In the short film Rosetta, first screened at the 2013 Nakba and Return film festival organised by Zochrot, a dream-like sequence is showing a young keffiyehclad Palestinian girl walking along the Jaffa beach, among the ruins of Irshid (Arabic for Rosetta), a small neighbourhood that once stood just north of the clock tower square area. As the girl recovers a shard of an arabesque-style floor tile, she carefully wraps it in her keffiyeh, only to use it as the base for a small makeshift model of an Arab home, which she then leaves on a rock nearby.

The arabesque-style floor tiles are making a comeback these days. Home décor ‘experts’ trace their roots to mid-nineteenth century Europe, another commodity exported to the Middle East via merchants, diplomats and mercenaries that arrived to the region in droves as the Ottoman Empire was rapidly growing weaker and unable to resist these incursions. Today, although these tiles are in high demand, the geometrical and floral patterns are no more than mass-produced adhesives, custom designed to match the tastes of buyers, as much as they are made to mimic and resemble the famed ‘Jaffa style’ tiles (see Figure 5.1). Conversely, Jewish artisans settled in and around the old city of Jaffa, which serves as an ‘artist colony’, offer their own, high end, similar products for those who can afford them. Unlike the mimicry, the flooring tiles that adorned Jaffa's modern houses were hand-painted by local artisans, a craft that, against the claims of latter-day ‘experts’, has a long history in the Levant.

While the renewed interest in these ‘Jaffa tiles’ as a colonial and neolib-eral commodity attempts to strip them of their Arab history and rootedness in Palestine (and the region), the short film Rosetta reclaimed these tiles and reinscribed them into the history of Jaffa: unlike the mass-produced Israeli mimicry, the tiles in Rosetta tell a story of loss and trauma. Found in pieces, buried under the rubble of a demolished Palestinian neighbourhood, they are reclaimed as authentically Arab, wrapped in a keffiyeh, a symbol of resistance and steadfastness, and used to symbolically rebuild the homeland.