PODCAST TRANSCRIPT: Remembering the Nakba of urban Palestine
This transcript was generated using an AI transcription service and lightly edited for readability. Please consult the corresponding audio before quoting.
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Ghousoon Bisharat
Welcome to the +972 Podcast, your direct line to the journalists, thinkers, and activists struggling for justice in Israel-Palestine. I’m your host Ghousoon Bisharat, Editor in Chief of +972 Magazine. Our podcast grounds the discussion in lived realities to bring you closer to the issues that matter most between the River and the Sea.
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Ghousoon Bisharat
In 1948, all four of my grandparents were forced to flee the village of Maaloul, which was depopulated and almost totally destroyed by Israeli forces. I grew up hearing stories of their lives before the Nakba, their fear, dispossession, and loss during the Nakba, and how even after fleeing, they held onto the hope that they would return within a few weeks. Their village — my village — is only a 10-minute drive from where they became refugees in their own homeland, denied the right to return. Maaloul is just one of the over 500 Palestinian villages that were ethnically cleansed in 1948. For Palestinians who remained within the borders of the emergent state of Israel, these villages are the heart of how the Nakba is remembered and commemorated.
But Palestine was not only villages, it was also cities — diverse, cosmopolitan, and politically vital. Jaffa, Yaffa in Arabic, is one of these cities. It was once among the most important urban centers in Palestine, but large parts of it were destroyed, and the vast majority of its Palestinian population was expelled. Today, it is no longer a city. In this episode, I am joined by Abed Abou Shhadeh, a community organizer, researcher, and podcaster from Jaffa, to explore the story of his home and what it reveals about how Palestinians survive, remember, and resist erasure — then and now.
Abed, thank you very much for joining me today on the + 972 podcast and for hosting me in your podcast studio.
Abed Abou Shhadeh
Thank you for having me, Ghousoon. I’m a big fan of 972 and a big fan of your podcast as well.
Ghousoon Bisharat
Thank you. I just shared a bit of my own family story from the Nakba. What happened to your family in 1948 and what happened to Jaffa as a whole?
Abed Abou Shhadeh
I think this is a very difficult question to begin with, because it makes us — or brings us — to understand the scale of the catastrophe. And my grandparents never talked to us about the Nakba. We had to learn about the Nakba from the stories they told about their childhood or their upbringing or their experience. But there wasn’t ever a systematic version or an attempt to tell us what happened to the family. It’s only in recent years when my grandfather went viral on social media. My grandfather is an excellent storyteller. It’s through there we understood the scale of the Nakba.
I will start where my grandfather described how his father died. In 1948, Yaffa was put under siege. People knew very well what was happening. My grandfather goes to his father — this is in March of 1948, and he asks him, “What are you planning to do?” Everybody’s talking about temporarily leaving, people were sure that there’s going to be two, three weeks of war, and then they could go back to their houses. My great-grandfather refused to leave and he told my grandfather, “I’m not leaving.” We, my family, Abu Shhadeh, is one of the few families that stayed as a whole family unit.
When he asked his father, my grandfather asked his father, “Why don’t you want to leave?” Apparently, he was a soldier in the Ottoman Empire, and he was influenced by the first Arab Spring. Arab nationalism started to question the Ottoman rule over Arab people and Arab countries. Before World War I, as a young man, he served in the military. He was stationed in Anatolia, which is north Syria, south of Turkey, and he had to walk back home for about six months. He lived the life of the refugees in the early 20th century, and in 1948, he refused to leave for this reason. He said, “I’m not going to live the life of the refugee, neither me nor my children.” And we are one of the few families that stayed as a family unit.
Fast forward to the 60s, he was an old man, 1948, all of our land was confiscated. But he was born in an age before you had to register your land, before the modernization of the Ottoman Empire. If you worked the land, it’s yours. You stopped working the land, it’s not yours. So when the state of Israel confiscated his land, he continued working the land. But in the 60s, when they bulldozed his orange trees, he had a stroke, and he died on the way to the hospital.
I learned about this through the Al-Jazeera interview with my grandfather. In Arabic, a stroke is “jalta.” “Jalta” means it’s being emotionally affected. He was really emotionally affected and devastated from the uprooting of his trees. But when we imagine the city, I think we underestimate how big the catastrophe really was. From 80,000 Palestinians living in the city itself, and another 40,000 in the villages surrounding Yaffa, 3,000 to 4,000 people remain. This is one of the most successful ethnic cleansing of the 20th century. When you walk in Yaffa, especially us Palestinians who live in Yaffa, we keep questioning what happened to the people who built these buildings.
