Jaffa

Summary

Port city that recurs in Kanafani’s account as a centre of the Arab labour movement, of unemployment and dispossession before 1936, and of British demolitions and the revolt’s outbreak in 1936.

Details

• The Federation of Palestinian Arab Workers in Jaffa produced the 1936 census of 1,000 workers and George Mansour’s report to the Peel Commission; by the end of 1935 there were 2,270 unemployed in Jaffa alone, in a population of 71,000, and the Mandatory Government refused nearly 1,000 unemployed Jaffa workers permission to demonstrate on 6 June 1935 (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.7-8 / printed p.13-14).

• Michel Mitri, president of the Federation of Arab Workers in Jaffa, was assassinated by the Mufti’s group in the early 1930s (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.9 / printed p.17).

• Dispossessed peasants moving to the cities appear in the statement that in Jaffa most of the street cleaners were ex-villagers (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.12 / printed p.22).

• Bauer’s commonly regarded start of the 1936 disturbances is Palestinian Arab crowds in Jaffa attacking Jewish passers-by on 19 April 1936 (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.18 / printed p.35).

• On 18 June 1936 the British blew up part of the city of Jaffa, an estimated 220 houses, rendering 6,000 persons homeless, the inhabitants being poor peasants who had left the countryside for the town (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.23 / printed p.44).

• The construction of a harbour at Tel-Aviv during the revolt was, Kanafani says, later to kill the port of Jaffa (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.29 / printed p.56).

• Ghassan Kanafani lived in Jaffa until May 1948 (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.35).

• In Said, Chapter Two II: Tel Aviv originated, in Weizmann’s telling quoted by Said, in Ruppin’s walk over the dunes north of Jaffa and his declaration that a Jewish city would be created there; Tel Aviv was destined to outstrip the ancient, much older Arab town of Jaffa, and its preeminence was later buttressed by the military capture of Jaffa (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.113-114 / printed p.92-93).

• In Pappe’s Chapter Five, Jaffa was the last city taken, on 13 May 1948, after a three-week siege in which 1,500 volunteers — the largest Palestinian defence force in any locality — confronted 5,000 Irgun and Haganah troops; its entire population of 50,000 was expelled, people pushed into the sea to board the far-too-small fishing boats for Gaza while Jewish troops shot over their heads (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.132-133).

• The Greater Jaffa area’s twenty-four villages were all destroyed with it; today one of its seventeen mosques survives and not one village is left standing (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.132).

• Two months after Jaffa’s occupation, the Red Cross found a pile of dead bodies; the military governor admitted to the Red Cross’s Mr Gouy they had probably been shot by Israeli soldiers for not complying with their orders, under a nightly curfew (5 pm to 6 am) in which anyone found outside ‘will be shot’ (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.239).

• The systematic official looting of Jaffa targeted the British government’s wholesale stores for the Arab population; the military governor reported to Ben-Gurion that as of 15 May 1948 an average load of 100 trucks a day was taken out of Jaffa (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.239-240).

• Military governor Yitzhak Chizik complained to Minister of Finance Eliezer Kaplan on 5 June 1948 that he could no longer control the looting, reported that ‘They do not stop beating people’, and resigned at the end of July, surrendering to the uncontrollable crusade of pillage and robbery (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.240-241).

• Sitta’s register lists Jaffa at S 361: dated 25-04-48, notes “Till early May,IZL.2600 rem”, Arab Population 48 of 76,920 on 17,510 dunums, and a Total Refugees est 1998 of 472,368; the Jaffa district subtotal is 123,227 people on 210,260 dunums — the register’s largest district population, on less land than every district except Nazareth, Jinin and Tulkarm (The Palestinian Nakba 1948 — The Register of Depopulated Localities in Palestine, PDF p.12).

• In Manna, days after Haifa’s fall the Irgun attacked Jaffa; the British, fearing renewed accusations of colluding with the Haganah to empty Arab cities, intervened conspicuously on 28 April and forced the Irgun out of al-Manshiyya quarter, but did not at first try to stem migration; after relative calm they encouraged the remaining Arab leadership to sign a surrender agreement with the Haganah on 13 May 1948 (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.63).

• Eliyahu Sasson, in Manna’s account, told Ben-Gurion’s Arab-affairs experts that Muhammad Nimr al-Hawwari, leader of al-Najjada, had kept Jaffa quiet until obliged to leave in December 1947, after which ‘disturbances started’ (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.54).

• Manna’s Chapter 6 (part 6) tells Jaffa’s post-surrender story: the 13 May 1948 surrender signed under Ahmad Abu-Laban promised civil rights, no arrests and return of the expelled, none of it honoured; the cabinet decided on 16 June not to allow refugees to return; first military governor Yitzhak Chizik resigned on 25 July 1948 after his complaints achieved nothing, and his successor Meir Laniado moved all remaining Arabs into the al-‘Ajami quarter, the “ghetto”; of 70,000 Palestinians before the war only some 3,000 remained, and the number barely grew afterwards (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.224-226).

• The chapter’s Jaffa cases: Abu-Laban’s own Kafkaesque detention and delayed Supreme Court release, followed by his emigration to Jordan; Amin Andrawus, who kept his house and brought his children back from Jordan by family reunification in early 1950 among 117 returning Jaffa residents named by al-Yawm; Ahmad Abd al-Rahim, who rented and then sold his al-‘Ajami house to the French consulate before leaving for Beirut; and Fakhri Jaday, who returned from Beirut in October 1950 to the family pharmacy (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.228-231).

Related pages

The Palestinian Nakba 1948 — The Register of Depopulated Localities in Palestine, The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, Histadrut, Peel Commission