Contradictions seem to be the way of life in Jaffa's Ajami neighborhood. Escaped donkeys galloping down small streets in the middle of the night are juxtaposed with Range Rovers tucked safely inside remotely controlled underground parking lots. Multimillion-dollar mansions and foreign ambassadors' compounds cast shadows on smaller, somewhat crumbling but impressively sized Arabian-style villas. Within the same hour, one can hear Muslim calls to prayer simultaneously from five directions, while church bells ring on nearby Rehov Yefet, and Jews shuffle off to Shacharit morning services.
Louis Williams. A local historian, translator, author and former IDF spokesperson, he has lived there for 12 years.
Ajami, Arabic for "strangers," was the first Jaffa neighborhood built outside the Old City walls. Today the area is seeing the effects of gentrification, but for the most part it is still rundown and neglected. Some of the old Arab homes have been torn down, but a glimpse into its former beauty can be seen in Ajami's old mansions inhabited by Jewish and Arab residents.
The Ajami strip is bordered by Rehov Yefet to the east and the Mediterranean coast to the west, between Jaffa Port and Bat Yam.
The neighborhood's unobstructed seaside sunsets, fresh air, exotic buildings, low-cost rent and unpredictability make Ajami an atypical alternative to living in Tel Aviv. Its lack of basic infrastructure, such as street signs, and high crime and vandalism rates are moot points for the mixed Jewish-Arab residents, and keep the less adventurous away.
Local historian Louis Williams, a translator, author and former IDF spokesperson, has lived in Ajami for 12 years. In his rented home meters from the Jabaliya bridge, Williams spoke with Metro on Israeli Arab stereotypes, Jaffa's history and one of his community's latest environmental battles.
"There is violence and crime here… since I have lived here there has been no violence between Arabs and Jews, though," says Williams, a volunteer member of the District Committee for Ajami, one of 68 local citizens groups appointed by the Tel Aviv-Jaffa municipality to help put communities' deciding power in the people's hands. But collectively, Ajami's Jewish, Christian and Muslim citizens are not always sure that their best interests are being considered.
Visitors to the seaside in Jaffa cannot miss the gargantuan mountains of rubble accumulating by the shore, part of the building process of a large public park on Ajami's 200-dunam (50 acre) beach, similar to north Tel Aviv's Yarkon Park. Ajami residents are thrilled that what was an eyesore will eventually become Jaffa's own version of Central Park, connected to Tel Aviv's beachside promenade.
The site for the park - variously known as Ajami slope, Ajami beach or garbage mountain - was a legal and illegal dumping ground for organic and industrial waste from the Tel Aviv-Dan area from the 1950s to the 1980s. Prior to that time, say residents, the beach "was magnificent" and washed up onto the stoops of Ajami homes.
Nowadays, the Ajami slope is visited by dog walkers, fishermen, bauble collectors and people looking to get away from Tel Aviv crowds. The landfill is also a pasture for small herds of neighborhood goats and a magnet for swarthy characters. According to Williams, a couple of bodies have been uncovered since the excavation began last January.
Besides the park, other changes are taking place in Ajami. Police who were once afraid to enter the snaking, narrow streets now have orders to be omnipresent, especially on Ajami's main street, Rehov Kedem. The Peres Center for Peace is constructing a new branch at the southern end of the beach to foster cultural coexistence between Arabs and Jews.
Jaffa, once called the Bride of the Sea, used to be the cultural center for the bulk of the Middle East. In the 1930s, most of the Middle East's Arab-language books were printed by some 70 Jaffa printing presses; there were 17 cinemas, many of them open-air, screening Egyptian and foreign films. It was a magnet that drew traders from the Arab world, and most of the region's import-export traffic passed through Jaffa port.
Prior to 1948, the houses on Jaffa's main thoroughfare, Rehov Yefet, were owned by rich merchants and mainly Muslim Arabs, although some Jews and Christians owned property and lived there. In 1948, the demographics changed when the battle for the Manshia quarter (the area of the border between Jaffa and Tel Aviv where the David Intercontinental hotel stands today) caused the wealthy Arabs to leave.
"Most of the well-heeled Arab population that could afford to run, did," recounts Williams, leaving only about 3,000 people in Jaffa. At the time, displaced Arabs from some 30 surrounding villages moved into the empty mansions in Jaffa. "At that moment, Jaffa changed from being a cultured urban society into a much more rural one, which is the reason why you can find donkeys, chickens and horses running around here today."
From 1948 into the 1950s, Jaffa was under military rule. "Then the city [of Tel Aviv] had the bright idea to make a landfill west of Ajami into the sea. They dumped 1.2 million tons of the city's garbage there. They even wanted to develop villa communities on the site, [but] the engineers told them you can't build on that - there will be huge air holes caused by the organic waste," Williams explains.
The dumping was stopped in the 1980s by a local Arab organization in Jaffa because people were getting ill. From that point onward, it lay idle until the Tel Aviv-Jaffa municipality under Mayor Ron Huldai slated the area to become a park.
About 25 Arab and Jewish families living on the border of the proposed park are concerned about dust and noise from the trucks. Members of the District Committee for Ajami sat with city officials and the park's contractor, Olnick Haulage, Earthwork and Roads, to choose a landfill removal method that would minimize the effects on residents' lives.
A decision was made that 500,000 tons of landfill would need to be removed from the site, in some 120,000 truckloads over the course of 18 months. The Jaffa residents favored the option that would produce the least amount of noise and dust, involving equipment to sort the industrial material by metals, concrete and earth, and grind the rest. That way, only 30,000 truckloads would be needed to remove the fill.
