Ajami

The name is older than the neighbourhood. Ajami is named for Ibrahim al-Ajami, who in Muslim tradition was among the companions of the Prophet Muhammad and who is held to have been buried south of the area. The mosque built over his shrine in 1895, by Haj Yousef al-Manawi, carries his name and stands in the northern part of the quarter beside the Hassan Arafeh public school. Its status as waqf property was later annulled under Israel's absentee property law, which is the short version of a long argument.

The neighbourhood itself dates from the middle of the nineteenth century, when Maronite Christian families with money began building outside the walled town on streets set parallel to the water. In 1895 Father Antonios Shbeir Ghostaoui established a church and monastery on 1,600 square metres of ground; between 1901 and 1920 that was replaced by a larger building, whose first stone was laid at a ceremony on 28 February 1904. The church stands at the southern tip of Dolphin Street and is a working parish rather than a visitor attraction.

The building type is the point. Houses went up in kurkar, with high ceilings, arched openings and a walled courtyard, and the size of the courtyard told you what the family was worth. Jaffa's walls were demolished in 1879, which released the pressure inside the old town and pushed building outward; by 1924 Ajami held something like 950 houses. Poorer residents arrived in the early twentieth century and built simpler structures in the gaps, which is why the street frontage switches between a merchant's villa and a single-storey house within a few metres.

Yefet Street is the spine, running north to south with the Old City at its head. Tabeetha School, founded in 1863 and run by the Church of Scotland, has been at number 21 since long before the state existed and still takes children of any nationality or religion. It is a useful reminder that the quarter was never only Maronite, and never only Arab.

• 1879: Jaffa's walls demolished, and building spreads south
• 1895: the al-Ajami mosque built over the shrine, and a Maronite church and monastery founded on 1,600 sq m
• 28 February 1904: first stone of the larger Maronite church
• By 1924: roughly 950 houses in the quarter
• 1863: Tabeetha School founded on Yefet Street by the Church of Scotland

Britannica records that the Irgun Zvai Leumi attacked Jaffa on 26 April 1948 and that on 13 May the city was securely under the control of Jewish paramilitaries, with nearly all of its 70,000 Arab Muslims and Christians displaced in the battle. Those who stayed were moved into Ajami and held under military government. The English-language Wikipedia article on Jaffa puts the end of that military administration at 1 June 1949.

How many stayed is genuinely disputed, and the disagreement is worth stating rather than smoothing over. Britannica gives 4,000, concentrated in the Ajami neighbourhood south of the old city. Wikipedia's article on Jaffa gives 3,800, subject to strict martial law. Its article on Ajami gives roughly 3,000, against an estimated displacement of about 90 per cent of the city. The three accounts describe the same event and differ by a third, so a page that prints one figure and calls it the answer is overstating what is known.

The mechanics of the concentration are documented in blunter language than tour guides tend to use. Palestinians were moved into Ajami, which was ringed by Jewish quarters; officials proposed enclosing it with a barbed-wire fence that would rigorously separate the Arab neighbourhood from the Jewish section; residents needed special permits to pass the wire. Wikipedia's account calls the result a sealed-off ghetto. That is its characterisation, not a neutral term, and it is the term the sources on the period use.

The property law is what fixed the arrangement in place. Under a 1950 absentee property law, according to Associated Press reporting carried by The Times of Israel in 2021, the Israeli government confiscated thousands of empty properties and handed them to state-run public housing companies. Arab residents who had stayed ended up as tenants in those buildings, which is why a dispute over who owns a house in Ajami can start in 1948 and still be live this year.

Most of what looks nineteenth-century in Ajami is nineteenth-century. The quarter was not rebuilt as a theme of itself in the way the Old City above it was, and the villas, courtyard walls and arched windows on the streets between Yefet and the sea are the real thing, in varying states of repair. What is missing is the rest of them.

The Hebrew account of the neighbourhood is precise about how they went. In the 1950s the authorities settled on demolition and reconstruction as the policy for Ajami. From the 1970s the housing authority stopped renovating houses and stopped moving new tenants in, and demolished each building as it emptied. The vacant lots scattered through the quarter are the result, and they are the single most reliable way to read the last seventy years off the streetscape.

