Travel restrictions in Jaffa: Freedom of movement and religion is questioned

Twice a week buses leave from the Gazans' Garden (Gan HaShnayim) in Jaffa for Jerusalem: people go there in order to pray in the Al Aqsa Mosque. Most of them, the very large majority in fact , are elderly devout women. After the prayers they take a walk through the Old City and return to Jaffa.

Today the police waited at the traditional bus stop and prevented the pilgrims from boarding the Jerusalem  bound bus and leaving Jaffa. So much for the freedom of religion in "the only democracy in the Middle East".

Chasing humans on the garbage-mountain, oops, in the Jaffa "Midron" park

Lately i have been taking early morning and late evening walks and runs in our brand new "midron park", usually topped of by a serious work-out in the open air free gym and a water drinking pause at the very end of the deck, above the huge evening waves crashing just below (and sometimes all over me, allowing for a salty cooling shower). During the cool eveing hours the northern, almost finished part of the park (which isn't open ye, but trust Jaffans to find a way in) many hang around, with fresh grapes, watermelon, drinks, surrounded by their kids running wild on the green grass ans sandy slopes. Thus, on my way back, there is always someone offering me a drink or sweet cool fruit.

Although not yet finished, the park is a true blessing, inspite of its sorry story, as it is also the grave of Palestinian Jaffa: When the Palestinian homes of Jaffa were demolished, their rubble was thrown on the Ajami beach, just south of the Jaffa harbour. Soon all kinds of junk followed the rubble. The underworld also quite loved the location for getting rid of suspicious "materials" of all kinds from cars used in robberies to body parts and drug stashes, weapons, explosives, you name it.

Thus, a huge rubble mountain was created, called "the garbage mountain". Only a very small part of the original beach was left; the "Jabaliyah beach, not known to most Tel Avivians.

The municipality intended to create an artifical piece of land and construct villas and other housing for the very well to do, in order to "uplift the level of the local population".

The Jaffa community, united for the first , them to court and won. The rest is history. A park was to be created, and a small part of the beach was restored as well.

And, the truth, the park is great. OK, there is a lot of water-using soft green grass (irrigated with de-salienated sea water, i have been told) but that makes for great picknicks and games. The open air gym is already popular, so for once, thanks, municipality, thanks mishlama. What started out as destruction , turned into some sort of a blessing.

But blessings is not what this story is all about.

The new homes of the ultra rich in Ajami, are being constructed by "illegal" workers, mostly from the territories. Low pay and horrid labor conditions are all part of the ugly game of labor relations in construction. Nothing new there. On large construction projects you'll mostly find Chinese and Romanian labor migrants. But when constructing oriental style villas, you need stone masons for the creation of arches and arabesques: Palestinians from the occupied territories. They work hard and receive low pay, the risk is mostly on them. The conditions in the occupied territories are so difficult, many of tem have no choice, but to come to Israel and work here in order to provide for their poor families.

Yesterday the border police carried out a manhunt for "illegal" construction workers. Some of them gt away, quickly running to wherever they could hide. In some cases, sympathetic locals, both Palestinians and Jews, helped to hide them, feeling uncomfortable and perhaps guilty with the man hunt going no in their now quite fancy neighborhood. after all, the police are not chasing criminals, but people whose only crime is wanting to provide for their families through hard physsical labour few Israelis are willing to do.

The hunt went on for many hours. Until sunset, or so we thought.

On may way back from my run, quite late, almost midnight, i saw them, again, border police and soldiers carefully going through the park. Searching.

When going out running i only carry water, no id. But they weren't looking for me and the likes of me. The man hunt was still on.

Another murder on Yefet Street

Saturday evening, 21.00, enjoying a mellow evening with my friends and their kids, while trying to do some work on an article, gotta deadline coming up.

A few hundred meters from where we sit, shots on Yefet Street, 2 young men are hit, one of them dies a little later in the hospital. The other, lucky, one was wounded.

It has become so common, most newspapers do not even mention it. Another murder, another young life finished, Jaffa, who cares?
Well, we do care. The murder victim belongs to one of the prominent families, but that didn't help him very much. I know this family, my heart goes out to them.