You walk in Jamal Basha Street — it’s called Yerushalayim Street today — you see beautiful houses built in the 30s and the 20s. Who owned these houses? You come across beautiful buildings, villas. You can’t not think about it. But this is the first stage. 97% of the Palestinians in Yaffa have become refugees. But then what happened to the property? What happened to the institution? Then you understand the Nakba of the cities had different stages. The first stage is the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. The second stage is the most successful armed robbery of the 20th century: The banks, the theaters, our football field, for example, Al-Bassa, today, it’s Bloomfield. Our theater houses, they continued operating, by the way. So the second stage, it’s armed robbery. Everything was taken away.
And then comes the third stage, which is even more devastating than the second and the first stage, and it has to do with something that we as Palestinian men don’t like talking about, and it’s the trauma that men went through. Because in the third stage of the Nakba, they gathered all the Palestinians who remained, and they put us in ghetto Ajami, a neighborhood. But then they surrounded the neighborhood — Ghetto Ajami — by barbed wires, military rule, you can’t leave the Ajami.
But the majority of the Palestinians who remained, the 3,000, 4,000 who did remain, were not from Ajami neighborhood, and they weren’t given houses to live in the Ajami neighborhood. They were given rooms in houses that were, under Israeli law, called protected renties and you could live there for two generations, but these houses are not yours. They’re the houses of the Palestinian refugees. Now, your property outside of Ghetto Ajami is also confiscated after Israel passes a bill, the Absentee Bill that says if you’re not in your house during the war or six months after the war, the state has the right to confiscate your property.
So we lose everything. Now the men find themselves in very small rooms, in houses that are not theirs, in Ghetto Ajami that they can’t leave. Eventually, in the 50s, with the Jewish immigration into Jaffa, they ran out of space, so one of the things they do is they bring different Jewish families to live in the same house as the Palestinian families. For example, my grandparents from my mother’s side, they were put in one room, and in different rooms, different Jewish families — a Moroccan family and a Bulgarian family. This was devastating for the men. When we interviewed them, the view was that they didn’t, as men, they couldn’t defend al-Watan, the nation, and then they couldn’t defend the city, and now they can’t even defend their houses.
I think you can’t understand the Palestinians today without understanding these three stages, especially the third stage, because it reconstructs the Palestinian family and the Palestinian community as a whole.
Ghousoon Bisharat
If we try to go back to pre-48 Yaffa, can you paint a picture of life in the city? What was so special or unique about it?
Abed Abou Shhadeh
As someone who was born to a person who went through the Nakba, and when I used to ask my grandfather, “What was Yaffa like before 1948?,” he would describe paradise. Objectively speaking, or scientifically speaking, when we imagine cities like every other city, and I think it’s good for us as Palestinians to humanize ourselves — it has some positive things and some negative things. You had a class system, you had aristocrats, you had workers, you had a very diverse community. People underestimate the geography that Yaffa is located in: We are in the heart of the Arab world. The Arab world is divided between North Africa and West Asia, but Yaffa is in the middle, but it’s also very close to Europe through the Mediterranean, and it has the closest port to Jerusalem. Muslims, Christians, Jews, throughout the centuries that wanted to visit Jerusalem through the sea would go through Yaffa. It made it extremely diverse.
When we imagine Jaffa, I think it’s healthy to imagine it as a city in the full sense of what does a city mean. The infrastructure — the train, the Yaffa train, JJ, the first train in Palestine that connected Yaffa to Jerusalem, but from Jerusalem to al-Hijaz. Someone like my grandfather, born in 1924, for him in the 40s, it was very casual to work all week long then take the train JJ to Jerusalem, from Jerusalem to visit Damascus. Because of the political situation we live in, we underestimate how close Damascus and Beirut are to Yaffa. Damascus and Beirut are closer to Yaffa than Eilat is. My grandfather lived in a city connected to the Arab world.
