Lives in Common: Arabs and Jews in Jerusalem, Jaffa and Hebron

350 Pages·2014·1.2 MB·English

by  Menachem Klein

LIVES IN COMMON

MENACHEM KLEIN
Lives in Common
Arabs and Jews in Jerusalem,
Jaffa, and Hebron
Translated by
Haim Watzman
A
A
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Menachem Klein
Lives in Common
Arabs and Jews in Jerusalem, Jaffa and Hebron
ISBN 978-0-19939-626-9
CONTENTS
About this Book vii
PART I
CONNECTED TO PLACE
Introduction: Jerusalem, Jaffa Gate/Bab al-Khalil 3
The Gate of Forked Ways 3
1. Arab Jews 19
Neither Oxymoron nor Aspersion 19
The Locals 22
2. Mixed Cities 65
A Holy Site Chooses a City—A City Chooses a Holy Site 87
Coexistence Disturbed by Confrontation 94
3. Life On the Verge of the Future 111
A Large Problem in a Small Place 111
Conflict as Routine 121
PART II
CONNECTED BY FORCE
4. Expanding the Boundaries of the Possible 139
A New Land 139
An Ambiguous V 157
5. Like Owners 171
Transferring the Deed 171
Houses from Within, People from Without 188
v
CONTENTS
6. Occupation, Assimilation, Opposition 213
Jerusalem: A Bustling and Noisy Place 213
Jaffa: Abandoned and Attractive 246
Hebron and Jerusalem: The Force of History 258
Epilogue 285
Notes 291
Bibliography 305
Index 325
vi
ABOUT THIS BOOK
Historians should not adopt the past, but rather investigate the relationship
between past and future.
– Alon Confino1
Modern history has connected and disconnected Jaffa, Hebron, and
Jerusalem, showing them to have much in common but also much that
separates them. Jerusalem and Hebron, two mountain cities and the
two holiest cities in Palestine, have been contrasted with Jaffa, the
worldly coastal city. Each of these cities is home to a Palestinian com-
munity with its own character and status, and each of them is also
home to a Jewish community of a different sort. The conflict between
Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs is different in each of these cities,
only about 40 miles distant from each other, yet it is also much alike.
In the same way, the Jews and Arabs in each of these cities have evolved
relationships that, while similar in some ways, are different in others.
All three cities have a long history. Jerusalem and Hebron were
founded about 5,000 years ago. Jaffa is younger—only about 3,800
years old. Many books have been written about each of these cities but
no work has been devoted to comparing them. However, it is impor-
tant to make such a comparison because each of them has become a
focus of modern Israeli or Palestinian national identity (or of both).
The confrontation between these two peoples has played out in each
of these cities, dividing them and setting into motion a series of demo-
graphic, urban, and political changes. But—and this is one of the
book’s original insights—urban life has also created types of common
vii
ABOUT THIS BOOK
identity and coexistence. Only at a few points in time did the conflict
become total. The following chapters reveal this by focusing on daily
life. It is a new approach in the history of the Israeli–Palestinian con-
flict. Whereas the existing historical literature stresses national institu-
tions and leaderships, this book views the cities from the bottom up,
concentrating on the day-to-day interactions between Jews and Arabs.
The national struggle broke out within this context, impairing the pre-
vious web of relations and reorganizing daily life.
The triangle formed by Jaffa, Jerusalem, and Hebron lies in the geo-
graphical, political, religious, and historical center of the Land of
Israel, as the Jews call it, or Palestine, as the Arabs call it. Another tri-
angle, formed by Haifa, Acre, and Nazareth, lies to the north. Jews
and Arabs who lived in that triangle fashioned a system of relation-
ships that differed from that of the central triangle. It was less fervent
religiously and nationally, and exhibited more cooperation between
ethnic groups.2 But the northern triangle lies in the country’s geograph-
ical and historical periphery. None of the three cities that formed it had
ever been a capital, nor were any of them holy to Muslims or Jews.
Jews and Muslims together constitute an overwhelming majority of the
country’s inhabitants, and for more than a century have contested who
the country belongs to. The focal point of this contest is the Jaffa–
Jerusalem–Hebron triangle. Furthermore, up until 1948 Jaffa was a
much more important city than Arab Haifa or Nazareth.
By telling the stories of these three cities, the book casts new light on
the larger story of the Jewish–Palestinian conflict. It reveals aspects of
the conflict that have been missed by previous studies which examined
the subject from the top down and whose starting point was Zionism
or Palestinian nationalism and the conflict between them. Unlike the
approach generally taken by historians of the Jewish national move-
ment or its Palestinian rival, this book’s starting point is not an event
that was constitutive of Zionism or Palestinian nationalism—say, for
example, the inception of Jewish immigration motivated by national
sentiments or the Palestinian riots of 1920. This book’s story instead
begins at an earlier point in time, toward the end of the nineteenth cen-
tury, when a local Palestinian identity began to form, an identity in
which Jews and Arabs were partners. It did not arrive from the outside,
like Arab nationalism and Zionism, but grew out of the daily lives of
the country’s inhabitants during a rapidly modernizing and Westernizing
period, in which the authority of the Ottoman regime was growing
viii