For several months, construction of a 20-unit housing project in Jaffa’s
predominantly Arab neighborhood of Ajami has been at the center of a controversy
over the changing face of the community and the state’s relations with its Arab
citizens – leading some to argue that the forces of the free market, along with
the ideology of political Zionism, are conspiring to diminish the Arab nature of
the community.
In May 2009, the B’emunah corporation won a tender to
build a residential complex marketed to members of the national-religious
community in the former “Etrog market” in Ajami. Since then, B’emunah has faced
accusations that it is trying to dilute the Arab nature of the neighborhood by
moving in national-religious “settlers,” leading to a series of protests in the
area over the past year.
On July 21, the Supreme Court decided to delay a
vote on an appeal against the project submitted by the Association for Civil
Rights in Israel on behalf of a coalition of Jaffa residents and activists. The
appeal argued that B’emunah is practicing discrimination by limiting the project
to members of the Jewish national- religious community. During the hearing,
Supreme Court president Dorit Beinish recommended that petitioners drop the
motion, arguing that the construction of the project is a moot point, mainly
because it does not discriminate on racial grounds.
The appeal reached
the Supreme Court after it was originally rejected by the Tel Aviv District
Court in February.
B’emunah contends that the stipulation that residents
be observant Jews is legal on the grounds that it is meant to create a specific
quality of life for its residents, and not a form of discriminatory housing
based on race.
In February, a stop-work petition presented by 27 Ajami
residents who argued that the project was discriminating against the
neighborhood’s Arab residents was rejected by the Tel Aviv District Court. The
dismissal was followed by the Supreme Court’s denial of a request from the
Association for Civil Rights in Israel to delay the project. ACRI had argued
that B’emunah does not adhere to equal housing policies, and promotes its
projects through racist marketing.
The site of the project was until
recently a vacant lot with a handful of olive trees scattered across a dirt lot
a block from Rehov Yefet, Jaffa’s main thoroughfare.
Two blocks past the
site, the road dead-ends across the street from the French ambassador’s palatial
residence and the campus of the Arab Jewish Community Center.
The final
block of Rehov Mendes France is lined with new, upscale four- and five-story
apartment houses, sandwiched between older buildings that have not undergone
renovation, all of it facing a sweeping view of the Mediterranean
Sea.
Since it first won the tender in 2009, the B’emunah project has
found itself at the center of the debate over the changing face of Jaffa,
specifically the area’s majority Arab districts. While the most extreme
assessments see the changing demographics of Jaffa, and in particular the influx
of national religious Jews, as part of efforts to force out the Arab population,
potentially sparking widespread violence among Israel’s Arab population, others
see Jaffa’s changing demographics and tension between newcomers and long-time
residents as a classic story of gentrification and urban renewal.
The B’emunah construction site is
located where Ajami starts to become the “Givat Aliya” neighborhood, the
southernmost district of Jaffa before Bat Yam. The lot gets its name from a
market that sold etrogim – citrons – to the area’s once far larger Jewish
population, many of whom left the neighborhood over the years as the fortunes of
Ajami went south and it became a neglected, poverty-stricken
district.
The lot ends at Rehov Donnolo Harofe, named after the famous
Jewish doctor Shabbetai Donnolo, namesake of the Donnolo Hospital, which served
the neighborhood’s residents until the construction of Wolfson Hospital in
1980.
When it was initially founded south of Jaffa’s Old City in the late
19th century, Ajami was home to a wealthy community of Arabs, who built spacious
homes with large courtyards near the sea. The neighborhood’s fortunes began to
change during the 1948 War of Independence when the majority of Jaffa’s Arabs
fled and were unable to return to their homes.
An influx of Jewish
immigrants entered the neighborhood, as did displaced Arabs from around the
country. The neighborhood soon became overcrowded and in the years to come
suffered from crime, poverty and neglect by Tel Aviv’s municipal planners,
becoming a shadow of its former self.
In recent years, the largely poor,
disadvantaged inner-city neighborhood has undergone a flurry of change and rapid
demographic and economic transformation, largely brought on by its proximity to
the seaside and the city center. As a result, a district that was once a
no-man’s land for investors and young urban professionals has now found itself
subject to the same skyrocketing real-estate prices that have long affected the
traditionally desirable parts of town.
