Raneen Jeries

Some one hundred people participated on Saturday, April 24, 2010, in Zochrot’s tour of Yafa’s (Jaffa) demolished Manshiyyah neighborhood, today part of Tel Aviv’s seafront.  Residents of Manshiyyah joined the tour and led the large group, this time not among the ruined buildings but over the “dunes” of Charles Clore Park that covered the rubble of the shoreline neighborhood.

The tour began in the demolished Al Rashid neighborhood, which until 1948 separated Yafa from Al Manshiyyah.  One of the few remnants of the neighborhood was “preserved and reconstructed,” and in 1983 became the Amichai Gidi Etzel Museum (Gidi was the Etzel’s operations officer), in commemoration of those who conquered the neighborhood.

Abu El-Sa’id, one of those uprooted from Manshiyyah, who today lives in Yafa’s Ajami neighborhood, recalled his old neighborhood emotionally.  “I was born in Manshiyyah,” he said, “I went to school here and when I grew up my brother and I opened a butcher shop in the Carmel Market, where we worked.  Manshiyyah was a living, thriving neighborhood, well-developed, with many shops and markets, lively by day and night…a neighborhood that never stopped.”

We continued north from Al Rashid along the shore.  We stopped in the middle of the park, surrounded by many people, Jews and Arabs, who had come to relax and walk along the shore.  We erected a sign reading “Hassan Beq Street,” which began in the middle of the park and ended at the Hassan Beq mosque.

We listened to Sharif Turq tell about his mother, Iftahar Turq.  She’s very sick and couldn’t join the tour, but made sure to send Sharif and Rif’at, her two sons, to recount her sad and moving story.  Sharif told us about the property and the buildings that his mother’s family had owned before they were expelled from Manshiyyah.  He recounted how his mother had been driven out of Manshiyyah six times during the war, and how she and her family had been saved and managed to reach Yafa’s Ajami neighborhood.

From Hassan Beq Street we continued north, stopping opposite what had been, before the nakba, Bides Hill, the site today of the Hilton Panorama hotel.  Majdolin Bides told about her family and the house they had built on the hill, so large it was called a palace.  Both her parents had been born in the village of Sheikh Muwanis (today the site of Tel Aviv University), where they lived until 1948, and then moved to Al Manshiyyah.  They were then expelled to Al Lid (Lod), where they lived until their deaths.

‘I’athdal Alqassam, a member of the nakba’s second generation who lives in Lod, participated in the tour together with her friends, and emotionally told the story of her mother who had been expelled from the neighborhood and still finds it difficult today to revisit its ruins.

We continued north, past the Hassan Beq mosque, and reached the Dan bus terminal opposite Gan HaKovshim.  Abu El Sa’id showed us where his home had been.  We erected a sign, “The home of  Salah Masri,” (Abu El Sa’id).  He had been born in 1927 in the house that stood there, and had been expelled in 1948 along with this mother and brothers and some 15,000 additional residents of the neighborhood.  “My house was here,” he said, “where the Dan bus terminal is located, next to Hassan Beq mosque.  After we had been expelled from our home my family and I walked toward Yafa.  We had gone about 50 meters when we looked back and saw the house going up in flames.”  He pointed toward the Hilton hotel and said that his father was buried in the cemetery on which they built the hotel.

Rif’at Turq, Iftahar’s son, recounted how his family’s nakba, that had begun in 1948, has continued until today, with a demolition order his mother received from the municipality ordering her to demolish a number of rooms in their home which had supposedly been built “illegally.”  Rif’at pointed out that others had also received similar orders.  The homes of hundreds of families in Ajami are threatened by demolition orders.  Many of them are displaced refugees from 1948.

The tour’s participants were given the publication, “Remembering Al Manshiya – Yafa,” that had been prepared for the occasion.  The refugees were given many copies of the booklet to send to refugees from Al Manshiyyah who had been exiled from their land and now live in Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Gaza and elsewhere in the world.  A few of the expellees became internal refugees; today they live in Yafa’s Ajami neighborhood, in Lod, Ramla and Nazareth, but are prevented from returning to their neighborhood and reclaiming their property.