The Nakba: Jaffa's erasure is a warning to Gaza
- Middle East Eye
- 7 hours ago
- 13 min read
Middle East Eye
Israel's destruction of Gaza has echoes of the Nakba, following a plan tested in 1948. But Palestinians are still resisting exile and extermination.
My grandfather, Ismail Abou Shhadeh - known to most as Abu Subhi - never spoke to us about the Nakba. He talked about everything else but had always avoided describing what happened in 1948.
It was only through interviews he gave to various media outlets that we came to understand what it meant to live through the catastrophe of 1948 in what was then one of Palestine's most prominent cities, Jaffa (Yafa in Arabic).
And it was only through one interview in particular, with Al Jazeera, that we learned how his father, Haseen Abou Shhadeh, died.
Haseen was born during the Ottoman era, when land was often seen as belonging to those who worked it - a principle that had shaped generations of Palestinian agricultural life, even as formal land ownership laws changed.
In 1948, Zionist militias exploited that deep sense of rootedness and security, catching unsuspecting Palestinian villagers off guard and using terror to drive them from their homes and seize their land and property.
Haseen, like many others, continued to cultivate his groves despite the new reality. But in the 1960s, when Israeli authorities arrived to uproot his orange trees, he realised he could no longer stop them. He suffered a stroke and passed away on the way to the hospital.
How our family managed to remain in Jaffa, when so many others were expelled, is something I only came to know later. That continuity, living in the same city that witnessed the Nakba 77 years ago, shapes how I remember and how I write today.
Jaffa and Gaza: Parallel stories
In memory of the Nakba, and in light of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, I reflect on the parallel stories of Jaffa and Gaza - two coastal centres bound by loss and resistance.
Jaffa was ethnically cleansed of its Palestinian population, destroyed, and transformed into a playground for the world's wealthy. The richest people now stroll along the shores of its ruined neighbourhoods. Hotels have been built atop the city's rubble and even over its cemeteries.
Across the Gaza Strip, entire neighbourhoods have been obliterated, with heads of state openly calling for it to be "cleaned out" by expelling its residents and turning it into a similar playground.
When US President Donald Trump floated his vision of transforming the Gaza Strip into the "Riviera of the Middle East", many dismissed it as an absurd fantasy.
But what he proposed for Gaza had, in fact, already happened in Jaffa - once a thriving Palestinian centre, now reduced to a marginal neighbourhood within the Hebrew city erected over its ruins, swallowing it whole.
The magnitude of Jaffa's Nakba was not only material and political, but also cognitive.
In the spring of 1948, Zionist forces laid siege to the city. Jaffa was bombarded for weeks, and on 14 May, it fell. Of the roughly 120,000 Palestinians who had lived there, only about 4,000 remained.
Entire neighbourhoods were emptied, and families were forced into exile or corralled behind barbed wire. Homes were seized under the Absentee Property Law and handed over to new settlers.
Public buildings, like the Saraya, Jaffa's municipal headquarters, were bombed. Streets were renamed, and cultural landmarks disappeared. What remained of the city was rebranded and repurposed, its Palestinian identity systematically stripped away.
This is the model now being projected onto Gaza: a place to be emptied, repackaged, and reopened to the world - but without its people.
Jaffa: A thriving centre
Like the Gaza Strip today, Jaffa was once among the most densely populated places in Palestine. In 1945, British Mandate records documented around 94,000 residents in the city itself, and another 30,000 in surrounding villages.
It was the cultural and economic heart of Palestine: five newspapers, three football clubs, four cinemas and a theatre, printing houses, soap factories, and an international shipping industry.
Buses ran from Jaffa to Jerusalem, and trains connected it to the broader Arab world via the Hejaz railway. The city had 47 educational institutions and Palestine's first train station, just a kilometre from its port.
Given the political reality, so few people now recognise that Jaffa is closer to Damascus (215 km) and Amman (160 km) than to Israel's southernmost city, the tourist hub of Eilat (275 km).
It is a distortion of perception, memory and geography that speaks to how thoroughly its ties to the Arab world have been erased.
Interestingly, most visitors today seek to tour the Old City - undoubtedly a beautiful neighbourhood, but one whose appeal reveals the orientalist trope through which westerners imagine the Palestinian city.
