News flash. October 2023: Heavy air bombing of Jaffa Neighborhood in the Jabaliya Refugee Camp in Gaza. Hundreds killed, injured and missing. Tens of thousands are displaced southwards, toward Deir al-Balah.

News flash. May 1948: Heavy bombardment of the city of Jaffa, with many killed and injured. Tens of thousands of refugees are deported everywhere. Many of them towards Gaza. Most of the Jaffa refugees who arrived in Gaza eventually settled in a distinct area within the Jabaliya Refugee Camp established north of the city to house the Nakba survivors, temporarily. It became known as the Jaffa Neighborhood. Everything there is reminiscent of Jaffa. At her “temporary home” in the camp, not far from the Jaffa Supermarket and the Jaffa Mosque, 80-year-old Wajiha al-Harsh, a refugee from Jaffa, described the 1948 deportation in an interview with Nawa news agency journalist Hanan al-Rifi: “Mom was terrified. She threw us out of the house. We had to move fast. We left the house in panic. We didn’t know what was going on…. Eventually, we ended up here. More than seventy years went by… I’m afraid of dying before returning to beautiful Jaffa”.

A Virtual lecture and tour, via Zoom, about the history of Jaffa, the largest and most important city in pre-1948 Palestine Jaffa – its occupation and ethnic cleansing.

The virtual tour starts from its northernmost neighborhood, al-Manshiyya, and passes through the Hassan Bek Mosque, the Clock Square at the center of the city, the Old City, the Jaffa Port and the neighborhoods of al-‘Ajami and al-Jabaliyya. Using photos, maps and documents, the tour paints a picture of the life in the city before the Nakba, the Zionist takeover, and the subsequent processes of its Judaization and Israelization. Throughout the tour, we address the similarities and dissimilarities between Jaffa and Gaza in different periods and contexts, then and today.

Lecturer and presenter: Umar al-Ghubari, Zochrot.