‘Jaffa, land of oranges’

In “Jaffa: land of oranges”, Ghassan Kanafani described his exile from the Palestinian coastal city of Jaffa.

As a 12-year-old boy, he struggled to understand, but “on that night, though, certain threads of that story became clearer... a big truck was standing in front of our door. Light things, mainly sleeping items, were being chucked into the truck swiftly and hysterically”.

A few decades after Kanafani wrote about his exile, I, an 8-year-old boy from a Gaza refugee camp, pondered on my own. When I stood at the borders of Jaffa, the line of what was real and imagined suddenly became blurred.

Once Palestine’s largest city, Jaffa turned out not to be a figment of my grandfather’s imagination, or of Kanafani’s, but a tangible space of sand, air and sea. The Palestinian-Arab identity of Jaffa was evident everywhere.

I was a third grader on my first school trip. Gazans were still allowed to cross into Israel in those days, mostly as exploited cheap labour.

My family had been driven out of Palestine during the Nakbeh, the “great catastrophe” that saw the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes. My family was composed of simple peasants from the village of Beit Daras.

The residents of my village were known for their love of couscous, and for their legendary stubbornness, courage and pride. Beit Daras residents saw in Jaffa a centre of many aspects of their lives. 

A commercially vibrant port city, known around the world for its oranges, Jaffa was home to some of the largest markets in southern Palestine.

Jaffa was a centre for Arab culture and a model of religious coexistence. But the British colonisation of Palestine, starting in 1917 then morphed into a mandate government in 1922, interrupting the natural historic flow that positioned Jaffa as the beating heart of Palestine.

Strata of educated elites in Jaffa raised the level of political consciousness of the city to standards that would still be considered high by Middle Eastern criteria even today. 

Politicians, artists, bankers, craftsmen, and young and vibrant student communities gave Jaffa a middle class that served an essential role in the fight against British colonialism and its Zionist allies many years before the Nakbeh and the creation of Israel.

Jaffa union members organised around labour rights with steadfast commitment. Arab labourers were being laid off and Jewish labourers coming from Europe were taking their place.

That mobilisation become part of the 1936 strike and revolution, Palestine’s first collective uprising that inspired generations of Palestinians, and still does today.  

Numerous villages and small towns looked to Jaffa for guidance, and sometimes survival.

My grandfather, who owned a small piece of land in Beit Daras, was a craftsman who weaved baskets. Every few days, he hauled the best of what he had made into the Isdud and sometimes Al Majdal markets, hoping for a few extra Palestinian dinars to supplement his meagre income. But the best was saved for Jaffa, because the Jaffawis had the best taste. He would put on his poshest outfit for that trip. After feeding his trusty donkey, he would pile his baskets on the cart and embark on the long journey.

“Sido [grandpa], please tell us stories about your adventures in Jaffa,” we would plead as he sat on an old mattress in his special corner of a small, decaying house in a refugee camp in Gaza.

His stories, which he conveyed with much suspense, were treading a fine line between truth and fantasy. When I grew up, I realised that the fantasy was not simply his way to amuse us, children, but also a way to express how Jaffa represented my grandfather’s greatest triumphs and most humiliating defeats.

Fantasy helped him make sense of the world he had left behind.

When the Arabs revolted in 1936, Britain hit back pitilessly. Not only did it kill, imprison and exile many Jaffawis, it also defaced the city. Large parts of the old city were erased never to be seen again. History was violently undone.

Grandpa was one of the thousands who defended Palestine to the bitter end. Although he was a peasant, he had taught himself how to weave baskets to survive. 

Later, he exchanged everything for an old Turkish rifle to defend Beit Daras, as nearby villages were falling in the hands of Zionist militias, one after the other.

Grandpa said much about how beautiful Jaffa was. He would describe the gentle breeze of the sea as it greeted one upon the entrance to the city, and how it would make one feel as if one’s soul returned to him.

When Beit Daras fell, after successive battles between Zionist militias and villagers armed with only a few rifles, grandpa’s soul was trapped forever.

When Plan Dalet, the master plan through which most of Palestine was violently conquered, was implemented, following the calculated departure of the British forces, the capture of Jaffa became the culmination of a violent campaign.

The highway between Jaffa and Jerusalem was a theatre for heroic battles, culminating in the battle of Castal, a few kilometres away from Jerusalem.

Jaffa, known as the “Bride of the sea” was conquered between April and May 1948. A major exodus was already under way into Transjordan and Syria.

Zionist forces belonging to Haganah and Irgun set aside their supposed differences as they moved in against Jaffa.

Three different military campaigns were launched simultaneously: Chametz, Jevussi and Yiftach, through which Jaffa, areas around Jerusalem and the whole eastern Galilee were seized. But when Jaffa fell, the pride of Palestine was crushed.

The city was encircled and thousands of people were forced to flee by sea to Gaza or Egypt. Many drowned as small, overcrowded fishing boats gave in and sank.

Arab leadership had hoped that the British would not allow the Zionists to conquer Jaffa. They were ill prepared. Civil defence arrangements were almost nonexistent.

The military disparity between Zionist militias (numbering at about 5,000 well-trained fighters) and Arab volunteers (numbering around 1,500) was impossible to overcome without backing from the outside. None came.

Men and women died in droves. Tens of thousands were on trek over land, but mostly by sea.

At the age of eight, I discovered that Jaffa was not a fantasy. Much later in life, I discovered that Jaffa, although conquered in battle, still stands through the collective memory of Jaffawis everywhere.

While the term Nakbeh might be a fitting depiction of what befell the Palestinian nation in 1947-48, it is sumud — steadfastness — that keeps the millions of refugees holding on tight to their right of return 66 years after the land of orange trees was conquered, and it is sumud that will keep Jaffa alive, forever.

The writer, managing editor of Middle East Eye, is an internationally syndicated columnist, a media consultant, an author and the founder of PalestineChronicle.com. His latest book is “My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story” (Pluto Press, London). He contributed this article to The Jordan Times.