Can I recommend books? Unfortunately, one of them is only in Arabic and in Hebrew, by Dr. Manar Hassan. The name of the book in Arabic, “al-Mughayyabat,” the “unseen or the unspoken about Palestinian City or the Palestinian woman.” This Manar Hassan describes beautifully. As a city, it also gave space to different groups that usually don’t get the space in the villages. Going through the newspapers that were published in Yaffa back then, she finds out that Yaffa had a very strong feminist movement. She mentions, and she talks about an activist and a commentator called Fikriya Siddiq, for example, that used to write amazing op-eds in the 20s and in the 30s concerning the role of women in society. And then through the book, you also understand there were social phenomena in our communities, such as Halqat Isti’bal, who is a wealthy aristocratic woman that would meet once a month to discuss different issues, and then you see how power dynamic works.
In one case, they also demanded that the municipality open another only girls school because they didn’t have enough classrooms. You find that, just like any other city, extremely diverse, but it also gives space to marginal groups where they could also accumulate more power through their work. The other book by Suad Al-Amiry, she’s a very well-known architect but she’s also a novelist and she writes beautifully — this is one of the best books I could recommend people to read — called “Yaffa, the City of Strangers.” I think it’s a beautiful book because it reflects how normal people went through the Palestinian Nakba during the Nakba. What people were preoccupied days before the Nakba, and even after the Nakba, what they went through. I think it’s hard to understand the scale.
Today, even if we see the genocide in Gaza, for example, but we see it through the lens of social media, of reporting. All the world is talking about it. Back then, they were forgotten. It’s only in future decades, people realize that there’s Palestinians also living inside of Israel, but there’s also Palestinians in Yaffa, and after Yaffa being annexed into Tel Aviv, there’s also Palestinians in Tel Aviv. For some people, this was seen as strange. Through them, you understand that they felt as if they were orphans, forgotten in history. And they go from living in one of the most important Arab cities into the slums of Tel Aviv.
Ghousoon Bisharat
Speaking about Tel Aviv, and you just mentioned that Jaffa was annexed to Tel Aviv in 1950, what was the immediate impact of this annexation on Jaffa and its residents?
Abed Abou Shhadeh
I think it was very normal that Tel Aviv annexed Yaffa, because it was built on Yaffa.
Tel Aviv was built over the Palestinian villages that surrounded Jaffa. Tel Aviv University was built over Sheikh Muannes. But you had another 30 different villages — Sumel, Jammasi, Nijraisha — and all of them were part of Yaffa, not as the city, but of its periphery. So when Tel Aviv annexes Yaffa as an urban space, it felt like something normal because this is how it was. This is Yaffa.
When you ask people, when we interviewed people concerning, “How was it?,” the immediate reaction, especially in the early 50s, is that through Yaffa, they were part of the Arab world, through Yaffa as a city. And in a matter of months — we’re not talking about years — you have become so marginal. You have become something that is there by chance. Now, the majority of Palestinians who remained remained there by chance. But I think you should imagine it’s not only the physical world. Today, again, I understand that we live through social media and fast information and so on. But for them, they would say that, “We didn’t know what happened to our family. We were left alone in the world. We found ourselves in Ghetto Ajami, where foreign language was spoken, Hebrew back then, and we were forced to learn it. We can’t leave Ghetto Ajami. A month ago, we could have visited the Arab world, and now we can’t leave our neighborhood.” It was a devastating effect that reshapes their emotion and physical and mental health. Going from being a city to something very marginal in Tel Aviv led the neighborhood of Ajami into being the slums of Tel Aviv.
And by the way, it was one of the most dangerous neighborhoods up until recently, up until the late 90s, with the gentrification. But when they sensed it, they sensed it from being part of the city into having to live in a very poor and marginal neighborhood and it was devastating.
Ghousoon Bisharat
Politically, at the time, what was the impact on what was left of Jaffa’s institutions, maybe elite?
Abed Abou Shhadeh
This is an interesting question because there’s a sense, people tend to ask, “Who are the people who left and who are the people who stayed behind.” Technically, everyone left. If you go through the numbers — the elites, the poor, the middle class, the 3,000 to 4,000 people remained by accident. The question of politics, I find it interesting because there is an assumption that at that time you could have played a political role. There was no politics, and it’s not only that there wasn’t any political institution for the Palestinians, they didn’t even see the sense in it.
