A Tale of Two Cities: Yaffo and Yaffa

Image by Shai Pal on Unsplash

When I had the initial idea for Until the Walls Come Down, about a Jewish Israeli woman who discovers that her childhood home used to belong to her Palestinian husband’s family, I knew that house would be in Jaffa, just like my grandparents’ first Israeli home—the house my dad was born in. Over the first drafts, Tammar and her siblings evolved (mostly becoming less me and my siblings and more their own characters), but the Jaffa setting remained.

We’re not entirely sure where that Jaffa house stood. My grandparents are long gone, so are my dad and his middle brother, and my uncle—my dad’s eldest brother—was a child when my grandparents moved from Jaffa to an Amidar home (effectively a council estate) in Bat-Yam, a city just south of Jaffa, before my dad started school. But many Jewish families stayed and continue to live in Jaffa to this day. I wanted to connect my roots to the political systems I grew up with, especially after leaving Israel and coming to terms with the fact that my family’s safe haven came at the expense of another family’s tragedy.

As I noted at the end of the book, the pronunciation of places’ names in Israel/Palestine reveals your political convictions. Yaffa is the Arabic name for Jaffa, whereas in Hebrew, the pronunciation is Yaffo. The ancient city is mentioned in the Bible, most famously as the starting point of Jonah’s attempt to escape God’s mission.

I set the story in Ajammi not because it was where my grandparents’ house stood but because I felt the neighbourhood represented most starkly the systemic neglect that characterises the state’s treatment of Palestinian residents. Ajammi was, in effect, a concentration camp after the 1948 war, and Palestinian residents from Jaffa and neighbouring villages were forced to move into the neighbourhood. They were fenced in, and their homes—which were in some cases minutes’ walk from their refugee camp—were taken over by the state in their “absence”. The state settled Jewish immigrants in the emptied homes. These immigrants were Holocaust survivors and refugees, mostly from Europe—like my grandparents—but some from the Balkan and North Africa. When I talked with my uncle about his childhood, he mostly remembered the screaming at night coming from the neighbours who relived the horrors of Nazi Germany every night.

Soon after the war, in 1949, Jaffa’s martial law was removed mainly because there was little separation between Palestinian and Jewish residents. Jaffa was annexed to Tel-Aviv. Some houses were shared between Jewish and Muslim families who also shared food and raised each other’s children. The stark separation began in the 1970s and mostly after the 1973 war, which was traumatic for the Jewish residents of Israel.

Ajammi is, to this day, one of the poorest neighbourhoods in the Tel-Aviv-Jaffa municipality. When I walked around Ajammi with my guides in December 2021, what struck me most was the class chasm between neighbouring houses. Some newly refurbished, resplendent homes literally border houses that look like they’re about to fall down. Based on research I’ve read, the division is along nationality: rich Israeli Jews and poor Palestinians. It’s crucial to understand that most Palestinians living in Jaffa are Israeli citizens, which exposes the inherent systemic racism.

The jarring juxtaposition of houses in Ajammi is what drove me to set Until the Walls Come Down there—that, and the Kedem Street Bakery. On our tour, my guides, Einat and Hana, took me to the small, run-down building. With no storefront to speak of, we bought the mana’eesh and ate them in the car, and their smell and taste visit my dreams still.

I hoped that setting the story in Jaffa, and specifically in Ajammi, would convey the complexity of the situation in Israel/Palestine. There are no two sides to this conflict. There are as many sides as there are people, and they all live in close proximity, sharing daily life. Yaffo and Yaffa are two cities, but they are superimposed on each other, and disentangling them would come at a high cost. For me, I was always interested in how political and societal systems affect actual people, and that’s what I tried to do with this story.

My debut novel, Until the Walls Come Down, will be available in all bookstores on July 22nd. You can pre-order it here.