With its emphasis on mosques and churches, the alleys offer a romanticised image of Arab life frozen in time.
One can even see how a hammam (bathhouse) was converted into a gourmet restaurant under the same Arabic name, even though its original meaning is simply "restroom".
The Old City, then, tells a tale designed to flatter western sensibilities: a fantasy of Arabs stuck in pre-modern times, before the white man arrived to modernise them.
Palestine's cities: Pushed to the margins
Jaffa's story as a political and cultural centre lies outside the Old City.
Only the keen-eyed will walk down Jamal Pasha Street - named after the Ottoman governor under whose rule Hassan Bey carried out an ambitious modernisation plan for the city during the empire's final decades.
At that time, a development project was launched to reshape Jaffa's urban landscape, leaving a distinctive architectural imprint - or at least, what remains of it.
Given the scale of destruction of Palestinian urban life...we must ask: what happened to these cities and their inhabitants in 1948, and what might that tell us about Gaza's future?
In the mid-1930s, Al-Hamra Cinema was built. Upon its opening, the flag of the 1936 Arab Revolt was raised, and a large placard featuring legendary Egyptian singer and actress Umm Kulthum was hung for a screening of her film The National Choir.
The building still stands, though it was renovated in recent years after being purchased by the Church of Scientology.
But while these scenes reveal the depth of urban life before 1948, the histories of Palestine's major cities have often been pushed to the margins of its national narrative.
In her book Hidden from View: Palestinian Women and Cities until 1948, urban sociologist Dr Manar Hassan criticises national historiography for focusing primarily on the rural narrative - portraying Palestinians as a people of fellahin, or peasants expelled from their villages - while giving less attention to urban centres like Jaffa and Haifa.
Perhaps, as an occupied people, we wanted to counter the Zionist image of the kibbutznik and prove our connection to the land. Or maybe we sought to highlight the scale of the national catastrophe by invoking the figure of the peasant labourer.
But given the scale of destruction of Palestinian urban life - in Jaffa, Haifa, Acre, Ramle and Lod - we must now ask: what happened to these cities and their inhabitants in 1948, and what might that tell us about Gaza's future?
The Nakba of 48: 'Nothing remained'
During an interview with the Jordanian channel Ru'ya, a young journalist asked my grandfather: "Abu Subhi, please tell me how Jaffa used to be." He began describing life in the city before 1948. Then she asked him: "How would you summarise the Nakba of '48?"
He started to tell her how 4,000 rockets rained down on Jaffa - launched from the sea and all directions, from Lod and elsewhere - and how nothing remained except corpses. Before he could finish his sentence, she asked how he felt.
And for the first time, I saw my grandfather break down. He said: "This is the first time I speak about Jaffa and begin to cry." He asked her to stop the interview and stood up to leave.
Finally, she called out to him with one last question: "What does Jaffa mean to you?" And he answered: "To me, it is nothing less than a legacy that binds us to the city. You may curse my father, and I will forgive you - but if you curse Jaffa, I will never forgive you for as long as I live."
My grandfather passed away in 2021 on the way to a cemetery.
I was in the back seat of a car with my father's cousin - a man in his late forties who runs an auto repair shop - as we drove to visit my grandfather's grave. As we approached it, he suddenly bowed his head and said: "Abu Subhi, today you can rest with the children of Saraya."
He was referring to the major terror attack carried out by the Lehi militia (Stern Gang) on 4 January 1948.
Labelled a terrorist group by the British at the time, Lehi militants bombed the Saraya building - the former governor's palace, located outside the Old City - killing 14 people and wounding 98.
According to a Haaretz article published the following day, the building was used by the Jaffa Municipality to provide social services and distribute food to needy children.
My grandfather had been working further down Salameh Road when the explosion occurred.
As a young man, he ran towards the site to help. He began moving rubble and searching for survivors, but when he saw the bodies of the children crushed beneath the stones, he lost consciousness.
The first thing he remembered upon waking was a man telling him, "You've seen enough. Go home. It's better for you."
The story of the Saraya haunted him - eventually becoming part of our family's narrative. More importantly, it left the people of Jaffa asking, "If they could do that to needy children, what would they do to the rest of us?"
Capture and expulsion
Under the original partition plan, Jaffa was to be part of the Palestinian state. But Zionist militias, led by David Ben-Gurion, could not accept such a large concentration of Palestinians in the centre of the proposed Jewish state.
