jaffa in 1948 and the destruction of Gaza today, and warns that the radically remade landscape of his own hometown shows why proposals to turn Gaza into a riviera are far from implausible.
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