Spatial Relationality

Theorizing Space and Sociality in Jewish-Arab "Mixed Towns"

In the Mediterranean, birthplace of the City-State, the State, whether it be inside or outside the city, always remains brutal and powerless, violent but weak, unifying but always undermined, under threat. ... Every form of hegemony and homogeneity are refused in the Mediterranean. ... The very idea of centrality is refused because each group, each entity, each religion and each culture considers itself a center. ... The polyrhythmy of Mediterranean cities highlights their common character through their differences.

— HENRI LEFEBVRE, "Rhythmanalysis of Mediterranean Cities"

SITUATED VIOLENCE: THE OCTOBER 2000 EVENTS IN JAFFA

The large-scale protest demonstrations staged by the Palestinian citizens of Israel throughout the country in the first two weeks of October 2000, now widely known as "the October 2000 events," did not bypass Jaffa. For a few days in early October, Palestinian youngsters marched through the streets in solidarity with the casualties of the Al-Aqsa Intifada, destroying public symbols and state institutions including banks, post offices, and Jewish-owned stores.

Shortly after these events I met with my Jaffa-born sister, Aurelie, who lives in the heart of Jaffa's predominantly Arab Ajami quarter, and with Hicham, a Palestinian high school classmate from my own Jaffa days twenty years ago. Inescapably, the conversation turned to the recent upheaval and its implications for Jewish-Arab relations in Jaffa. I asked my sister how she had coped with the "riots," referring to an incident in which Palestinian youths burned down a lottery booth a block away from where she lives. Her answer surprised me, as it stood in sharp contrast to the biased and hysterical anti-Arab media reports and to the anxious responses of most Israeli residents of neighboring Tel-Aviv. Dismissing the notion that these events were in any way dangerous, she said dryly that all she had to do was detour to avoid whatever demonstrations were going on and go home from work another way. At the end of the day, she concluded, Tel-Aviv is more dangerous than Jaffa, if only for the fact that Jaffa, where many of the residents are Arabs, is immune to suicide attacks by Palestinian terrorists. She said,

The whole thing was not a big deal. Nothing happened to me. They [the demonstrators] never reached my house. From the outside it looked much worse than it actually was. Some Jerusalemite Palestinians arrived to agitate and nationalize the atmosphere, and some youngsters from Jaffa went along. I know that for Tel-Avivans it looked awful, but I wasn't afraid. Friends suggested that I stay with them in Tel-Aviv, and some of them did not visit me for months. ...

I live in the ideal location, you see. They didn't enter the houses and there were no pogroms. They were not brutes like Sharon's people. They focused on expressing their protest — with no looting or rape. They didn't hurt civilians because so many of them are Arabs like them. They looked for external Jewish elements — people from Bat-Yam [a coastal town just south of Jaffa], for example, who never try to integrate with them. The post office represents the Jewish-Israeli establishment. But they did not think it through: damaging it eventually hurt them, since they are the ones who use it. For me, as someone who lives in the area, it wasn't serious. Tel-Aviv, with all those suicide bombs, is much more dangerous.

Proceeding with this surprisingly sympathetic view of the events, Aurélie described them in apolitical and non-national terms. Her description was of what might be called "collective effervescence" — a ritual of semi-spontaneous gathering involving in-group agents ("Jaffans") and out-group agents ("Jerusalemites") alike. Rather than a threatening and frightening occurrence, Aurelie's account of the October Events took a Durkheimian tenor, whereby Jaffans recognized their collective unity by means of a primarily social and quasi-ludic practice of opposition. In her words,

The atmosphere was like a festival; people enjoyed the action. Evening comes and everyone goes out to the streets. The gutsy ones throw some stones, but the driving force were those Jerusalemites. I told my friends that it all took place at certain hours in the evening, around six or seven, as youngsters come home from school or work. Jaffans are usually calm and quiescent, but when the Jerusalemites arrived it made the locals finally feel they were part of the whole thing, of the Palestinian people. Also you have to remember in October the air outside is pleasant in the evening.

Disagreeing with what my sister described as the pivotal role of the demonstrators from outside of Jaffa (the "Jerusalemites"), Hicham, who took part in the demonstrations, insisted on the political dimension of the violent events. Aurelie's association of the events with undisciplined working-class and youth-based leisure practice was wrong, he thought. He said,

Even though the demonstrations were pretty lame, the Israeli newspapers depicted Jaffa as a "ticking bomb." Most gatherings took place when we thought that people from Bat-Yam were about to attack Jabaliyye [a southern neighborhood in Jaffa]. At least two hundred people came out to defend the neighborhood's mosque. Luckily, the police stood between us and the Jews and after a few days the tension dissolved. What made most people happy — me too — is that they closed Yefet Street. It was a festive atmosphere, like that on Yom Kippur [when in Jaffa both Jews and Arabs fill the streets]. An atmosphere of disorder and festival. We were happy that the Jews were afraid to enter Jaffa.

Referring to the de facto Israeli boycott of Jaffa in the weeks that followed, Hicham continued:

Abu Hassan's hummus restaurant was already empty at ten or eleven in the morning, and people started going there more to prove to ourselves that the Jewish boycott was not getting to us. There was one day when Abu Hassan was really moved as Jaffan Arabs filled the...