Today, there is a claim in the Palestinian cities that they say that we are second-class citizens. But when you say you’re a second-class citizen, you assume that you could be a first-class citizen, so you fight for equality. They didn’t see themselves as second-class citizens. They saw themselves as somebody outside of the system and you can’t ask for equality. They were focused on surviving. I think it’s very similar than what we see in Gaza, but what we also see in the Palestinian citizens today after the genocide, when they calculate their policies through the lens of surviving what’s coming, very similar themes came back and back again when we interviewed the people, that they just wanted to survive. But also, I think we should add to it the emotional trauma that men went through.
Ghousoon Bisharat
Abed, you briefly mentioned the Absentees’ Property Law, which created the legal infrastructure for ongoing dispossession, and also briefly mentioned the gentrification of Jaffa that began in the 90s and is still ongoing to this day. How have these two interconnected policies been implemented over the years, and what was their effect and the pressure they create look like on the ground today?
Abed Abou Shhadeh
First of all, this is an excellent question. I’ll answer it with the three phases of how the state treated Yaffa and the Palestinian community. The first stage was erasing Yaffa. UN Resolution 194 says that the Palestinian refugees have the right to go back to their houses. For the Zionist movement, they saw that the main project is Tel Aviv and they can’t afford having a Palestinian refugee going back to Jaffa, to their house. In the 50s, they started a new policy of just bulldozing Yaffa.
I think it’s interesting, like if you walk today in Park Charles Clore, right, this was al-Manshiyya neighborhood, one of the biggest neighborhoods in Yaffa. Other than two buildings — a mosque, Hassan Bek, and another building that they turned into a museum — nothing remains there. But also in Ajami, everything is deleted there. In the old city, the original plan of the old city of Jaffa was also to be demolished. But then they come up with a more sinister idea of turning it into an artist village. So it’s renovated, but through renovating it, if you walk through the old city of Yaffa, first of all, you won’t find any Palestinian family living there. It’s the only old city that doesn’t have any Palestinians living there. But the other thing is, in the public space — if you walk in Arab, Muslim, old cities — there’s usually a lot of symbols, right? In Nablus, in Akka, in Lod you’ll find symbols. Everything is erased, and it’s replaced with Jewish symbols. I think it just shows the erosion.
But then the second stage came with neglect. For example, Ajami neighborhood was the only neighborhood that didn’t have any urban planning until the late 80s, when they started working on urban planning. So the idea, they destroyed, they demolished the houses, and then they neglected them. If you want to see how Ajami looked, I’m going to recommend the movie, but please don’t watch it. It’s a terrible movie: Chuck Norris, Delta Force. It was filmed in the Ajami neighborhood and the reason it was filmed in the Ajami neighborhood was because they allowed them to bomb the houses for the effects of the movie. So if you watch Delta Force, you can see the trailer, this is Ajami.
Ghousoon Bisharat
Wow.
Abed Abou Shhadeh
It’s as if it’s Beirut during the civil war — extreme neglect. I just understand how bad the neglect was about 15 years ago — 2010, 2009 — my father and his siblings decided to buy a property of land and build an apartment building. So they had two options. One option was in the Nuzha neighborhood, which is about a kilometer from the sea. And the other was in the Ajami neighborhood and overlooking the sea. I was like, “Yeah, let’s go to Ajami and open your windows, see the sea.” My father was, “I’m not going back to Ajami. For me, Ajami is a place that I don’t want to live in.” Because of the trauma that my father went through living in Ajami, he would say sewage was everywhere. People underestimate what it means to live in a place without any urban planning. No schools, no infrastructure, no nothing. This is the second stage.
The third stage begins in the 2000s. It’s the folklore. This is gentrification of wanting to live in an Arab house, wanting to live in this oriental feeling. Then we start seeing, through the folklore — start with the urban planning in the late 80s, they finish it in the 90s — in the 2000s, you start seeing the gentrification. What does it mean? And if you go through the original plans, you’ll see that they divided the Ajami neighborhood into three neighborhoods: The western part, overlooking the sea, is for the rich and they use this terminology as well. The eastern part of Ajami is for minorities, the center of Ajami minority schools, they use this terminology, and the southern part of Ajami for low-income families and Jewish and minorities. This is pretty much how Ajami looks. Gentrification didn’t just happen by accident. It was planned. For the community, it was devastating.
