Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January/February 2016, pp. 28-29

Special Report

Palestinian Homes Abandoned in Nakba Attest To History of Haifa’s Wadi Salib Neighborhood

Story and photos by William Parry

To anyone familiar with Israel’s policies and practices in occupied Palestine and Israel itself there is little that is striking about its ethnic cleansing of Palestine—apart from how oblivious most Israelis are to it. Despite its simmering, systematic banality and barbarity, most Israelis seem to possess an uncanny knack for denying their history and present alike and simply get on with life.

But in Wadi Salib, a formerly affluent Palestinian neighborhood of Haifa, the wrongs of Israel’s past remain so prominently displayed that it is particularly unsettling. Driving into downtown Haifa from the north along the network of quick roads that lead to the city center, an entire, dilapidated neighborhood of handsome architecture and beautiful features faces the sea, and—to an outsider at least—one cannot but notice the absence that remains in their silent presence.

The city’s old center was all but destroyed in 1949 on instructions by David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, as the fledgling nation sought to rewrite history, says Johnny Mansour, a local authority who has written and spoken extensively about Haifa’s history. Following the Nakba, its Palestinian population plunged from 75,000 to 3,000, many fleeing for safety via the same port that had recently welcomed its new Jewish refugees, who had escaped the horrors of the Holocaust in Europe. A few old places of worship remain in what was the Old City, and beyond it, rising up Mount Carmel, rows of commercial buildings, several stone stairwells and the elegant homes of Wadi Salib. Today, the imposing Justice Building, shaped like a ship, points and juts into Wadi Salib, overshadowing a row of Ottoman buildings that were the headquarters of the governor of Haifa, Mustafa Pasha al Khalil, prior to the British Mandate. Indeed, Haifa District’s government headquarters are built on top of the administrative heart of the Old City, Mansour says.

One former resident, now aged 93, is Abdullatif Kanafani, whose family lived at 15 al Bourj Street, a prominent home overlooking the wadi (valley). He was 22 years old when the family—his mother and father, two brothers and their wives, and his sister—fled the shelling for safety in Acre, north of Haifa. From there, as shelling again closed in on them, the family fled to Lebanon and were never allowed to return home. Their home was seized as “absentee property,” a fate shared by many of the 700,000 Palestinians who were forced to abandon their homes and businesses during the Nakba.

“Like many others, we did not imagine our flight would turn into a diaspora,” Mr. Kanafani said from his Beirut home. “I remember the neighborhood’s every alley, having frolicked in and out of them as a lad.”

In 1949 the new Israeli government used the Palestinian homes in Wadi Salib to house poor Jewish Mizrahi immigrants from North Africa, promising to relocate them after a year or two. In 1959, amid poverty and over-population, the new residents of Wadi Salib rioted and the Mizrahi population was subsequently divided and resettled in other areas to quell the unrest. Since then, most of the homes and commercial buildings have been boarded up and the windows filled with concrete blocks or blanketed with metal sheets to discourage homeless people from sheltering in them—largely in vain. A few are leased to families as public housing.

Along what is now called Kibbutz Galuyot Street, many former Palestinian buildings are now used for a flea market, with stalls operated predominantly by Jewish Israeli proprietors. The street level bustles with bargain hunters and vendors haggling over “junque,” while the windows to the floors above—along with their history—remain boarded up.

Hemming in the wadi above and below are busy arteries used by cars and buses to get in and out of the center of Haifa. A new artists’ village and park are being built there, with an old Palestinian home at its heart. The homes and commercial buildings are an unmissable backdrop to daily life.

Like many former, thriving Palestinian neighborhoods throughout Israel, Wadi Salib is slowly being renovated, gentrified and populated by Jewish Israeli businesses, institutions and law firms, while their former owners live in forced exile, uncompensated. Mr. Kanafani’s home now houses a law firm.

His message to those who have “bought” his home is simple: “How would they feel if they were evicted from their homes?” Mr. Kanafani asked. “It is a terrifying, shattering experience.”

He has no hope for any justice today. “‘Injustice’? When it comes to the rights of the Palestine Arab, injustice is blatantly ignored. Done away with completely. The word does not exist in the Israeli vocabulary.”

William Parry is the author of Against the Wall: The Art of Resistance in Palestine (available from AET’s Middle East Books and More).