Jaffa

 History matters, especially in conflicts where national narratives selectively weaponise memory.

Jaffa was a major Arab city before 1948, and many Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled during the war. That is part of its history and should not be erased or minimised.

Yet there are populist and ahistorical narratives that present Jaffa as some timeless “ancient Palestinian city”. Jaffa is one of the oldest cities in the eastern Mediterranean. It has Canaanite, Egyptian, Jewish, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Crusader, Ottoman and British Mandate layers. In Greek mythology, Jaffa is tied to the myth of Andromeda and Perseus. After Alexander, it passed through the Hellenistic kingdoms before later becoming part of the Roman and Byzantine eastern Mediterranean.

The city came under Arab-Islamic rule after the 7th-century conquest of the Levant. Over time, through settlement, conversion, language change, trade, local continuity and Ottoman-era urban growth, Jaffa became an Arab-majority city. That is its history. It does not make it an exclusively Arab or Palestinian city “from antiquity”.

Framing it this way also erases the actual context of 1947-48: the civil war after the UN partition vote, attacks and counterattacks between Arab and Jewish militias, the rejection of partition by Arab and Palestinian leadership, and then the invasion by surrounding Arab states after Israel declared independence. The Nakba is what emerged from that war. At roughly the same historical moment, ancient Jewish communities across much of the Middle East and North Africa were themselves expelled, destroyed or forced into flight, with many eventually resettling in Israel.

Some people also invoke Jaffa to misrepresent the EU position regarding textbooks. European criticism of Palestinian textbooks is not about Palestinians mentioning Jaffa. The documented concerns are about antisemitic material, glorification of violence, and maps that erase Israel entirely. These criticisms are valid.

Attempts to collapse centuries of layered history and a complex modern conflict into a single uninterrupted morality tale with only one actor and one source of agency are propaganda. History is more complicated than that.  And unless one gets the history right, one risks misdiagnosing both the conflict and its possible solutions.