Al Ajami Neighborhood
Al Ajami is all that is left of Jaffa
Cosmopolitan luxurious neighborhood
Al Ajami was the most affluent neighborhood, with luxurious villas, cinemas, theatres, a big range of cafés, sports clubs, schools, a private hospital, banks, car dealers, pharmacies, shopping streets, public baths, a church, a mosque, community centers, and gardens. Some of the villas were nearly 500 square meters and had spacious high-domed halls and marble floors. Here lived the mayors, editors-in-chief, heads of Jaffa’s Chamber of Commerce, members of The Citrus Board, doctors, engineers, bankers, orchard owners, and film directors. Sandwiched between orange groves to the east and the sea to the west, the neighborhood was home to cosmopolitan and urban Muslim and Christian Jaffans. The Ajamis were often involved in the import and export businesses, in the press, in politics, and in culture. They were the city’s connection to networks both regionally and internationally.
Beauty and the Beast
While Jaffa was under attack in 1948, the richer residents left earlier than the rest, with some money thinking that they would come back in a couple of weeks. Workers such as fishermen, sailors, small business owners, bakers, teachers, and most of the Jaffans had to stay in their city until the end. Most Jaffans were turned into refugees in one night. The 97% of the nearly 120,000 Jaffans that turned refugees, their children and grandchildren, are scattered all over the world. When Jaffa was occupied by the Zionists, most Jaffans were pushed to the sea, hopped on boats and fled to Gaza or Lebanon. Gaza’s population comprises about 85% refugees from all over Palestine, but a substantial part of today’s Gazans are from nearby Mediterranean Jaffa. Gaza is the biggest Jaffa today. Gaza today, 66 kilometers from Jaffa, has been living under siege since 2007, and this includes its Jaffan refugees. Jaffan refugees in Gaza, live behind barbed wire, walls, and blockades from sea, air, and land. According to the UN, Gaza has been technically unlivable since 2020. Other Jaffans ended up in refugee camps all over the region and are registered refugees of the UNRWA. As much as 80% of the population of Balata refugee camp east of Nablus, is originally from Jaffa.
Al Ajami’s rich left before the fall of the city. They lost their luxurious homes, villas, businesses, orchards, lands, and offices but they had money and networks. Yet nearly without exception, all the crème de la crème of Jaffa was involved in the resistance and the defense of their city, already from the 1930s.
European import, the Ghetto
In 1948, there were 120,000 Jaffans, 80,000 in the city itself, and 40,000 in smaller towns and villages in its vicinity whose livelihood was connected to the city. On May 13, 1948, Jaffa caved after a three-week siege by Zionist paramilitaries and was ethnically cleansed. Jaffa fell and 97% percent of its population disappeared. Only 3,700 Jaffans remained and they were rounded up in Al Ajami neighborhood. In one night, Al Ajami was transformed from a luxurious neighborhood into a military prison camp, complete with barbed wire, guard dogs, and a military curfew that lasted two years – (although the military rule didn’t end until 1966). Jaffa shrank in one night, in its population and its geography. The Israeli government soon built a wall that closed off the neighborhood and placed guards and dogs on the periphery. Residents of the neighborhood were not allowed to leave without a permit and had no access to the sea or to other Jaffans, relatives or Palestinians. The new state named the neighborhood ‘Ghetto’, a foreign term in Arabic, a concept brought from Europe. ‘Ghetto’ described the exact opposite of what Al Ajami was. Labeling the most luxurious neighborhood of Palestine ‘Ghetto’ was not a description, it was a plan.
Wrong ethnicity
Overnight, Jaffa the heart of Palestine, stopped beating. Merchants were denied access to their shops. Families were prevented from returning to their homes. Israel declared all the surrounding countries as enemies. If you looked for family members who fled and were refugees now in nearby countries, you were contacting enemies and would be punished by law. The State of Israel decided that the remaining 3,700 Jaffans, who were rounded all up in Al Ajami, had to share the homes they were in, with the new occupying settlers. Indigenous Jaffan families lived in one room and had to share bathrooms, toilets, kitchens, balconies, pots, and pans, often mattresses and sheets, with their newly arrived occupiers, in Jaffa this was mainly with Bulgarians. The Jaffans’ world disintegrated. There was no workplace to go to, the new employers wanted Jewish workers. Palestinian Jaffan children missed school for a few years. Stuffed in one room without employment or a place to go to, with no knowledge of the whereabouts of their family members who had been killed or fled, while their occupiers were sitting on their sofa speaking an unknown language – the remaining Jaffans were living a second trauma. Depression, hopelessness, violence, unemployment, and drugs- were the fruit of such conditions. Abed Abu Shehadeh, (a Jaffan who was a member of the Tel Aviv- Jaffa city council), explains that in the 1950s and 1960s, Al Ajami was probably the most dangerous neighborhood in the new State of Israel. Up until the 1980s, most families had at least one drug addict among them. A state that had taken over a whole land, could not take care of 3,700 indigenous Jaffans.