Because in 1948, Palestinians who went through the Nakba in the villages, like Umm al-Fahm, for example, lost a lot of land, but you had your house. This is super important. This property, you can monetize on. You can sell. You can buy. The Palestinians in Yaffa had nothing after 1948, because the majority of their houses were outside of a Ghetto Ajami, they were confiscated, and they could live in their same house for two generations. We lose everything. Through gentrification, you start without having a family property to rely on. You have to work really hard to try to buy a house. And then 2000 comes about, and prices of the houses start going up.
You take something that might seem as a civil struggle, gentrification. If you look at it as only a process of gentrification and underestimate the politics and the Nakba and how things came about, you don’t understand well how difficult it is for these Palestinians to play in the Israeli economy because they started way behind because of what happened in 1948.
Ghousoon Bisharat
You served as a city council member from 2018 until 2024. You’re now the head of the Islamic Council in Jaffa. Is your work at both the political and the grassroots levels, along with other efforts, successful in providing some sort of protection or support to the Palestinian community in Jaffa?
Abed Abou Shhadeh
The short answer is I don’t know. The more complicated answer is I see my role — whether it’s in the city council, in the Islamic Council — as something that we inherited in Yaffa as part of our resistance, or culture of resistance. The Palestinians in Yaffa, have been resisting since the 50s, but they don’t have the political language to frame it. After 1948, Israel confiscated and closed all of our mosques. We could pray in only one mosque called Al-Ajami. Today, there are about seven mosques operating. And ask the question, how come? What happened? And then you learn that every decade, people organized, not through the political parties that we know and political ideology. These are day-to-day people who organize to free the mosques.
One of the most interesting cases was Hassan Bek Mosque, which is on the outskirts of Jaffa today. It’s very close to the Intercontinental Hotel, it’s in the al-Manshiyya neighborhood. Daniel Montanesco wrote about this — how men in Yaffa restructure their manhood through the liberation of Hassan Bek Mosque. When we talk about liberating a mosque, we need to imagine a mass movement where everybody plays a role. Women play a role. Men play a role. Young people play a role.
Religious people, seculars, everybody plays a role. But then you learned, going through it, I found out, for example, one of the key figures was my father’s cousin, who’s not a political activist, but he is very grassroots. He played a very big and important role. It’s not only I’m an activist or I’m a community organizer who was born to a family of political organizers, so many people were involved, and so little was written about it, because one of the things that make it more complicated and harder to oppress is that it’s not centralized. It’s not as if there’s a few people that make the decision and everybody just falls through. It’s a community, and it’s a community struggle. There was a culture of resistance, there was a culture of demanding the municipality and the institutions give us our right, achieving our rights through our movements and through our activism. So what I do, I generally don’t know whether it protects or not. But I think it’s just another piece of the puzzle of my community of things that we need to do to resist.
Ghousoon Bisharat
I forgot to mention in the beginning that in addition to everything that you do, you also contribute sometimes to 972. You wrote a very powerful op-ed to 972 back in July 2024 about your fear as a parent, as a father in Jaffa. You said that every time you take your daughter to a playground, you see Israeli-Jewish parents, fathers carrying assault rifles, and you wonder whether it’s safe to be around them. Since you wrote that piece, you were blessed with another child, a boy. Mabrouk, congratulations. Do you still feel that way when you take your both children to a playground in Jaffa today?
Abed Abou Shhadeh
Just to put the piece in context, it was written during the first month of the genocide in Gaza.
It’s there I learned when you become a parent, you start hearing the world differently. You start picking up sounds of children. I think it’s a natural instinct as parents, that you think it’s your child. Just the other day, I just put my daughter in the kindergarten, and I was walking to take my son with me, and then I heard a girl scream and call her dad. I instinctively turned back just to make sure. I was sure it was my daughter. I’m like, “What is she doing outside of the kindergarten?” He started laughing, he’s a friend of mine, and he said, “She has the same sound as my daughter has.”
When we experienced and when we listened to all the horrific videos coming out of Gaza, I think it hit us differently as parents, and it hit us differently as men. I think the genocide in Gaza is going to redefine what does it mean to be a man, what does it mean to be a Palestinian man, seeing so much death and destruction, especially to children. When I wrote this piece, it came from all of the thoughts that were going through my mind, watching these videos, and then imagine, when you go to the playground with your children, you tend to play on your phone, right? You’ll see these horrific pictures, but then you lift your head, and you find soldiers with M16 assault rifles and then you see your children very close to them. You can’t not, I think we should visualize it. When you look at this: Your daughter next to someone, a soldier with an assault rifle, after watching the horrific pictures and the horrific images, and the horrific political discourse in the Israeli society that justified the genocide, I think it’s very normal to be afraid.
