Twilight Nationalism

Politics of Existence at Life's End

Daniel Monterescu, Haim Hazan

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781503605640
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

The city of Jaffa presents a paradox: intimate neighbors who are political foes. The official Jewish national tale proceeds from exile to redemption and nation-building, while the Palestinians' is one of a golden age cut short, followed by dispossession and resistance. The experiences of Jaffa's Jewish and Arab residents, however, reveal lives and nationalist sentiments far more complex. Twilight Nationalism shares the stories of ten of the city's elders—women and men, rich and poor, Muslims, Jews, and Christians—to radically deconstruct these national myths and challenge common understandings of belonging and alienation.

Through the stories told at life's end, Daniel Monterescu and Haim Hazan illuminate how national affiliation ultimately gives way to existential circumstances. Similarities in lives prove to be shaped far more by socioeconomic class, age, and gender than national allegiance, and intersections between stories usher in a politics of existence in place of politics of identity. In offering the real stories individuals tell about themselves, this book reveals shared perspectives too long silenced and new understandings of local community previously lost in nationalist narratives.

PART I

SUNSET

CHAPTER 1

BESIEGED NATIONALISM

Fakhri Jday and the Decline of the Elites

Under siege, time turns into a place

that has petrified into its own eternity.

Under siege, a place turns into time

that has missed its term.

Mahmoud Darwish, “State of Siege”

Day in and day out, Fakhri Jday leaves his home and walks to the pharmacy that his father built in the early twentieth century. There, he serves customers from all sections of Jaffaite society, and he is their undisputed medical authority. Yet a dark shadow looms over his daily bourgeois routine of regular working hours, an afternoon siesta, and the reading of Arabic and English daily newspapers. Born in 1926, Jday is the sole scion of the old Palestinian elite, and he proudly fulfills the role of samed, a Palestinian steadfastly rooted in the land. The central theme of his story is encapsulated in his motto, “Power cannot suppress free will.” This motto reflects his refusal to surrender to the prevalent trend toward “Israelization” among Israeli Palestinians in the face of demands that they accept the yoke of citizenship and kowtow to the state. His story is one of prolonged struggle, which made him a living symbol for the Arabs of Jaffa.

Jday is the starting point of the twilight of nationalism because he is emblematic of the hegemonic ensnarement of nationalism: uncompromising insistence on his national identity and a clear-sighted depiction of the national tragedy, agents of betrayal, and ultimate loss of direction. We interviewed him in his luxurious home, which affords a view of a private orchard. The orchard, by its very existence and its anachronistic, heavily contoured, and foreboding design, defies the passing of time, the disappearance of the old elite, and Jday’s splendid isolation.¹

Fakhri Jday is a tragic hero. In Jaffa he is perceived as a national symbol, a residue of a former social class, and a one-man urban pedestal. He portrays himself as having lived under protracted siege ever since 1948, “in a time that has missed its term,” as Mahmoud Darwish writes. For thirty years Jday was the only academic in Jaffa, and his national identity became the focal point of his public life. He was crowned the spiritual father of the generation of educated Palestinians who emerged in the 1970s and was one of the founders of the nationalist al-Ard movement² and later the Association of Jaffa’s Arabs.³ He is regarded as the community’s most eloquent and assertive nationalist spokesperson, and, as such, he is frequently interviewed by the international press and regularly writes articles for the local Jaffa newspaper.

And yet, during our interview, Jday articulates a critical and bitter narrative quite different from the nationalist pan-Arab discourse we had expected. He levels severe criticism against both the state and the Arab bourgeoisie and national and local politicians. As seen in this chapter, the dominant theme in the narrative of the community’s icon is one of estrangement and loss of direction. Jaffa’s last aristocrat mourns the loss of the Palestinian city and its erstwhile flourishing bourgeoisie and culture. His story simultaneously voices the community’s official and “authentic” discourse and the cracks in it that cannot be repaired.

I Would Stroll Around the Streets and Weep for Jaffa

Jday’s life is locked in a permanent bind between being an essentially conservative and law-abiding bourgeois citizen and being an Arab nationalist who offers a radical critique of Israeli society as well as his own. This apparent paradox leads him to adopt a principled standpoint and to reject any pragmatic measure that would require him to forgo his demand to restore his stolen land and national values. At the same time, however, he leads the normative life of a citizen who pays taxes to the state responsible for the ruin of his people. It is this tension that turns Jday’s story into a tragic account of alienation and frustration, of a losing battle against a fate dictated by overwhelming and insurmountable forces. Jday’s story, however, is completely devoid of any tone of victimhood or self-pity. His disillusionment and sense of betrayal are manifest in a bitter narrative that lashes out in all directions. Like old Samed ‘abd al-Baqi al-Maslub in Gabi ‘Abed’s show, Jday begins his tale by describing Jaffa’s heyday before the Israeli occupation, underscoring Jaffa’s key role in the Palestinian national project.

