Lecture: From Palestinian cities to [non-]mixed cities

By: Umar al-Ghubari, Director of Space for Return at “Zochrot” 

The lecture was given as part of the Change Leaders in Mixed Cities course, Cycle 7, Session No. 5

Date: 22.12.23

Umar gave a fascinating lecture which he prepared especially for our course. The lecture outlines the formation of the nationally-mixed cities from the perspective of the 1948 Nakba. To begin with, Umar introduced us to the story of the Palestinian cities and told us of their development as central cities in the Palestinian landscape – centers of culture, identity, commerce and more. The historical Palestinian cities are: Yaffa, Haifa, Bisan, Al-Quds, Majdal, Safed, Tiberias, Bir al-Seba, Lyd, and Ramla. Umar told us of the Ottoman Empire’s support in the growth and development of the cities, and highlighted the shift that took place after World War I, with the Balfour Declaration. After that, the British backed and politically acknowledged the Zionist movement at the expense of the Palestinians. Moreover, Umar mentioned that even as early as the Balfour Declaration, Zionists started talking about the destruction of the Palestinian city. According to them, the Palestinian city needed to be removed from people’s consciousness, and then it had to be physically removed. The most important Palestinian cities were occupied even before the establishment of the State of Israel and almost all of their residents were expelled – in some cities all the residents were deported, and in others only a very small minority (a few hundreds or thousand people) were left.

Umar recounted some specific stories regarding these Palestinian cities. One example is Jerusalem. In 1948, the city was seized, and all its residents were displaced from the area now considered West Jerusalem. While today some consider Jerusalem to be a mixed city, this is only due to the 1967 occupation, during which the city’s municipal borders were expanded to include Palestinian villages in its territory. If they had not done so, its fate would have been like that of Safed or Tiberias – today an entirely Jewish city, completely emptied of its Palestinian inhabitants. In addition, Haifa and Tiberias are the only cities that were truly “mixed cities” before ‘48, in the sense that the population composition was half Jewish and half Arab until 1948. All Arabs were expelled from Tiberias and most of them were expelled from Haifa. Majdal is another interesting case, because some 1000 Palestinians remained there in 1948, yet were expelled by the Israeli military in 1950. This to say that Majdal – now known as Ashkelon – could have been one of the “classic” mixed cities if not for the additional deportation in 1950.

After the occupation in 1948, the displacement and the prevention of refugees’ return, Israel decided to concentrate the remaining Palestinian residents in the cities in ghettos: the state concentrated Palestinians in a small and fenced area of the cities, for about two years. Palestinians were not allowed to leave the area without special permission, and their original properties were taken from them – either destroyed or settled by Jews.

To this day, there is no official government definition of what constitutes a mixed city. The tendency is to define a mixed city as a city where Jews and Arabs both live. Over the years, and according to this definition, additional cities were added to this group – Beer Sheva, Karmiel, Nof HaGalil and more. But Umar claims that the “classic” or “original” mixed cities are actually cities that went through the trauma of ethnic cleansing in 1948 in which not all of their residents were deported. Although the definition “mixed city” can sound pleasant and positive, it hides the trauma of deportation, dispossession, and oppression. A trauma that is still very much alive. This trauma was clearly felt, for example, in the events of May 2021 in the “classic” mixed cities. The residents of these cities went through a trauma that never received recognition and therefore is bound to erupt again and again.