Final photos from the program. Click the photo to see the album.
It is now Monday night, August 16th. The program ended a week and a half ago, on August 4th. Since then, I spent an additional week in Israel with friends and returned late Wednesday night / Thursday, finally arriving back at my apartment in Brookline in the evening of August 12th. Before any more time passes I want to complete my presentation of the ISSRPL program in this blog and wrap things up. Here we go:
On Friday, July 30th we visited an Arab community center of sorts in Jaffa. We heard from a lawyer and a professor, and also from a sheikh. This was the morning of hearing what life in Jaffa looks and feels like from the Arab perspective. It wasn't pretty. One thing I did not know previously was that fully 95% of Jaffa's population prior to Israel's War of Independence was vacated from the city - either by flight or expulsion. Many tens of thousands of people. Thus, the country's most important Arab city - politically, commercially and culturally - was shut down.
In 1950 the city ceased to exist as an independent entity and was incorporated into the new We also heard about the forced relocation of the remaining Arab population from their homes into vacant homes in a specific quarter in the neighborhood. These relocations happened more than once. There were also Arabs from outside the city who were transplanted by Israel into the city. It seems the new neighborhood was (is?) fenced off. Families were scattered. We learned, too, about Israel's laws by which it readily deems private property as abandoned and assumes ownership of that property. With that, we learned of Israel's very grudging granting of new building permits to Arabs, in Yaffo and elsewhere, resulting in highly problematic housing situations and leaving Arabs with little choice but to build illegally and risk having their new structures demolished by the state. Whole neighborhoods of Arab Jaffa were bulldozed by Israel over the years (Israel's explanation is that the housing was decrepit and needed to be cleared) and Jews from all over were transplanted into formerly Arab Jaffa. From the Arab perspective, the whole Arab character and substance of the city were erased over time. There was more, none of it good. With coexistence being the overarching concern of our program, our learning on this particular morning painted a picture of a broken minority society on the one hand, and public policies by the majority, on the other, that provided few promising means for healthy rebuilding.
At one point, visiting the Old City of Jaffa, we saw historical markers put up by Israel to tell the story of the place. First of all, the markers are printed in Hebrew, English, and several European languages, but not in Arabic. Further, that Jaffa had once been an major and important Arab city was not mentioned at all. This was indicative of something we talked about repeatedly on the program: the story, or narrative one tells about the past points to one's vision of the future: if the historical markers are to be trusted (which is debatable) Israel does not recognize an Arab claim on Jaffa of any sort. It does not "see" the Arab past there, and presumably does not "see" an Arab present or future there. At a minimum, the erasure of the long Arab history from the public story of Jaffa was very disrespectful, given the continued presence of Arabs in the city and in Israel.
My fatigue had the better of me when the sheikh spoke, but I listened intently when he insisted that Jews are only a religious group and not a people. The implications of his understanding are enormous - he would happily return to the condition under the Ottomans when Jews were a tolerated religious minority. The gap between Jewish self-understanding and this Muslim's understanding of Jews was unbridgeable and worrying.
Our day included a visit to the Hassan Beq Mosque, now incongruously adjacent to the David Intercontinental Hotel facing the beach, when previously it was a center point of a neighborhood that no longer exists. We went for Friday prayers but most of us, being non-Muslims, had to wait in the garden outside the mosque itself but within the gates of the property. Following the prayers a sheikh told us about the history of the place.
We had an outstanding lunch back at the community center. What could be bad about an enormous tray of flavorful rice with pieces of fried potato and eggplant mixed in?
In the later afternoon we had a terrific program which, unfortunately, I mostly missed. A Jewish Israeli doctoral student in philosophy, and an Arab Israeli pursuing a different academic decree, took us on a walking tour of Jaffa and, at each of three stops, told the story of the place from the Jewish and Arab perspectives. At the port, for example, we heard from the Jewish guide about the Jewish history of the port going back to Solomon importing materials for the Temple through the port and about the waves of Jewish immigrants coming through the port in the 20th century. From the Arab guide, we heard about the enormous export operations Arabs ran through Jaffa prior to Israeli independence. We also heard about expulsions of Arabs to the north and south on ships sailing from Jaffa. Adam and I had to leave early to get back to the hotel in time for Shabbat. Adam and his family and me, together with a Jewish board member of the Summer School and his wife, had Shabbat dinner (following T'fillot) at the hotel. The rest of the group dined out on their own.
Worried as I was about imbalance in the program, a fellow on the program from Cyprus urged me to have more confidence in the group's capacity to listen and observe critically to what we all heard and saw. A good caution.
Alas, it will take me still more time to finish my review of the program. More another night.
Joel
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