It became crucial for them to capture the city and expel its inhabitants before declaring Israel's independence and the end of the British Mandate.
Throughout March and April 1948, Jaffa came under siege and was bombarded for weeks. Panic spread across the city - people simply wanted to reach safety.
Unlike today, Palestinians at the time believed they would be able to return to their homes. But under relentless military pressure, they were driven out by land and sea.
Within days, the combined population of the city and its surrounding villages fell to fewer than 4,000 Palestinians. It remains one of the most striking examples of ethnic cleansing in the 20th century.
When I asked my grandfather how our family managed to stay, I learned that his father had deserted the Ottoman army before the First World War and made his way back to Jaffa.The journey took six months, travelling from the Antalya region to northern Syria to Jaffa. He moved only at night, sleeping during the day, because the Ottomans executed deserters.
When my grandfather warned him of the danger in 1948 and urged him to leave, he refused. He had already known the hardship of life as a refugee and said he would rather die than go through it again. And so our family remained intact.
That was not the case for most Palestinians. Families were often torn apart - some fled to Gaza, others to the West Bank, or neighbouring Arab countries.
The Palestinians who remained
Most narratives of the Nakba end with the mass expulsion: the war was lost, the land seized, and some 800,000 Palestinians forced into exile as Israel began systematically demolishing Palestinian villages. But for those who remained, further stages of dispossession followed.
Immediately after the war, the new state rounded up the remaining Palestinians in Jaffa and forcibly relocated them to the Ajami neighbourhood.A barbed-wire fence was erected around the area, and no one was allowed to leave without a military permit.At the same time, the Israeli government passed the Absentee Property Law, defining as "absentee" anyone who had been in an enemy country or territory between 29 November 1947 and the law's enactment in 1950 - including the West Bank, Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan.Crucially, this law applied even to Palestinians who had never left the borders of the new state.
In Jaffa's case, most of those who remained were not originally from Ajami. Only a handful came from each surrounding neighbourhood or village.Once confined to Ajami - soon labelled "the Ghetto" by Jewish immigrants who likened it to Europe - they lost everything.
The homes they were assigned became protected tenancies for three generations (later reduced to two) and, to this day, hundreds of third-generation descendants live under threat of eviction orders issued by the courts.
It is worth pausing to consider: what happens when an entire city is stripped of its residents and its property is stolen - banks, theatres, homes, furniture, gold, shops, public institutions?
One might argue that Palestinian cities experienced the largest armed robbery of the 20th century.
In the early 1950s, journalist and writer Moshe Smilansky described Jaffa as undergoing "Bulgarisation".
Following the arrival of immigrants from Bulgaria, the city acquired a new, non-Palestinian character and was even promoted as a "Bulgarian city".
Photographs from that period show Jaffa thriving again - banks reopened, theatres filled, shops and restaurants bustling - but without Palestinians. The city had been plundered, and it continued to function under Jewish ownership.
The stages of the Nakba
Ajami, where Palestinians were forcibly relocated, became the Ajami Ghetto. But even the ghetto would last for just a few years.
In 1950, Israel's parliament, the Knesset, passed the Unification of Jaffa and Tel Aviv law, transferring all of Jaffa's municipal institutions to Tel Aviv Municipality.
The first stage of the Nakba was the loss of homeland. The second, the loss of city and property. The third, the home. And the fourth was the loss of belonging - the Nakba of the soul
Symbolically, anyone visiting 45 Jerusalem Boulevard will find the old Jaffa Municipality building still owned by Tel Aviv, now housing social welfare services.
With the ghetto's dissolution, Palestinians, still under military rule, were officially permitted to work only within the Tel Aviv-Jaffa municipal boundaries.
However, the removal of barbed wire also had another consequence.
Following the influx of Jewish immigrants after the Second World War, the new Israeli regime faced a housing shortage. A policy was introduced allowing multiple families to share a single home, including in Ajami, which enabled Jewish immigrants to move into expropriated Palestinian houses.
In some cases, Palestinians were forced to share their homes with newly arrived Jewish immigrants. Among them were Arab Jews from North Africa, who spoke Arabic and, at times, openly expressed their contempt for the Palestinians they now lived with under the same roof.
