Published Story
Where the Streets Have No Name
What are the names of the streets of an ancient city made of? Image Source At the beginning of the 18th century, Jaffa saw a recovery marked by renovations and the building of the wharf and warehouses. After Napoleon’...
What are the names of the streets of an ancient city made of?
At the beginning of the 18th century, Jaffa saw a recovery marked by renovations and the building of the wharf and warehouses. After Napoleon’s massacre in Jaffa, its governor Muhammad Abu Nabbut rebuilt the city wall, city gate, a seawall and added a beautiful Sabeel, a water-drinking place just outside the Mahmoudiyya mosque. That Sabeel exists to this day and carries his name. Abu Nabbout transported stones and some ancient columns from another port city just up north, Caesarea. French and Venetian merchants and agents of the Venetian republic were settled in Jaffa. The city became an important local administrative center and port city receiving waves of pilgrims. After Ibrahim Basha took over, the whole country rose against him and that was one bloody period. At the same time, Ibrahim Basha planted a beautiful garden and two quarantines for pilgrims outside the city. And soon the counselors of England, France, Russia, Greece, and Armenia had consular agents in Jaffa.
Jaffa’s first municipal council was established in 1871. And before the end of that century, vice counselors from Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Austria, and The United States had been stationed there. Just before WWI Jaffa’s population grew 14,5 fold with about 50,000 inhabitants. There was a ready plan for the first tramway and street lighting just before WWI, but they had to wait. After the war, Jaffa Port was one of the most active in the eastern Mediterranean. The municipality kept the city clean and safe and planted a couple of gardens and Jaffa started its serious flourishing. All this doubled with the development of the Jaffa Orange, which modernized and urbanized the city once and for all. This multilayered urban history, throughout centuries, meant that every growth brought about new streets and each had a name. The streets of Jaffa had their names from events, heroes, citizens, geographical locations, anecdotes, and descriptions of places, people, and things.
In May 1948, in one night, a whole sophisticated urban, rich city fully furnished, was violently left up for grabs. In addition to banks, bank accounts, orchards, savings, cars, busses, trains, hundreds of boats and ships, libraries, huge stores of oranges, fully functioning cinemas, 18 public hammams, 47 schools, restaurants, gardens, cafes, films, private home furnishings, and private art. The pots and pans of about 100,000 people, 100,000 mattresses, plates, clothing, photo albums, gardens, churches, mosques, and one magical ancient precious port, the beaches, and the sea- were all looted. Jaffa constituted about a quarter of the real estate that fell on that day in Palestine.
“Street names and landmarks were replaced with the names of Israeli and Zionist soldiers or figures. Mansions belonging to prominent Palestinian families were looted and taken over by Israeli state institutions, and Palestinian homes were given for free to newly arrived Jewish immigrants.”
What Jaffa experienced was urbicide — the deliberate killing and destruction of urban life and urban infrastructure. After 97% of the Jaffans were ethnically cleansed, the 3% who were left behind were gathered out of their homes and rounded together in Al Ajami neighborhood. Right after, they were surrounded by barbed wire, with no work or connection to their (old) lives — the rest of the Palestinians, the Jaffans who were now refugees or worse, not even to the sea.
Astrological Streets
After the big destruction of parts of Jaffa in 1948 the urbicide continued. The total bulldozing of its biggest neighborhood, Al Manshiyya took place in the 1960-70s. The only thing that was left was Al Ajami, which was now a ‘Ghetto’ and treated as such. Al Ajami was the crème de la crème of Jaffa, the richest and most prosperous neighborhood, if not in all of the Mediterranean eastern shore. Jaffa became a shell of a city. Buildings stood with no function, like ghosts. The urbicide was followed by a consistent project of memoricide.
Most of the Jaffans who stayed were not from Al Ajami. In one night the most luxurious neighborhood in Palestine was turned into a concentration camp of displaced Jaffans. Now was the turn of the place. The policy was to replace Palestinian Arabic names with Hebrew names. Names of cities, towns, villages, valleys, mountains, and streets- were erased and replaced. The easiest way was translating the Arabic names into Hebrew. When there was no good translation, names were invented. Al Ajami was named Ghetto, a term unknown in Palestine, it was a European concept that traveled with Europeans who tried to root it in a new place. The labeling ‘Ghetto’ was a social, financial, and political plan for an outcome. The killing of urban Palestine was a clear continuous process. Street names and signs were erased and names of Zionists or people who had supported the Zionist project, started at Jaffans from the top of the streets or on buildings that have been evacuated from their owners.
Make a Wish
The project of erasure of history, heritage, and memory was so fast that a part of old Jaffa had to have names from the horoscope. Having a whole city full of ancient and original names in Arabic, and wanting to erase that quickly, the new settlers had to think out of the box and the Zodiac offered twelve names not relating to the city or its heritage, all at once.
To anchor astrology in an ancient city emptied of its inhabitants, a story was invented, and that story was called a ‘local legend’. The story goes that whoever holds their Zodiac sign (one of twelve plaques) in old Jaffa and looks at the sea, their wish comes true. An artsy Zodiac bridge and a Zodiac fountain were added on top of erased buildings and now one can stop and make a wish. If you stand where Jaffans used to live, run after their children and sip coffee, and look at the sea while touching a ceramic zodiac sign on the new bridge, your wish will come true. The four artists who sculpted the twelve bronze plaques and designed the mosaic at the Zodiac bridge's front, live in old Jaffa in homes of refugees. The Zodiac ceramic street plaques were designed by Ruth Zarfati who was awarded a silver medal at Milan Design Week in 1972.
While destroying a city and erasing its street names, the original Jaffans have been demanding to be part of naming their city streets. The success is very limited but, in 2010 the last Palestinian mayor of Jaffa resurfaced. Dr. Haikal received his Ph.D. from the Sorbonne and was the last elected mayor. The mayor left the city before its fall, something found controversial by some. Yet, today mayor Haikal’s name stands high, even though on a side street. One crucial personality and symbol of the ancient city is steady in the ground of Jaffa.
My East in Venice, Piecing together a fragmented Palestinian family
By Nathalie Handal, Extract
“Days later, I received an email from another uncle from Jaffa who now lives in the United States. I immediately called him. He told me he was fourteen when his family took the boat to Lebanon in 1948; that as they moved further away from the port he could feel his mother’s resentment. For losing everything. She repeatedly told him of her magical childhood; of going to her uncle’s in Heliopolis, a suburb of Cairo, to attend school; of returning to Jaffa to marry his father. My uncle remembered their house on Jebel Aractinji, a small hill in the heart of the city; their large terrace, patio, garden of roses and jasmine; their orange groves; their abundant orchard in Wady El-Hawareth. They eventually ended up in Damascus, where they lived at first in the old city, then in a house with no view, then in an apartment with buildings in front of it.
I had heard similar stories before, all of them heartbreaking. Yet daily, I ask the ghosts to tell me something about their hearts by the Abu Nabut Fountain on the Jaffa-Jerusalem road.”
References
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/5/30/the-legacy-of-the-oldest-palestinian-pharmacy-in-jaffa