As usual there's a lot of border police around on Jaffa's streets today.

Moufleta Politics

Yafo Gimmel is a mixed and by all standards rather slummy neighbourhood: Palestinian families and poorer Jewish ones (those who can afford it, move out) share dreary apartment blocks, many of them owned by the "Halamish" public housing company. Over the last few years, recent immigrants from Ethiopia have been housed in this very weak place.

The original inhabitants for whom the neighbourhood was constructed were people mostly form Bulgaria and Morocco who were living under harsh and cramped conditions in pre-gentrification Ajami.
They were happy to move out to the new blocks, where they finally had their own bathroom and kitchen (previously they had to share those with several other families).
But the blocks proved to be problematic. Shoddy construction, bad insulation, sheer size and Halamish's poor repair and maintenance standards soon turned the area into a slum.
And right in the middle of that slum there is the "Dake" orange grove, which, in spite of its romantic name grows few oranges: another "favela" like area inhabited by the Dake family, who live thereunder terrible conditions of poverty and neglect, as the municipality refuses to create a "housing plan" for the area and as a result it is impossible to undertake legal construction on the land the family has been owning for centuries. There is no good sewage system and electricity hook up is somewhat, how shall i say it, "primitive". There is much poverty and neglect in all of the area. And where there is poverty, there is crime, mostly drugs related in this case. And violence. And youth gangs of alienated kids who have lost all hope.

Those who can afford it, run away, those who still live there, mostly wish they will be able to run away, one day, perhaps. A mixture of elderly, recent and less recent migrants from Ethiopia and the Ex-Soviet Union, Palestinian families and as of late, ultra right wing yeshiva students, who believe the real struggle is no longer in the West Bank, but in the mixed cities, where they come to "strengthen the Jewish Community" and "to protect it against -God forbid- mixed marriages". Reality being that there are very few of those (less than 10 a year) doesn't bother them in their rhetoric, it sounds "good" and is easy to use when you want to create tension.

And tension exists.

"The Red Field" used to be a neglected football field used for many activities, but football wasn't one of those. Over the last year or so, the field has been beautifully renovated into an open, public sports center with basket ball courts, an out-door gym, table tennis and of course a football field.
After tension arose between the poor kids of next door "Dake" and the housing estates' kids a community worker and a multi-ethnic group of mothers started to meet and try to undertake joint positive activities. Sport and games are a good way of letting off steam and get to know each other. And it seems to be working. Something good appears to be going on in the "Red Field" as it is still known. The municipality is doing something right here.

So they selected the Red Field as the location for the "Mimouna Party". For those unfamiliar, Mimouna originates in Morocco, when, on the end of the last day of Passover the Muslim neighbours would bring their Jewish neighbours the first leavened baked goods which had been forbidden during Passover. Moufleta and colorful marzipan-like sweets are traditional. Over time, in Israel, it was turned into another popular festival of neighbors of all ethnic backgrounds, visiting neighbors and eating lots of the traditional sweets, while listening to music and dancing.

What also has become traditional, is the political ride taken by Israel's politicians who tend to visit the various public festival locations and yesterday's Jaffa version was no different. Mayor Ron Huldai, Gilad Peled (who returned to manage the Mishlama) and others, as well as the distincly Ashkenazi rabi of the yeshiva all spoke their words of unity among the Jews, most of them convienently forgetting the Palestinian presence. The talk was of a "unified city of Tel Aviv, which exists 100 years (right in Jaffa, remember?).
It was rather cold yesterday evening, so most people had dressed warmly, some over or under their traditional Moroccan dress, making a few of them looking litke glitzy stuffed bears. The guests of honour, among them muniipal coalition members Ahmad Mashrawi and Maytal Lehavi as well as ex-mk Nadia Hilou, were sitting in a traditional and very pretty Morocan tent colorfully decorated with cushions and small tables full of goodies, while the children of the hoi polloy had to wait in the cold to receive their freshly made Moufleta.
The musical theme was of the mostly "Anu Banu Artza" type of theme, with the occasional Morocan song thrown in for political correctness.
The area was guarded by border police and the little boys from Dake, who are loud and active (i am talking about 8-10 year old children) were not let in. They "might disturb the peace".