Palestinians in Jerusalem and Jaffa, 1948: A Tale of Two Cities by Itamar Radai (review)

Itamar Radai’s microhistory of the experiences of the Palestinians in Jerusalem and Jaffa in the closing months of the British Mandate of Palestine is a scholarly and informed comparative study. The focus is narrow but the book’s significance is broad, and it augments our understanding of how and why the Nakba, “the catastrophe,” unfolded for the Palestinians. Palestinians in Jerusalem and Jaffa is rich in detail on the Palestinian community, based on excellent use of Arabic sources. Radai avoids taking sides in the polarized literature on 1948, but his conclusions reflect poorly on the Palestinian middle class, who fled the shock of war. The book’s human and engaged text vividly brings to life Palestinians’ lives and their struggle to remain in their homes as Palestine went to war from late 1947.

Radai’s thesis is that prior to 1948, Jaffa, as a coastal port city open to international trade, had changed and become more “modern,” accepting waves of migrant workers from the Hawran region in southern Syria, and growing an indigenous, prosperous (often Christian) Arab middle class. The migrants (making up 70% of the Arab population in 1946) were poor, alienated, and marginal, figuratively and literally, living in cardboard shantytowns in Jaffa’s vulnerable peripheral areas that abutted neighboring Jewish settlements such as Tel Aviv. The new middle class was alienated in different ways, more interested in preserving its newly found wealth than fighting the common Jewish enemy. The result in 1948 was disaster:

Jaffa’s characteristics as a coastal city, and the social change it was experiencing, seem to have contributed to its downfall … it had attracted large numbers of villagers, who lived in alienation from the established urban society and remained unorganized among themselves … this large population suffered from high unemployment. The wealthy and the middle class largely opposed the war … Their exodus from Jaffa considerably weakened the city (p. 177).

Thus, modernity equaled weakness. Jerusalem was different; geographically isolated in the mountainous interior, conservative, and religious, it was less affected by change and was more cohesive and better able to withstand the shock of war. Thus Jaffa collapsed and was taken over on the eve of the declaration of the State of Israel, leaving only 3,000 Palestinian residents from a population of over 70,000, while Jerusalem survived the loss of the mixed, western portions to Zionist forces in early 1948 and Palestinians remained in the Old City and eastern districts, escaping total collapse.

Radai situates his analysis within theories of mountain versus coastal cities, between orthogenetic cities based on venerable traditions and heterogenetic littoral ports with their melting pots of modernization and rational economic norms: Alexandria, Port Sa‘id, Beirut, Tripoli, and Haifa versus Cairo, Fez, Nablus, and Damascus. Radai’s dissection of the Palestinians’ societal and political structures in Jerusalem and Jaffa emphasizes internal dynamics as the root cause for the Palestinians’ downfall. This creates a useful paradoxical tension, as Radai simultaneously details resistance and intense organization that suggest victory, while taking the reader on a journey to disaster for the Palestinians, even in Jerusalem where Zionist militias still displaced tens of thousands of people and captured swathes of territory in the western portions of the city.

The collapse of Palestinian neighborhoods was cumulative not sudden, despite the arrival of irregular forces to fight the Jews. In middle-class Katamon, the “population’s bourgeois values and way of life, alongside its practice of relying on the British authorities to defend them, led to a lack of will and ability to take part in the war effort” (p. 107). Small defeats wore down morale, as when a stray bullet killed the donkey of the milk seller (p. 66) and thus ended milk deliveries. War traumatized local children, with loud noises disturbing them, “even the slamming of a door” (p. 68). Schools closed and normal life shut down. Richer civilians opposed Palestinian forces firing back, worried that their houses would become...