I recently helped build a Sukkah for the first time in my life. It might sound odd, but I was brought up to mark Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Hannukah and Pesach but somehow Sukkot was missed out. A group of us built our Sukkah at Friends Meeting House, with fragrant fresh greenery brought from people’s gardens. Weirdly, it was an indoor Sukkah, but it looked great.
Constructing our Sukkah marked the start of a series of events organised by local Jewish people who are against Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Next was a virtual tour about the history of Jaffa, which piqued my interest because I lived in Jaffa several decades ago.
Back then, I worked for an Arab–Jewish organisation, Friendship’s Way, mostly teaching English to children at a lively after-school club. Motti Golan set up the organisation with Jewish and Arab Israelis, alongside international volunteers, because, as he commented, ‘somebody’s got to do something to improve the miserable lot of the Arab residents of Jaffa, especially their children.’[1] Much of the Arab-Israeli community lived in the run-down neighbourhood of Al-Ajami.
At the time, I didn’t know about the links between Jaffa and Gaza, although I recall that I lived on Rehov Aza – which should have provided a clue. Listening to the talk by Umar al-Ghubari from Zochrot, I learnt that the vast majority of around 70,000 Palestinian residents of Jaffa were forced to flee during the war of 1948. Not everyone was able to leave: the elderly, the sick and the poor didn’t have the means to move, and some decided to stay in their homes come what may.[2] These remaining 4,000 Palestinians were moved to the Al-Ajami area.
Large numbers who fled Jaffa ended up in Gaza, gathered in an area of Jabaliya refugee camp that became known as the Jaffa Neighbourhood. They made great efforts to make the district feel a little like their hometown, for example, by constructing a Jaffa supermarket and a Jaffa mosque. And there they and their descendants stayed for more than 70 years. Following the terrorist attacks of 7 October 2023, reprisals against Gaza included the bombing of the Jaffa Neighbourhood, and residents were displaced once again. For me, hearing how they had to escape and seek temporary shelter elsewhere in some way recalled the story of Sukkot.
[1] https://fee.org/articles/a-reviewers-notebook-israels-dilemma/
[2] https://storiesfrompalestine.info/2021/04/12/jaffa-part-2/