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Jaffa is to Tel Aviv what Saint Paul is Minneapolis. A deeply broken analogy. Jaffa, unlike Tel Aviv, was 70 percent Arab in 1945 and was considered the cultu

Jaffa is to Tel Aviv what Saint Paul is Minneapolis. A deeply broken analogy. Jaffa, unlike Tel Aviv, was 70 percent Arab in 1945 and was considered the cultural and economic capital of Palestine. It was attacked in a major offensive by the Irgun in April, and later by the Haganah in May of 1948 (before the Declaration of Independence and the "defensive war" that followed it). I'm sure you know all about the Irgun; here's a description of their tactics from an Israeli historian: In one attack, on 13 December, a barrel packed with explosives was dropped from a vehicle next to the entrance to the Alhambra (al-Hamra) Cinema, adjacent to the Jaffa City Hall on King George Boulevard. The barrel rolled down the street and came to a stop outside Cafe´ Venezia. Some of the clients noticed it and rushed to take shelter in the kitchen or fled out the back door. The ensuing explosion killed six clients and passersby, among them a ten-year-old boy, the others aged 16 –24. The building and the nearby cinema were badly damaged. On the same day, the IZL blew up houses in the villages of Yahudiyya-‘Abbasiyya and Yazur, killing seven Arabs. On 30 December, the IZL launched another attack on Jaffa’s rear. This time the squads landed from the sea and tried to attack Arab cafe´s in the port area, but local fighters stationed nearby drove them off, apparently without losses on the Arab side. The next day, IZL men, dressed as Arabs, again entered Jaffa and threw a bomb into an Arab cafe´. Around 100,000 people were forced to flee (from the city proper and surrounding towns) - some 10-20k of which were literally pushed into the sea. Of course, very few were allowed to return. 90 percent of the smaller towns were completely depopulated. The 4000 Arab residents who remained were forced to live in a small corner of the city in dilapidated housing, and under martial law. From a recent New Yorker piece: “Ajami is about to be closed off with a barbed-wire fence that will rigorously separate the Arab neighborhood and the Jewish section,” an Israeli official wrote in 1949. “That arrangement will immediately render Ajami a sealed-off ghetto. It is hard to accept this idea, which stirs in us associations of excessive horror.” After the "defensive war" Arab houses were looted and given to migrants from Europe. Streets and public places were renamed. Arab Jaffa was effectively wiped off the map. What's to advocate for? A reasonable understanding (and non-erasure of) extremely basic and uncontested regional history.

racional 2y ago
[flagged]
tptacek 2y ago
I am aware of the history, and avoided getting into it because a prolonged litigation over which populations were abused and displaced when wasn't going to get us any closer to an outcome in this conversation. To wit: you can recall the civilian deaths and mass displacement of Palestinian Arabs in or around Jaffa and Israel in general, and I can recall the Aden Pogroms and the Farhud (and point out that the time period you're calling out was just three years --- a single Macbook generation --- from the Holocaust itself). And that rather than a "tit for tat" exercise, these facts establish an exchange of displaced populations, such as has not occurred in U.S. cities, which are not by and large peopled by the victims of Mexican and Indigenous American-led assaults elsewhere. The point, which we arrived at downthread before you picked this scab, is that there is nothing to be done with this information. The displacement of indigenous Americans was both criminal and vital to the establishment of American cities, but we don't seriously discuss the return or "decolonization" of those cities, for obvious reasons. And my point is: the issue is no less obvious with Jaffa, which is very firmly the sovereign territory of the most powerful (and nuclear-armed) state in the Middle East. 'runarberg clarifies that they brought Jaffa up as moral leverage for demands that Israel recognize Palestinian statehood. That makes sense to me, and I push back only to the extent that I don't think additional moral leverage of this kind is needed to make that argument. As for your argument, I'm at a loss for where you're hoping to go with it. Is the point that Israel is bad? If so: practically every state is bad, yes. (I didn't flag your post; in fact, I wrote this response to it --- the flagged version --- and was irritated when, on hitting the "Submit" button, I had to scramble with the back button to save it. I don't think commenting on the flag button is a particularly good idea. Reposting flagged comments is normally considered abusive here. Commenters are specifically asked not to provide "explanations" for flags.)
- runarberg 2y ago
  People do actually talk about the return or the decolonization of Belfast. The difference is that Northern Irish Nationalists were given a political avenue to continue decolonization efforts (but only after decades of armed resistance). The moral argument here is that Hamas is not even asking for that, instead only asking for the right of return of the displaced Palestinian families and their descendants, and a recognition of a Palestinian state which doesn’t include Jaffa. This is a much lesser ask than what the IRA was asking regarding Belfast, all the way up to the Good Friday agreement. The IRA actually went so far as fight a civil war against other nationalist factions over Belfast. So the moral argument here is, in short, that one of the worst colonial empire in history (the British) were actually far more reasonable then modern day Israel.

racional 2y ago

[flagged]

tptacek 2y ago

I am aware of the history, and avoided getting into it because a prolonged litigation over which populations were abused and displaced when wasn't going to get us any closer to an outcome in this conversation. To wit: you can recall the civilian deaths and mass displacement of Palestinian Arabs in or around Jaffa and Israel in general, and I can recall the Aden Pogroms and the Farhud (and point out that the time period you're calling out was just three years --- a single Macbook generation --- from the Holocaust itself). And that rather than a "tit for tat" exercise, these facts establish an exchange of displaced populations, such as has not occurred in U.S. cities, which are not by and large peopled by the victims of Mexican and Indigenous American-led assaults elsewhere. The point, which we arrived at downthread before you picked this scab, is that there is nothing to be done with this information. The displacement of indigenous Americans was both criminal and vital to the establishment of American cities, but we don't seriously discuss the return or "decolonization" of those cities, for obvious reasons. And my point is: the issue is no less obvious with Jaffa, which is very firmly the sovereign territory of the most powerful (and nuclear-armed) state in the Middle East. 'runarberg clarifies that they brought Jaffa up as moral leverage for demands that Israel recognize Palestinian statehood. That makes sense to me, and I push back only to the extent that I don't think additional moral leverage of this kind is needed to make that argument. As for your argument, I'm at a loss for where you're hoping to go with it. Is the point that Israel is bad? If so: practically every state is bad, yes. (I didn't flag your post; in fact, I wrote this response to it --- the flagged version --- and was irritated when, on hitting the "Submit" button, I had to scramble with the back button to save it. I don't think commenting on the flag button is a particularly good idea. Reposting flagged comments is normally considered abusive here. Commenters are specifically asked not to provide "explanations" for flags.)

runarberg 2y ago
People do actually talk about the return or the decolonization of Belfast. The difference is that Northern Irish Nationalists were given a political avenue to continue decolonization efforts (but only after decades of armed resistance). The moral argument here is that Hamas is not even asking for that, instead only asking for the right of return of the displaced Palestinian families and their descendants, and a recognition of a Palestinian state which doesn’t include Jaffa. This is a much lesser ask than what the IRA was asking regarding Belfast, all the way up to the Good Friday agreement. The IRA actually went so far as fight a civil war against other nationalist factions over Belfast. So the moral argument here is, in short, that one of the worst colonial empire in history (the British) were actually far more reasonable then modern day Israel.