In a 1970 interview with Australian journalist Richard Carleton, prominent Palestinian intellectual and the editor of al-Hadaf Ghassan Kanafani pointedly responds to questions about ‘peace talks’ with the Israelis as an alternative to armed struggle. The tone-deaf questions and succinct, poignant responses seem almost hilarious in exchanges such as this:

Carleton: Why don't your organization engage in peace talks with the Israelis?

In August and September 2013, Israeli media, pundits of all political colours, and keyboard activists on social media were embroiled in a public debate surrounding the planned Zochrot conference titled ‘From Truth to Redress: Realizing the Return of the Palestinian refugees’. The event, first of its kind in Israel, was to be held, strategically, in the Eretz-Israel museum in Tel Aviv, on the lands of Shaykh Muwannis, a Palestinian village depopulated in 1948. Indeed, the official invitation reclaimed the village's lands and its elided history by identifying the museum's location as Shaykh Muwannis.

In May 2014, Zochrot led a day-long Nakba tour promoted under the title ‘From Yafa to Beirut’. Signalling a departure from their trademark Saturday tours to a specific site of a former Palestinian village, this event highlighted the refugees’ path to their forced exile. The meet-up spot Ê¿Umar, the tour organiser, chose, was symbolically ironic: 48 Hakovshim (Hebrew, ‘conquerors’) Street. Located in the heart of what used to be Manshiyyeh, it is named after the Irgun Zionist militants who the Israeli state credits with the occupation of Jaffa that began with the shelling and depopulation of Manshiyyeh in the spring of 1948 (see Chapter 1). From there, the group of middle-class Israeli tour participants walked to two local key sites: the Hasan Bek Mosque, the only complete surviving pre-Nakba structure that still functions as a house of wor-ship for Jaffa's Muslim community, and Beit Gidi, currently occupied by the historical museum of the Irgun (see Chapter 7). After a relatively brief historical introduction by Ê¿Umar, the group was led to a bus parked by the mosque, and began the journey north, making brief stops at Qaysariyah (Caesarea), Birʾim and al-Bassa (inside the Jewish settlement of Shlomi in the Acre district), all Palestinian communities that were ethnically cleansed in 1948. Our destination was Rosh Hanikra, or as it is known in Arabic, Ras al-Naqurah, the northwestern (closed) border crossing to Lebanon.

The narrow passageway leading to the locked gate was the end point of our tour; we did not reach Beirut after all. Ras al-Naqurah became our ‘unfulfilled destination’, where a large sign directs visitors to Beirut and Jerusalem in three languages,3 but the path north leads nowhere. By virtue of settler colonial conquest and war, Ras al-Naqurah became a site of closure: even the locked gate is covered so visitors cannot get a glimpse of what lies beyond. Moreover, tunnels blasted in the rocks during the late British Mandate, designed to connect Istanbul and Cairo via rail, were sealed by Israel in 1949, ending its railway in the Jewish town of Nahariyah, just south of Ras al-Naqurah.

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.

Shortly after our return from Cape Town, we heard that the Tel Aviv municipality had decided to name a small turnabout in Jaffa after Dr Fouad Dajani (1890–1940), scion of an elite family, a physician and Palestinian medical pioneer who had lived nearby. The roundabout is located right behind the Dajani family home and hospital founded by Dr Dajani. Both have been repurposed by the state and are used today as a geriatric centre. The ceremony was planned to be a public affair in the presence of the extended Dajani clan, including the physician's surviving son and his grandchildren, several of whom were allowed back into the country for the first time. A group of Zochrot activists, both Palestinian and Israeli Jews, planned to attend the ceremony and call for the implementation of the right of return rather than tokenising the Dajani family and the Palestinian-Arab history of the city in order to curry favour with Palestinian voters.

Our group took position at the periphery of the large crowd, yet clearly visible, holding banners in English, Arabic and Hebrew calling for the right of return. One of the signs provocatively greeted the Dajani family members with ‘welcome returnees’. Our presence was quickly acknowledged by members of the audience and the media. We were approached by architect and self-styled ‘Tel Aviv expert’ Samuel Giller, who, according to his account, facilitated the whole affair. Giller sternly demanded that we leave the scene, claiming that ‘such provocations might discourage the municipal authorities from making similar gestures’ and that moreover, the Dajani family was ‘uncomfortable’ with our presence. His claims were belied by the sheer enthusiasm of all members of the Dajani family, who came to shake our hands, expressing their gratitude, and insisting on having their photographs taken with the group and the banners (see Figure 7.1).

