Ethno-national Territorialisation, Urban Memory and Ambiguity in Jaffa, Israel/Palestine

Keywords: Ethnographic methodology, visual methodologies, spatiality, temporality, ethnonationalism, spatial violence
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Monday
Session Start / End Time: 2/28/2022 05:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/28/2022 06:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 10

Abstract

In the early 1960s, the southern edges of Jaffa were transformed from citrus orchards into functionalist-modernist neighbourhoods of social housing (shikunim) existing parallel to informal housing and small plots of agricultural land (bayārāt). This paper observes how an Israeli version of modernism projected a blueprint to transform the area and the people who live in it. Crucially, the spatial imagination of the plan was undercut at its inception through a social encounter between Palestinian inhabitants of the bayārāt who remained in Jaffa after the violence of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War (only 3% of Jaffa’s pre-1948 Palestinian population) and largely Mizraḥi (of Middle Eastern origin) Jewish immigrants who lived in maʻabarot (transit camps) in the area before the construction of shikunim (circa 1949-60). This form of collective memory contributes to collective understandings of the area as an ambiguous place and disrupts the linear order imagined by architects who constructed the shikunim. It understands the articulation of a nostalgic past by residents as located at a particular intersection of governance, urban space, and time, demonstrating how ethno-national territorialisation and the construction of the shikunim failed to totally obliterate intimate relations that formed during the maʻabara-bayāra encounter. Although, with time, its spatial repercussions would be felt, urban memory continues to produce ambiguities in the production of territory and space, encouraging a reading of ethno-national geographies of erasure that attends to mnemonic leaks moving against the grain of ethno-national spatialisation.