As men, this brings us to the Nakba. I mentioned earlier that the Palestinian men back then felt that they couldn’t defend their Watan, the nation, and they couldn’t defend the cities, and now they can’t defend their houses. I think we’re going to something very similar. If the state decides to do horrific things to us, what would stop them? And how, as a man, can I protect my children? I think this is one of the most difficult ideas and thoughts I’ve had to go through.
Unfortunately, as Palestinians, this is the burden that, especially as men that are not in Gaza, this is one of the burdens that we should live with the rest of our lives. I think it’s going to reshape us. What does it mean to be a man? We keep asking ourselves as Palestinians about the Nakba. How come people let this, allowed the Nakba to happen? Now we have the answer: Because we saw, we allowed the genocide in Gaza to happen as well. Then you understand that you’ve allowed it because you have children, you have responsibilities, life is complicated. It’s one of the things that I think it will take us some time to recover from. I think it’s very selfish, because at the end of the day, the people who paid the price are the Palestinians in Gaza.
Ghousoon Bisharat
I can relate to that, because I still don’t know how the genocide in Gaza affected me as a mother. You know, as parents — whether mothers or fathers — your main duty in life is to protect them. It’s as simple as that. You don’t have to be from here, you don’t have to be a Palestinian, all parents have that basic duty that they work hard to fulfill. I really relate to what you said now, because I try not to think about it too much, I don’t know how it affected my motherhood — seeing the pictures of boys and girls. Especially to me, there were so many little girls who looked very similar to my daughter. You know, same features. It makes you wonder, as you just said, what could stop Israel from doing the same to me, to my family, to my kids? It’s really a heavy thought that you have to live with, and maybe some of us try not to think about it.
Abed Abou Shhadeh
I think it’s easier not to think about it and to push these thoughts away. But two and a half years into the genocide and how things are playing about in Lebanon and Syria and Iran. Even through the Iran war, we were one of the lucky ones that had a shelter in our building. I keep asking my wife, “How crazy could people be to think this is normal?” To think that children should live under threats of missiles.” And in Yaffa, there were a lot of missiles falling, in Tel Aviv and in Yaffa, and neighboring cities, and you look at your children getting used to it. I think this is absolutely terrifying.
Ghousoon Bisharat
Just to continue the discussion about Gaza, as you mentioned earlier, the vast majority of people of Jaffa were ethnically cleansed — were expelled from Jaffa. Many of those took the boat to Gaza. For those refugees in Gaza, the city they knew was essentially erased. Jaffa does not look like what it used to look. Now, over the past two and a half years, their own new cities in the Gaza Strip have been erased. Do you see a connection between what happened to Jaffa and the genocide in Gaza, and what is happening to Gaza?
Abed Abou Shhadeh
I’ll start by saying the most successful project by the Zionist movement is Yaffa. When Donald Trump said in the White House of building a riviera in Gaza, I thought he was talking about Yaffa. What is the shoreline of Tel Aviv built over al-Manshiyya — you have beautiful hotels and beautiful people — this is Yaffa, this is what happened. I didn’t understand why people ridiculed the idea. Like, this is literally what they did to Yaffa, they turned it into a riviera in the Mediterranean at the expense of the people that were pushed away, that were exiled. So I don’t think it’s a crazy idea. I think the State of Israel is willing to do it, and they look at it as a profitable project, the same way they robbed Yaffa. They would probably want to rob Gaza. These ideas — there’s people thinking about practical projects.
The Israelis don’t hold back. They say that they have projects on how to do this, and how to do that, if you just expel the people. They will go into the gritty details of which company would come. But I think what’s more interesting — this we saw in the past two and a half years, you mentioned that many of the Palestinians in Jaffa, they have relatives in Gaza, and they have family members and the people you know — you find how these connections that people have play out even during the genocide.