Like all tales of gentrification,
the poorer residents of the one-time urban backwater find themselves between a
rock and a hard place, where the most appealing qualities of their neighborhood
– proximity to the sea and the city center – are the very qualities that make
their neighborhood a target for outside investors with larger pocketbooks,
looking to find places near the beach and the economic heart of the
country.
AS OPPOSED to other cases of gentrification, in Ajami the
long-term residents are predominantly Arab and the newcomers Jews, causing the
classic story of urban gentrification to play out against the backdrop of
tensions between the stewards of one of the world’s most contested pieces of
political real estate.
Like classic stories of gentrification around the
world, the rising costs facing long-time residents are tempered with a rise in
cultural and other opportunities that produce a love-hate relationship with
their changing neighborhood. In Jaffa, wine bars, cafes and pubs have moved in
and brought a nightlife culture to an area that had been largely bereft of such
attractions.
For Jaffa resident Muhammad Jabali, who organized a
Palestinian cultural festival in late July in Jaffa’s old city, the changing
face of the city does present some opportunities.
“It’s a complicated
thing to talk about what’s happening. I like to have bars to go to in the
shuk, I like that there’s lots of young people around, which is something you
didn’t have before. This place is happening, and most of it is a nice
feeling."
“But, it’s no longer cheaper than Tel Aviv,” Jabali said, adding
that the development is pricing out so many in Jaffa that “part of what draws
people to Jaffa, the Arab culture, is a large part of what [the investors] are
trying to get rid of.”
Nonetheless, Jabali says, the B’emunah project is
part of a series of factors and official decisions on the part of the state to
change the demographic facts on the ground in Jaffa, a situation he says
stretches back ultimately to the 1948 war for Israel’s
independence.
“What you have is the ideology of B’emunah working together
with the free market to change the facts on the ground in Jaffa. The free market
does what it can, and the state and ideological groups pick up the rest” Jabali
said, describing what he said is “part of a 60-year process of pushing Arabs
more and more eastward, so the state can retain a grip on the coastal area with
as few Arabs there as possible.”
According to many local residents and
activists, the rising cost of housing in Jaffa affects the Arab population worse
than the city’s Jewish population because young Arabs looking to buy or rent a
home near their families find themselves unable to do so.
While the
difficulty of affording housing in Tel Aviv is a subject close to the heart of
virtually all young people in the city, young Arab residents of Jaffa find their
mobility and options for moving far more limited than those of Jewish
Israelis.
For Jaffa Arabs, the communal institutions they need cannot be
found elsewhere in the Tel Aviv area, leading in large part to a migration from
Jaffa to Arab areas outside the center. This leaves many to seek affordable
housing in areas of diminished opportunity such as Lod, Ramle and Kafr Kasim, as
well as in remote villages and provincial backwaters far removed from the
opportunities afforded by Tel Aviv.
The situation is not lost on Sami Abu
Shehada, head of Darnah, the committee for housing rights in Jaffa, who says
that the housing problem, while relatively new in Jaffa, is among the most
crucial issues facing the city’s residents.
“In the last 15 years, there
is a new phenomenon in Jaffa where most of the young couples are not able to
solve their housing needs. In the last five years, the situation is so bad that
for the first time since 1948, people have to leave Jaffa because they can’t
afford either buying or renting in Jaffa.”
Instead of housing for the
poor local population, Abu Shehada said that the only new projects in Ajami are
luxury projects marketed to outsiders, a situation that exacerbates the housing
shortage and threatens the existence of the Arab community.
“When you
bring such expensive residential projects to Ajami, which is the poorest of 60
neighborhoods in Tel Aviv-Jaffa, when you make this gentrification, the
political result is you are expelling the Arabs, whether you are planning it or
not. If you are using weapons or using economic means, the results are the same.
Here there are Arabs, the next decade there won’t be.”
“People in Jaffa
are certain that all of these policies are being carried out for racist reasons…
With the settlers project of B’emunah, with the gentrification, with the bad
planning of Ajami and Jaffa as a whole, all of this is bringing a strong feeling in the Arab community that this is a
big plan to transfer us out of Jaffa,” Abu Shehada said.