Absent by law
Homes and buildings, whose owners had to flee, were looted. Then they were confiscated under the 1950 Israeli Absentee law. Every house and building in Palestine of each refugee was confiscated. “Absentee” did not only mean refugees who were outside Israel, it often meant people who were not present when the decision was made, even if they lived nearby, such people who lost their homes and ownership are called “Absent Present”. In addition, all public property, buildings, and land, were confiscated. Jaffa’s refugees accounted for 15% of Palestinian refugees in 1948. Their ownership of houses and buildings was moved to Israeli public housing companies such as Amidar. One year after the fall of Jaffa, in 1949, Jaffan Palestinians made up less than 2% of their city.
Welcome to Bulgaria
In 1959, Israeli journalist and writer Nathan Dunevich wrote that Bulgarians replaced Jaffans and Jaffa had turned into little Bulgaria. In the 1960s and 70s, the state of Israel destroyed 50% of the Ajami neighborhood, 70% of the old part of the city, and 100% of the Manshiyya neighborhood. Al Ajami is all that is left of Jaffa. Al Ajami was systematically neglected and left to fall apart. It became full of social trouble- and the “Ghetto” project succeeded. Al Ajami became a neighborhood riddled with poverty and crime. The city of Tel Aviv used to be one suburb of thriving Jaffa. After destroying most of Jaffa, Tel Aviv swallowed the rest and turned Jaffa into its “Ghetto”. In the 2010s, Al Ajami, with its historic buildings became hip and chic. The media started describing Al Ajami as: “authentic”, “historic”, “eclectic” and “nostalgic”, “chic”, but never Palestinian. Beneath this layer of hip and chic nostalgia lies a reality of taking over what was left of Jaffa. In 1985, the city of Tel-Aviv ordered a master plan for Ajami 2036. The aim was “to bring a beautiful Greek village type that spills into the sea” said Emily Silverman (Jaffa: A Guide to Gentrification, film 2022 by Keren Shayo and Lavi Vanounou).
Ethnic Gentrification
Al Ajami’s history is the transformation from one extreme to the other. The gentrification of Al Ajami brings the change full circle, back with expensive villas for millionaires. In the early 2000s, hundreds of Al Ajami’s Palestinian residents started receiving demolition and “vacate” orders. This time, gentrification is not only about money and so-called class, it is about the last 3% of Jaffa’s original Palestinian population.
Jaffans are facing a strong ethnogentrification, a process turning Jaffa into a fully Jewish city. For context, in 1850 Palestine had about 350,000 inhabitants, 30% of whom lived in 13 towns. Palestinian Jews made was 4% of the population. Like Muslim and Christian Palestinians, the Jews were also called Palestinian Ottomans. In 1886 Jaffans consisted of 16,900 Palestinian Arabs and 100 European Jews. In 1931 there were 44,638 Palestinian Arabs and 7,209 Palestinian Jews.
Today the neighborhood’s most iconic buildings are listed as properties for sale on Sothby’s, or for stays on Airbnb. The Jaffan owners of each of these homes and buildings, (even when they still hold the ownership documents), cannot claim their homes, cannot buy their own homes back, and while the whole world is open to book a stay on Airbnb, the owners of these Jaffan homes cannot even sleep in their homes as tourists, most are not allowed even to visit Jaffa. The very few original Jaffans who stayed are today fighting for their right to stay in their city.
The disappearance of money
“The Arab accounts are twice blocked”: UK Treasury currency regulations (Feb 22, 1948) and Israeli Government “freeze order” (June 12, 1948)
On February 22, 1948, the British Treasury suddenly announced, “without any prior notice or explanation, that it would “exclude Palestine from the sterling area and henceforth suspend the free convertibility of Palestinian pounds into pounds sterling.” It also stated that the Palestine Currency Board would no longer, after May 14, 1948, continue to issue Palestinian pounds,” so that the “termination of the Mandate for Palestine would be accompanied with the end of Palestinian currency as legal tender.”
A History of Money in Palestine
Missing Checks, Vanished Funds: a Financial Accounting of the Palestinian Nakba of 1948
References
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/5/30/the-legacy-of-the-oldest-palestinian-pharmacy-in-jaffa
https://www.wattan.net/ar/video/390844.html
https://www.palestinechronicle.com/jaffa-is-not-for-sale-palestinians-protest-planned-evictions/
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/5/30/the-legacy-of-the-oldest-palestinian-pharmacy-in-jaffa