As journalists, we get our information from resources, right? And we want them to be reliable resources, and they have to be, like, pure, and non-biased, and so on. But when I talk to Palestinians in Yaffa, you find a much more complicated reality. People talking to their relatives under the genocide, how they go through it. How, after October 7, both the Israeli society and the Israeli security apparatus oppressed the Palestinian citizens of Israel and they stopped us from protesting against the war, or speaking against the war, or criticizing Israel, or criticizing what was before October 7, and so on. So the Palestinians of Yaffa went into the politics of silence. They stopped talking about their political views in front of people that they don’t know.
Through the community, you start to see and listen to different stories than you get in the mainstream media, but you also find a lot of love and affection; of people taking all kinds of risks just to talk to their family. People fundraising, trying to help with what they can. There was a big campaign about a year and a half ago, if I’m not mistaken, trying to organize food for Gaza. It’s amazing. I was there, you find children bringing their savings to buy food for people in Gaza, you find it something extremely grassroots.
For me, this is resistance. This is political movement and mass mobilization. It’s not when people who have every answer to all the problems and very clear ideology, it’s when it’s grassroots. It shows you something very deep about the Palestinians, even though almost 80 years passed since the Palestinian Nakba, there is this strong sense of connection that was built throughout generations. This is something that doesn’t just disappear, but it also shows a lot of humanity, that people were willing to take risks because they weren’t willing to give up on their loved ones.
Ghousoon Bisharat
I would like to wrap our discussion with a question about Jaffa’s place in the Palestinian narrative. You mentioned the book of Manar Hassan about Jaffa and the women of Jaffa. I know that Jaffa and the other Palestinian cities — Haifa, Aqqa, Lid, Ramli — are all part of the Palestinian narrative. But as you mentioned, and as Manar Hassan explores in her book, the depopulated villages are more central, in particular in how we — those who remained in the land — remember and commemorate the Nakba. Why do you think that is?
Abed Abou Shhadeh
I think it has to do with the relationship between the oppressed and the oppressor. This is me theorizing on it. The Israelis had the tzabar, had the kibbutznik, who worked the land, right? The Palestinian had the fallah, the farmer, to counter it. I think it’s an excellent question because it’s really relevant today. It’s like, who is the indigenous? It’s like, “the indigenous are the Palestinian who are working the land.” I think it’s very orientalistic. Because if you go through the Palestinians, we are an extremely diverse group of people. We are a group of people who have been built throughout many, many centuries of different types of occupation, of movements, of people. I think this is the way the world should work. It used to work this way, now that’s because of bureaucracy. But we are extremely diverse. I think this is what makes us beautiful.
Trying to prove the indigenousness led us not to give space also for the urban, which is just as important and just as indigenous. Like the aristocrats in Yaffa who’ve been there for many decades and centuries, they’re as indigenous as the villages. But I think it has to do to counter the Israeli tzabar. But it also fits well with the Western view of us. How do they see us and how do they imagine us? They don’t imagine us having a city, a very wide range of people, and different ideas.
It’s interesting going through Yaffa’s political system before 1948, you’ll find everything. You’ll find communists, nationalists, religious, and all kinds of groups of people and all kinds of organizations. It’s a very rich, interesting, and beautiful political discourse and things that people wouldn’t have imagined, right? But this shows us being a very diverse community, but it doesn’t fit well to the narrative. I feel, unfortunately, sometimes you get it from people who are pro-Palestinians that we appreciate very much. But when they think of us, and when they imagine us, it’s much more convenient to imagine us as being just like one color or just one group of ideas when we are much more diverse.
I think pushing forward, we should emphasize how diverse we are, how beautiful our communities really are. I think they represent something different than what the West is used to. So today, almost 80 years — 70/80 years after the Palestinian Nakba — I think it’s also a chance to remember how diverse, on the one hand. And how catastrophic it was, deleting all of this beautiful human experiences that were multicultural, multireligious. It wasn’t perfect. by far. There were a lot of struggles, a lot of ugly things happening also at the same time. But this is what makes us human. This is what makes the human species so beautiful. I think it’s also a proper answer to the Zionist movement that wants to see people for only one group, or religion.
Our answer is seeing different groups of people, learning to live together, and building a shared culture as well, through this process that’s going to have a lot of struggles in between, which is also fine. But it’s built on diversity. I think this is what also makes us stronger for the long run.
Ghousoon Bisharat
Thank you, Abed.
Abed Abou Shhadeh
Thank you, Ghousoon.
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Ghousoon Bisharat
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