In the annals of history, Jaffa is often written as a coveted prize, a terra irredenta, an object of desire for warlords and invading armies. The city has been claimed by almost every conqueror that set his eyes on Palestine as a loot of war. Its current status as a real estate boomtown for Israeli developers can be read as yet another chain in that long history. Yet, reducing Jaffa's history to a chain of military conquests, however formative those have been for the city, elides its people and their lived experiences, and obscures how humans have constantly redefined their relationship to its changing urban landscapes. Narrating the longue dureé history of Jaffa as a site of military victories and defeats ultimately serves the interests of the Israeli state and its claims to the city as wartime conquest, sidestepping the human catastrophe of mass displacement and the continued attachment of Jaffa's refugees to their lost homes.

Drawing mostly on secondary sources, this chapter traces the history of Jaffa in the modern age until its fall in the spring of 1948. Despite the perceived linearity of this chapter, its purpose is to provide a counter-narrative to Israeli ones that position the founding of the state and the Judaicising of the city as their telos. Instead, this chapter reminds us of that which is ‘no longer conscious’, the local history suppressed and silenced by the state, a story with Palestinians as its agents, highlighting their creativity and resourcefulness, as well as suffering and eventual expulsion.

Jaffa: A Hub of Modernity

The question of modernity in the global South and the Middle East in particular has long been a subject of historiographical debate. Orientalist as well as Zionist historians identified Europe as the ‘true’ locus of modernity and the sole historical agent undertaking the ‘white man's burden’ of modernising and civilising the rest of the world.