Middle East Desk
Report
Tel Aviv: Gentrification in Tel Aviv’s historic port town Jaffa is being used by Israel as a tool to push the Arab population out of the area to make way for rich Israelis and foreigners, in another example of discriminatory policies aimed at demographic engineering.
A turreted former Catholic girl’s school in Jaffa is being transformed into an exclusive Soho House club. Around the corner, a historic ex-convent is now a five-star hotel. Across the street, the glittering towers of the Andromeda Hill luxury residences overlook the Mediterranean.
But farther down Yefet Street, working-class Arabs of Jaffa’s Ajami neighborhood face a starkly different reality. With housing prices out of reach, discontent over the city’s rapid transformation into a bastion for Israel’s ultra-wealthy is reaching a boiling point. The crisis has taken on nationalistic overtones, with some Arab residents accusing the government of trying to push them out to make way for Jews.
“Ninety percent of people here barely make a living, from hand to mouth, they don’t have enough to eat,” said Jaffa resident Ibrahim Tartir. “For a young man looking to get married, it’s 5,000, 6,000 shekels ($1,800) for rent, not including water and electricity and the rest. How much does he earn? 6,000 a month. How can he live?”
Jaffa, the historic port at the core of the greater Tel Aviv metropolis, is home to around 20,000 Arab residents, remnants of the Palestinian population that lived there before Israel’s establishment in 1948. The district has undergone extensive gentrification in recent decades with government encouragement.
That trend has accelerated in the past several years as real estate prices have skyrocketed amid surging demand. As wealthy Israelis and foreigners move from other areas of Tel Aviv into Jaffa, its mostly working-class Arab residents have been pushed out. This has added ethnic tensions to an economic phenomenon familiar in other cities around the world.
“We’re reaching a point where Arab people can’t buy houses unless they are very rich,” said Youssef Masharawi, a Jaffa native and professor of physical therapy at Tel Aviv University. He said young Arabs in Jaffa have nowhere to go, unable to afford to start families in their hometown and facing discrimination in nearby Israeli cities with overwhelmingly Jewish populations.
The stress is starting to reach a breaking point.
Long smoldering tensions erupted last week after the rabbi and director of a pre-military religious seminary in the predominantly Arab neighborhood of Ajami were assaulted by two Arab residents while visiting an apartment for sale. Moshe Schendowich, chief executive of the Meirim B’Yafo seminary, was injured in the incident. He said that while there have been some disagreements with Arab neighbors, those conflicts “should be solved with speech, with talking, not with violence.”
Although the seminary says it isn’t out to push anyone out, some residents view it with suspicion. Its head rabbi is a former West Bank settler and was formally affiliated with Ateret Cohanim, a group that takes over Arab properties in Jerusalem to make way for Jewish settlers.
