2 - The ‘New Normal’

Summary

It is advisable to include the smallest possible number of Arab residents and the biggest possible number of Jewish residents in the Jewish state.

The transformation of Jaffa was rapid and revolutionary. A new Hebrew seal has been impressed over the old Arab landscape. It seems that a giant hand was rocking the city, awakening it into new life … in the streets the west has come to rule; it is lively, tumultuous and full of movement. The shops’ windows and commercial ads make it [the street] look completely European. Yet cast your eyes upward to the buildings’ upper stories and see the markers of an oriental city: shaded balconies, barred windows, and here and there old Arabic inscriptions, half faded, but their impression still remains.

History has not known a case more just and more obvious than this: A country is snatched from its people to be made into a national home for remnants of mankind who settle on it from the various regions of the world and who erected a state in it despite its inhabitants and the millions of their brethren in the neighboring regions. Despite the pure right of the Arab's case, the potentialities of their land, and the interests of other nations have in it … the Arabs stand alone in the international arena.

In May of 2013, while I was conducting fieldwork in Jaffa, hundreds of human remains were discovered in a mass grave at the local Muslim cemetery. As the news of the grim discovery circulated in the city, many residents turned to their elders for answers to the question on everyone's mind: who are those buried in these nameless tombs and how did they get there? The consensus reached by Palestinian historians, dignitaries and Islamic movement officials is that the remains should be traced back to 1948, to the period just before and following the fall of the city to Zionist forces and the mass exodus of its residents. While some of those bodies would have been of combatants, volunteers from as far as Bosnia and Iraq, the bulk of the dead would have been civilians, either buried alive under the ruins of their homes during the massive shelling or massacred by Zionist forces in the chaos that followed the occupation of the city.