BEFORE 1948 Jaffa was the foremost city in all Palestine in every respect. At the national level, most public figures who defended the Palestinian cause hailed from Jaffa. I know them because they were my father’s attorneys. My father owned a pharmacy on Bustros [currently Razi’el] Street, in partnership with Dr. Fuad al-Dajani, near the Clock Tower, and on February 24, 1924, my father opened the pharmacy here in ‘Ajami. In 1945 I traveled to Beirut to study pharmacy. From my class in Jaffa, four or five went to [study in] Cairo, four or five to Baghdad, but the majority [went] to Beirut. They studied at the Lebanese university [al-Jami‘a al-Wataniya] or at the American or French university. I studied at the French university. I graduated in 1950 and returned to Jaffa on October 15 of that year. I returned at a time when the Family Reunion Law was still in force. I was the last one to come back, and then they closed [the country to returnees]. My father, mother, and brother were here. There was still martial law in Jaffa.

Because Jday was not in Jaffa during the 1948 war, the transition back to the city was abrupt, and the disparity between the Jaffa he remembered from his youth and the Jaffa he found upon his return was sharp and painful. Jaffa’s mythical construction as the Bride of Palestine forms the leitmotif of his life story; in comparison, contemporary Jaffa as experienced today is nothing but a forlorn and miserable mirror image.

The reality to which the young pharmacist returned in 1950 was sobering, if not shattering: a ghost town populated by a depleted community. And at home he was confronted with the family dilemma of whether he should remain in the “abandoned city” (al-madina al-mahjura). Most of the city’s wealthy families had been forced to leave during the war, and many chose to emigrate after it ended, but the Jday family decided to stay on the insistence of Fakhri’s sister and ailing mother. Upon his return, Jday’s father put him in charge of the family pharmacy, which he has been diligently managing to this day.

I STILL HAD a vivid mental image of Jaffa built up and full of people, and when I arrived only 3,200 people remained. I would stroll around the streets and weep for Jaffa. Everybody left, all the people you knew, families, friends. Why had I come? What kind of life was that? When I arrived, I found my mother ill. They told me, “Where will you go and leave us behind?” My father considered leaving, but my mother and sister wouldn’t have it. They told him, “Go if you want to. We’re staying.”

Young Fakhri and his father considered leaving but nevertheless stayed at the mother’s side. Jday never ceases to ponder that choice in the course of his narrative, particularly in the context of chance meetings with friends from his time in Beirut and with his brothers, who settled in London and the United States. Images of bygone Jaffa constantly haunt his dreams. These memories generate painful reflections, giving him reason to question whether his personal sacrifice was justified. His life as a nationalist middle-class student in the city of his youth in no way resembles his life today. Jday laments the loss as he compares his life to that of his brothers.

HAD I KNOWN it would come to this, I would have left long ago. What am I doing here? I have friends who studied with me at Beirut University who now come to visit; Dr. al-Siri’s brother came and said to me, “Fakhri, what are you doing? What is this garbage dump you’re sitting in?” He said, “Look, I live in Chicago. I have four children. The boys study medicine, surgeons, and the girls are pharmacists. And I work six months of the year and for six months I travel the world.” We stayed with Dr. Abdallah Khoury, director of the French hospital in Jerusalem. In Beirut we had lived in the same room at the university. He too said to me, “What are you doing in Jaffa? Come and live here with us! Is there even a respectable club you can go to?” Before the Intifada we would go to Ramallah and Jerusalem to visit friends and talk to people. Not like the asses here! There’s no hope here.

Sometimes I sit here and I start thinking about the way the families used to be in those days. Where have they all gone? I sometimes dream of them at night. I used to live a certain kind of life, and now it’s a different life, as if one were living in paradise and the other on a garbage heap. Even when my brother had come back from America . . . He had left Jaffa in 1945 and went to study political economy, and then the war broke out and he stayed there and married there. He didn’t come here until 1979. When he saw Jaffa like this, he remonstrated with me: “How can you live in this dump?” Like that, he said, “dump.” He told me, “Sell up and come to us.” He intended to stay for a year, but he ran off after just three months.

We Owned 2,384 Dunams of Land, Which Were Requisitioned

Having described the family’s dilemma, Jday elaborates on the judicial apparatus that led to the expropriation of the family’s land. Whereas many families were forced out of their homes and into the fenced “ghetto,” the Jday family was able to remain in their home in ‘Ajami. Yet the fact that they continued to live there only blackened the shadow of absence and ultimately heightened Jday’s present sense of living in a futile time of limbo. “The cruelest thing that Israel did,” Jday confessed during the interview, “was to leave Arabs in Jaffa after 1948.”