If the first stage of the Palestinian Nakba was the loss of homeland, then the second was the loss of city and property, and the third was the loss of the home.
The fourth stage of the Nakba was the loss of belonging - the Nakba of the soul. Palestinians who had once lived in one of the most important cities in the Arab world saw their lives upended within a few years, becoming a small minority in a Hebrew city, subjected to harassment by both the authorities and the Jewish immigrants.
Sociological shifts began to reshape society: dispossessed and alone in the world, many no longer even knew the fate of their own families.
These communities were forgotten and erased from history. For decades, both Jaffa and its remaining Palestinian community became pale shadows of their former selves.
The long aftermath
It was only through conversations with elders in the community - if they were willing to speak at all - that those of us in the younger generations were able to grasp their experiences. Not only those from 1948, but also from the decades that followed: the rise of drug use and the spread of alcohol; a growing problem that ravaged the community.
New patterns of violence and crime emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, turning Ajami into one of the most dangerous neighbourhoods in the country.
Ironically, to see what Ajami looked like then, one need only watch Chuck Norris's film Delta Force, which was filmed in the neighbourhood. During production, the crew was even granted permission to demolish houses there.
Following the passage of UN Resolution 194, which reaffirmed the right of return for Palestinian refugees, the Israeli authorities launched widespread plans to demolish Palestinian homes.
The next time you see a photo of Tel Aviv's beach promenade, know that one of the city's largest and most populated Palestinian neighbourhoods - al-Manshiyya - once stood there.
It was systematically demolished during and after the Nakba, as Israeli authorities cleared the area to make way for new development.
Few today remember that, until the 1967 war, the US maintained an arms embargo on Israel due to the unresolved refugee issue. For a time, the international community still spoke of the right of return as a matter of urgency and justice.
Like the Palestinian community that remained, the city itself passed through three stages: first, destruction; then, neglect; and now, the phase of folklore.
Today, Jaffa is marketed to tourists eager to experience Arab architecture, traditional food, and a curated glimpse of what is marketed as "authentic Arabian" life - but without the Palestinians who built it.
This latest transformation seeks to erase what came before. It turns history into an aesthetic, offering the city not as a site of resistance or memory, but as a cultural performance - a place where the remnants of Arab life are repackaged for consumption.
The Jaffa blueprint
Trump's plans for Gaza are often dismissed as absurd fantasies. But for Palestinians, they are a description of the past. History does not repeat itself exactly, but this time, the Palestinians in Gaza understand that if they leave, they will be forced into exile outside the homeland - and as before, Arab armies will not defend the city.
They will need to resist on their own.
Gaza's devastation will carry far-reaching consequences for years to come - social, psychological and historical - the weight of which we have not yet begun to grasp
Today, there are about 20,000 Palestinians in Jaffa. And although it is easy to view our history tragically, I want to offer a different perspective. Despite everything, we remained. We resisted. Against the state's intensive efforts to erase us, we fought not only to survive, but to preserve our presence, memory and history.
Through relentless struggle, we reclaimed spaces of communal life - from Jaffa's mosques and churches to its schools and social institutions. We forced the authorities to open new schools.
The Christian Orthodox Association succeeded in recovering its properties, and where the army once occupied its school on al-Khilweh Street, the Orthodox school now operates once again.
Gaza's devastation will carry far-reaching consequences for years to come - social, psychological and historical - the weight of which we have not yet begun to grasp.
But as the German-Jewish literary critic Walter Benjamin reminds us, the duty of the present is not only to those who will succeed us, but also to the victims of the past.
In 1940, writing in exile as part of the New-Marxist debate on the question of revolution, Benjamin argued that revolution should not be viewed primarily as an act for future generations, but as a response to the injustices endured by those who came before - a struggle not merely to remember the dead but to redeem them through present action.
He urges us not to view history as linear progress towards a better future, but as a commitment to those who came before - and to the truth they carried with them.
The genocide in Gaza is not a break from history, but its continuation - a new chapter in the Nakba.
Confronting it will require years of reckoning with unimaginable loss and devastation. But even as we grapple with what lies ahead, we must also honour those who came before - the dead, the displaced, and the dispossessed, from Jaffa and Gaza to the West Bank and far beyond.
This time, Palestinian efforts to halt the rewriting of history may succeed.
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