Jaffans Bounce Back: Five Stories of Resistance in Jaffa
Resisting the Pharaos 1460 BC
The first resistance of the Jaffans that we have archeological evidence of, is from around 1460 BC to 1125 BC, when the pharaonic New Kingdom conquerors ruled Jaffa. In 1472 BC, Pharaoh Thutmose III of the Eighteenth Dynasty occupied Jaffa. The Egyptians arrived with a small fleet of 400 men and smuggled 200 soldiers hidden in giant jars, inside Jaffa. This was a way older story than The Trojan Horse. Canaanites bitterly opposed Egyptian rule in Jaffa and fiercely resisted the Pharaonic power. The tower at the Ramesses Gate lays in ruins over a massive destruction layer of burned mud bricks, a witness to the Canaanite resistance to Egyptian rule over the seaside city nearly three thousand and five hundred years ago.
History is littered with attacks on Jaffa, a strategic Mediterranean port city. We jump only into the last five destructions including the fall of Jaffa in 1948. On the 3rd of March 1799, the French laid siege to the city of Jaffa which was under Ottoman control. Jaffans resisted fiercely inside their walled city against a modern army. The French had a variety of innovative rifles, pistols, sabers, and axes and Napoleon attacked Jaffa with cannons. For four days, the Jaffans resisted, but on the 7th of March, Jaffa City fell to the French. Napoleon allowed his soldiers to slaughter and rape for two days and two nights the aim was to spread terror in Palestine in order to help the next attack campaigns. The French slaughtered about 2500-4000 people and the sick French army spread the plague. Napoleon was stopped and defeated by another Palestinian port city, Akka or Acre.
1834 — Muhammad Ali Pasha Destroys Jaffa
The Ottoman Ruler of Egypt, Muhammad Ali Pasha acted independently in the region and did not follow the Ottoman Sultan’s orders. Muhammad Ali had big political aspirations and to do so, he raised taxes very high and ordered to be supplied with a fifth of males of fighting age, also from Palestine. This moment was a turning point in the history of Palestine. The Peasants’ Revolt in Palestine was a moment of political unity in Palestine. Palestinians came together and decided to revolt. The revolt saw Palestinians united, from different classes, subcultures, geographical areas, and religions. The peasants and townspeople refused to supply the Egyptian ruler with a fifth of their males of fighting age. The urban notables of Palestinian cities, including Jaffa and its surroundings, decided to disobey Muhammad Ali’s orders. This was the first of modern successions of revolts against foreign occupiers that we will see soon. This cost Palestine very dearly.
Ibrahim Pasha, Muhammad Ali’s son, entered Jaffa and took over. On May 24th, Ibrahim Pasha departed from Jaffa with 9,000 soldiers on his way to capture Jerusalem. The next day, on the 25th of May, thousands of Jaffans and other rebels left Jaffa to attack Ibrahim Pasha’s forces on their way. The five-hour trip from Jaffa to Jerusalem took Ibrahim Pasha two days while the rebels attacked the Egyptian troops, killing at least 500 soldiers. By June 8th, many crucial cities including Jaffa were in full rebellion. At the same time, life had to go on, Jaffa had to secure food and hygiene among others, to its inhabitants and now for the occupying army. The largest soap order Jaffa’s merchants had to secure, was during the 1830s for the Egyptian army during their attack and rule of Palestine (1831- 1840). Back to the rebellion, When Ibrahim was not enough, Muhammad Ali himself landed in Jaffa on June 30th with 15,000 fresh troops from Egypt. The Mutasellem or the tax collector of Jaffa was beheaded. The administrator of Jaffa and his son were beheaded. Jaffa’s urban notables, who backed the rebels, fled by boat into exile to the island of Cyprus. Ali personally ordered the decapitations of the governors of Ramla and Lydda (two cities in Jaffa’s province) and the beheadings of headmen of rebellious villages near Jaffa.
This revolt reduced the male population of Palestine by about one-fifth. Muhammad Ali Pasha demanded a fifth of the fit male population, between May and August in 1834 he left with a fifth of the fittest male Palestinian population dead or exiled.