NO ONE WAS LEFT after ’48. You would stroll around the city and feel as if it were abandoned. Those who lived a little farther away were moved to ‘Ajami, where they set up a fence. I arrived in October 1950, and they took down the fence in June I think. The purpose of martial law was to take the land. How were they to steal the land? They passed a law. You know, in Israel they can pass a law every 24 hours. Israel is a world leader in legislation. Any minor official can pass a law. They know how to steal land; every day there’s a new law. They tell you, “Okay, it’s your land,” and then they come up with a law: “If someone doesn’t cultivate his land for a month, it’s confiscated.” “OK, but I want to cultivate it. Give me a permit.” “That’s forbidden, military rule. If you set foot here, we’ll shoot you.” So how am I supposed to cultivate it? They canceled martial law in Jaffa earlier than in other parts of the country, because they had completed the job; they took whatever they wished. Anyone who had land, they requisitioned it.

Jday did not spotlight his personal victimhood but rather stressed his attempts to oppose the regime by taking responsibility for the outcomes of his own decisions.

BARAKAT had two citrus groves. He sold them and left; after all, they couldn’t stay and rebuild Jaffa because of martial law. Would they have allowed them to do so? The entire country was requisitioned. We owned 2,384 dunams [238.4 hectares] of land in Bat Yam which were requisitioned. In ’53 my father went there and saw that they were building there. They told him: “confiscated.” We had all the maps and the title deeds [kushan]. We appealed in court and it reached the HCJ [High Court of Justice], and it authorized the requisition. In 1939 the Jewish National Fund offered us a million Palestine pounds, at a time when in all of Palestine no one had half a million. My father refused to sell. Today it would be worth over a billion dollars. Where the [War] Monument stands today [in the center of Bat Yam], that’s our land.

Jday utterly repudiates the legitimacy of the state’s attempts to legalize the expropriation of his land, which, adding insult to injury, is now the home of a major war memorial in the neighboring Jewish city of Bat Yam. Having eventually lost all hope that the court would restore the land to its rightful owner, Jday contrasts the HCJ’s official seal with the heritage of Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasser, who during the 1950s and 1960s was regarded as the one who could liberate the Palestinians from Zionist occupation.

THEY CONFISCATED EVERYTHING from others in Jaffa as well. From Amin Andraus [one of the pre-1948 community’s leaders and a signatory to the city’s terms of surrender] they took the citrus grove and gave him a few pennies in return, and when he appealed to the court, they gave him 4,000 Israeli liras. He told them, “I don’t want them. You can throw them down the toilet. When Abu-Khaled comes, he’ll give me back my land.” The HCJ judge asked his attorney, “Who is this Abu-Khaled?” He told him, “Abu-Khaled is Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasser.” It’s recorded in the court minutes.

Although one might associate Jday with the sociological group that Rabinowitz and Abu-Baker (2005) call “the generation of survivors,” Jday refuses to defer.⁴ His story uses every opportunity to confront the establishment. Just the same, we consider him the harbinger of the stand-tall generation of young Palestinians who followed him. Perhaps this provides an indication that, despite what appears to be an intergenerational split, Palestinian national identity was alive already in the Nakba generation.⁵ The state’s control mechanisms, however, prevented it from manifesting and making itself readily available to ethnographic observation.

Divide and Rule

Jday’s proud national identity constitutes another arena of struggle against the state and the Zionist project. Even though the Palestinians have indeed suffered a crushing defeat, a high-horse nationalist identity has allowed some of them to stake out an uncompromising ideological position that delineates the boundaries of the collective and the Other. To Jday the story is an opportunity for signification that sustains his self-esteem.

IN THE PAST, had you asked someone, “What are you?” he would have replied, “A Palestinian.” No one would have replied otherwise. Were you to ask, “Where are you from?”—From Jaffa. But what are you?—Palestinian. That’s the most important thing, for the Palestinian was the most respected person in the entire Arab world. No one would say they were British. No one with any self-respect would have said this, or they would have thrown them out of town. Everyone hated the English. Also at the time of the Turks. I’m from Syria [al-Sham], I’m from Palestine. My father studied in Istanbul and served as a pharmacist in the Turkish army but would never identify himself as a Turk. Nowadays in Jaffa it’s the same story all over again. One finds in Jaffa scoundrels who say, “I’m a Christian,” “I’m a Muslim.” Whoever would have spoken like this back then? We never heard such things. It is only at the time of Israel that people began to say, I’m Christian, or Muslim, or Druze or Circassian or Bedouin. And who knows what the government would come up with in the future. Divide and rule. Before he died, Father used to say, “If anyone comes into our house and says I’m a Muslim or a Christian, throw him out.”

One by one, Jday rejects all the possible self-representations available to him over the years as manifestations of sectarian hypocrisy and an anti-Arab policy of divide and rule. There is only one identity he is willing to contemplate.

Why Is This Allowed to Jews but Prohibited to Arabs?

With his forthright and unequivocal identity, Jday portrays the relations between Jews and Arabs as a dire political struggle totally devoid of romant...