The reversal came in the 1980s, when the municipality recognised the quarter's historical and architectural value and drew up a conservation plan. Restoration since then has been thorough and expensive, and it is the reason a visitor now sees polished stone, new shutters and a Land Rover in a courtyard where the same house stood derelict in 1985. It is also the reason the argument in the section below exists at all.

The one unambiguously new landmark is on the shore: the Peres Center, designed by the Italian architect Massimiliano Fuksas, 2,500 square metres of glass and concrete opened in December 2009 on the Ajami seafront. Whatever is thought of it, it is honest about its date, which is more than can be said for a good deal of reconstruction elsewhere in Jaffa.

For most of living memory Ajami could not see the water it was built to face. The shore below the neighbourhood was used as a tip for construction waste: the Hebrew article on the quarter dates the dumping from 1975 and describes a mound about 15 metres high that separated the houses from the sea, while the Hebrew article on the park dates the tipping to late 1969 and records the beach erosion and environmental damage that followed. The two accounts differ on the start date by six years and agree on everything that matters.

The park laid over that mound is Midron Yafo, the Jaffa slope. It covers 200 dunams, roughly 20 hectares, and runs from the port north of the quarter down to the Givat Aliya beach at its southern end. It was designed by the Braudo-Maoz landscape architecture practice, begun in December 2005 at the initiative of the mayor Ron Huldai, largely finished in 2008 and formally inaugurated on 30 April 2010 after delays caused by drought and irrigation restrictions. The cost is given as about 60 million shekels.

What was built is a set of paths rather than a garden: routes running north to south and others dropping east to west from the neighbourhood to the shoreline promenade, three viewpoints with an amphitheatre, a sports and recreation area, planting, shaded spots and a car park. It works better as a way to the sea than as a destination in itself, and it is where the local population actually is on a Friday afternoon.

Two practical points follow from what it is made of. The planting is young by the standards of Mediterranean parks, so shade is patchy and the sea wind does most of the cooling; and the whole thing is a slope, because the ground under it is a made mound. Neither is a reason to skip it. Both are reasons to go late in the day.

• 200 dunams, from Jaffa Port to the Givat Aliya beach
• Designed by Braudo-Maoz landscape architecture
• Work began December 2005; largely complete 2008
• Inaugurated 30 April 2010, at a cost given as about ₪60 million
• Three viewpoints, an amphitheatre, a shoreline promenade, sports area and car park

The best-known address in Ajami is a hummus counter. Abu Hassan, on HaDolphin Street, was opened in the early 1970s by Ali Karawan, who had sold hummus from a cart and made an unsuccessful first attempt at a shop in 1959. The menu is short: hummus, masabacha, ful medames, labaneh, and the mixed plate that combines them. Its reputation rests on the food and on the room, where labourers, tourists, Arabs and Jews share cramped tables, and on the queue that forms at the door around midday.

The quarter also gave its name to a film. Ajami, directed by Scandar Copti and Yaron Shani and released in 2009, was shot here with a cast largely of non-professionals who lived in the neighbourhood. It was the first predominantly Arabic-language film Israel submitted for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and it was nominated. Nobody runs location tours for it, and after watching it most people find they do not want one.

The live argument is about housing. Associated Press reporting from 2021 quotes residents describing rents of 5,000 to 6,000 shekels a month against a salary of 6,000, and traces the pressure to a policy from 2011 of selling off the state-owned properties: the housing company Amidar says it has no intention of expelling anyone and offers homes to sitting tenants first at a significant discount, while residents say the discount is still beyond low-income families and that developers buy what tenants cannot. Wikipedia's account of the quarter records some 497 eviction and demolition orders issued by Amidar against residents of Ajami and neighbouring Jabaliyya.

Alongside that, and older than the current phase of it, the Arab-Jewish Community Center has run in the quarter since 1993, organising encounters between Jaffa's different communities and age groups. Ajami is a mixed neighbourhood in the strict sense: the people arguing about it live on the same streets. A visitor walking through is walking through a dispute, and the appropriate behaviour is the ordinary one of somebody in a residential street they do not live on.