In May of 2013, while I was conducting fieldwork in Jaffa, hundreds of human remains were discovered in a mass grave at the local Muslim cemetery. As the news of the grim discovery circulated in the city, many residents turned to their elders for answers to the question on everyone's mind: who are those buried in these nameless tombs and how did they get there? The consensus reached by Palestinian historians, dignitaries and Islamic movement officials is that the remains should be traced back to 1948, to the period just before and following the fall of the city to Zionist forces and the mass exodus of its residents. While some of those bodies would have been of combatants, volunteers from as far as Bosnia and Iraq, the bulk of the dead would have been civilians, either buried alive under the ruins of their homes during the massive shelling or massacred by Zionist forces in the chaos that followed the occupation of the city.

In a 1998 essay, Palestinian scholars Salim Tamari and Rema Hamami shared their impressions of multiple visits to Jaffa, the ‘lost paradise’ of their respective families’ histories. The ‘via dolorosa’ of pilgrimage to the ancestral place is literally a source of pain, anger and frustration: Hamami's aunt, upon recognising her childhood home in Jabbaliyeh, exhibits an outburst of emotions and refuses to proceed inside; Beshara, Tamari's son, expresses his anger and frustration at the ongoing displacement of the city's remaining Palestinians;

Tamari himself, however, responds with sarcasm when he meets Shlomo, a Moroccan Jewish man who settled in the city in the wake of the Nakba and the ethnic cleansing of Jaffa's Palestinians. Although Shlomo inhabits a complex liminal position of being both a coloniser and, as a Mizrahi Jew, a subaltern, in the final analysis, for displaced Palestinians, his presence, despite his self-identification as an Arab, represents his status as a settler and theirs – as refugees. Tamari and Hamami dub their repeated pilgrimages to Jaffa ‘virtual returns’, denoting the illusory aspect of the journey: their trip only has the temporary effect of return, in both the temporal and geographical sense, yet by the end of the visit, the phantasmagoria of return dissipates and the reality of refugeehood creeps back.

Tamari, who is Jaffa-born and Hamami, a second-generation Yafawiya, navigate through memories of urban past and present-day realities of rapid gentrification and de-Arabisation. Both share a sense of ‘being burdened by Jaffa’, forced to carry it around, ‘weighed down by its past and [their] duty to that past’. The repeated ‘virtual return’ pilgrimages are reminiscent of Sisyphean attempts to reconcile fantasies about a golden past and the pain of irrevocable loss.

On 15 May 2011, hundreds of Palestinians gathered on the Syrian border with the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights to protest the sixty-third anniversary of the Nakba (Arabic, ‘catastrophe’), the mass expulsion of Palestinian Arabs from those parts of mandatory Palestine that became Israel. One man, whose parents were exiled from Jaffa back in 1948, managed to evade the Israeli army and hitchhike his way to his ancestral city, where he attempted to locate his family's house and reconnect with his lost homeland. He then voluntarily surrendered himself to the police, not before being interviewed by Israeli journalists. Israeli news outlets considered the affair an embarrassment for the state, as a mixture of shock, fear and disgust echoed through social media online and in conversations on the streets and on buses. Hijazi's daring return journey was widely and immediately dismissed as an attempt to ‘infiltrate’ the country by a Syrian, obscuring his Palestinianness and his profound affective connection to a homeland that he had only heard of from his exiled parents.

Denouncing Palestinian returnees as ‘infiltrators’ is not a new practice. In fact, Palestinians who attempted to return to their villages and towns after the formation of the Israeli state, even before the creation of the armistice lines in 1949, were called mistanenim (Hebrew, ‘infiltrators’), denoting their illegal status as non-citizens and as a security threat that must be removed. The fear of being engulfed by Palestinian returnees marching through Israel's borders is also not a novelty. In fact, in 1952, only four years after the Nakba, Israeli security apparatus was alarmed by reports of a potential ‘march of the refugees’, which was understood as an ‘insidious plot’ against the state of Israel by Arab governments. Internal correspondence stressed that

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.

This chapter explores Tunisia's history as an authoritarian country that struggled with economic developing, ultimately resulting in a parasitic crony capitalist class closely allied with the regime. While the Arab Uprisings ushered in democracy, they failed to replace these crony networks as business engaged with parties in the new democracy. Unlike Egypt, Tunisia remained a democracy, but the presence of crony capitalists as party funders undermined reform efforts and the ultimate success of the democratic project.