1936-39 — The British destroy Jaffa
By the 1930s, Jaffa was a crucial node in political mobilization against British rule, its shoremen and dockworkers organizing the first general strike in 1933 that quickly spread throughout the country, and the city was a hub of agitation during the 1936-1939 revolt. Jaffa was the primary corridor of arms and munitions between Ramle and the wider hinterland, critical to the survival of the resistance to British colonialism (Arnon Golan, 2009).
The Great Palestinian Rebellion, The Great Arab Revolt and the British occupation
The Great Palestinian Rebellion or The Great Arab Uprising was against the British administration of the Palestine Mandate. The Palestinians demanded independence and the end of Jewish immigration as the League of Nations had authorized in 1922. The discovery of a shipment of arms, in October 1935, in the Jaffa port destined for the terrorist Haganah organization, made it clear that the Zionist military organizations aimed to take over Palestine. A six-month general strike of the Palestinian population stopped the country. The British, who had a mandate on the land, banned all Palestinian political parties, arrested political and community leaders, and exiled leadership and intellectual figures. British tanks, airplanes, and heavy artillery were deployed throughout Palestine. Collective punishment arrived in Palestine under the British occupation. The British shut thousands of Palestinians in detention camps; bombed and destroyed whole neighborhoods; shut down schools; and villages were collectively fined British troops and police took over private Palestinian homes as their headquarters.
A British commission toured the country to see what was at hand. In 1937, the Peel Commission recommended the partition of Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish state. Even eleven years later in 1948, only 9% of the land was owned by the Jewish. The Palestinian population refused the partition and started the second phase of the revolt. Curfews were imposed on Jaffa, the uprising’s main urban center. Curfews could confine the whole population to their homes for twenty-two hours a day. In June 1936 t Jaffa experienced urbicide. The British razed much of Jaffa’s ancient part of the city, the neighborhood on the sea. Issa El Sifri a Jaffan youth activist, compared the events to an earthquake and estimated that over one thousand dwellings and ancillary buildings were destroyed, making one-sixth of the Palestinian Arab population of Jaffa homeless. Although the demolitions destroyed a critical rebel sanctuary, local partisans continued. While Jaffa bore the brunt of the state’s increasingly militarized response to the strike, other cities also became sites of urban warfare. Palestine’s British garrison grew during the strike from two battalions to twenty-two, and the British occupying army took over schools throughout the country for use as barracks and bases, further contributing to the militarization of urban space. Jaffans faced searches over the next months, with hundreds detained. The entire city’s male population (boys included), was searched and processed in cage screenings at the local military base. From July 1937, until the fall of 1938, witnessed significant gains by the Palestinian rebels. Large parts of the hilly Palestinian interior, (including for a time the Old City of Jerusalem), fell fully under Palestinian rebel control. Rebels established institutions, most significantly courts, and postal service, to replace the occupying British Mandate structures.
By early 1939, members of the Jewish Settlement Police in Palestine (about 14,000) were subsidized, uniformed, and armed by the occupying British government. Now Special Night Squads of Jewish and British members launched “special operations” against Palestinian villages. The ranks of British and Jewish policemen swelled and Palestinians were subjected to house searches, night raids, beatings, imprisonment, torture, and deportation. The British called in military reinforcements. In 1939, more Palestinians were killed, more were executed (by hanging), and nearly twice as many were detained than in 1938. Over the revolt’s three years, some 5,000 Palestinians had been killed and nearly 15,000 wounded. The Palestinian leadership had been exiled, assassinated, and imprisoned.
The Great Palestinian Rebellion in numbers:
25,000 to 50,000 British soldiers
20,000 Jewish policemen, supernumeraries, and settlement guards
15,000 Haganah militants
2,883 Palestine Police Force, all ranks (1936)
2,000 Irgun militants
The result of the revolt was:
5,000 Palestinians killed
15,000 Palestinians wounded
108 Palestinians executed
12,622 Palestinians detained
5 Palestinians exiled
Zionists, a three-week siege, Jaffa falls
On 14 May 1948, many parts of Jaffa city were destroyed. In addition to the urbicide, 97% of the Jaffan inhabitants were ethnically cleansed and never allowed to return. Of the about 120,000 residents, only 3,700 Jaffans were able to stay in their historic city.
References
https://alchetron.com/1936%E2%80%9339-Arab-revolt-in-Palestine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peasants%27_revolt_in_Palestine