“People are
tense and feel afraid. I’m sorry to say it, but violence could
develop.”
While Abu Shehada said he wasn’t sure how many locals had left
Jaffa, “those who have left have moved to areas that are not up to the same
standard, they don’t have the same opportunities. Society is more open [in
Jaffa], less conservative, you are in the center of the country and you have
services and aren’t isolated.”
Tel Aviv city councilman Omar Siksik said
that he and others in Jaffa oppose the B’emunah project because it will bring to
Ajami “a group of people who are known for their extremism.”
Siksik would
not rule out ensuing tension resulting from the building project, saying
“everything is possible. A group like this comes to live in your
neighborhood on top of you and disrupts the type of life you’re used to living.
I’m certain a conflict will come at some point, it’s only a question of
when.”
Siksik said he doesn’t believe that residents can count on law
enforcement to protect them, but that residents “have the ability and the tools
to deal with these conflicts. I hope that the Jews who live in Jaffa will be
able to stop these people from being provocative, but we will use all the tools
we have.”
When asked if such tools could possibly include violence,
Siksik said “to defend my house, I’m willing to use all means at my disposal. We
didn’t come to bother their lives, they came to bother ours.”
Siksik’s
predictions pose a sharp contrast to those of B’emunah director-general Yisrael
Zeira, who said Sunday that he believes the 20 new families will only serve to
strengthen and enrich the neighborhood.
Zeira denied that the company
chose the project’s location out of a desire to displace or agitate the
neighborhood’s Arab residents; rather, that the location was chosen because it
was the cheapest of its kind the company could find in the Dan
region.
“They act like this is part of a Palestinian state. This is the
heart of Tel Aviv, only 300 meters from the Peres Center [for peace]… People who
are opposed to the project don’t have a problem when rich people come to Jaffa,
but when it’s religious Jews, it’s a problem. The people who are calling
us racist are the racists.”
Zeira said that the company is looking for
investors and land in Jaffa to build a much larger project for around 100
families. Like the current project in Jaffa, and other B’emunah projects already
built in Lod, Acre and Ramle, the Etrog Shuk project is meant to strengthen the
local Jewish community, and not at the expense of the local Arab
communities.
“WE CAME to strengthen the Jews in the neighborhood through
education and welfare. The welfare aspect is for everyone – if an Arab is
hungry, we’ll help him too.”
When asked why the project did not allow
Arab or secular Jewish buyers, Zeira said it was because “we have our way of
life to keep. We don’t want to have to tell people to observe Shabbat, or to
dress modestly.”
While Zeira said that none of the residents would speak
to the press while the Supreme Court was still considering the appeal against
the project, he did recommend speaking to B’emunah’s lawyer David Zeira, who has
bought one of the 20 units in the project, and also happens to be his
father.
Like his son, David Zeira dismissed contentions that the project
is racist, saying that “the issue is not over race, it’s over religion. There
are many neighborhoods in Israel that have a religious color to them. This is
not an issue of racism, or Arabs against Jews. It was on the basis of religion,
and that is why [the appeal against the project] did not succeed.”
Zeira
dismissed the commonly-held contention that the project will bring in a
population of young, ideologically-bent extremists from the settlements beyond
the Green Line, saying that to his knowledge, only “one or two families at most”
come from settlements. He said that other than himself and his wife, who are
nearing retirement, the rest of the buyers are couples in their thirties and
forties from across Israel looking to live a traditional Jewish life in an urban
environment near the heart of Tel Aviv.
Zeira said that he believes the
influx of a strong, motivated population “is also good for the Arabs in the
area. It will bring good people from good families who want to contribute and
give something to the community.
“This place and other places have a lot
of problems with poverty and bad schools, and there is a real opportunity for
people to come and contribute to the community and make it
stronger.”
David’s wife Dahlia, who like him is also from Tel Aviv,
echoed the sentiment, saying that “there’s a big community that wants to
contribute and help the area rise to a higher level.” David said that the
project also represented a great economic opportunity, with prices for units
going for about NIS 1,200,000, very cheap for the Tel Aviv area.
“Don’t
get the idea that we’re some sort of righteous people. This is an opportunity;
we know the prices in Jaffa will keep rising.”