A Confiscated Memory: Wadi Salib and Haifa's Lost Heritage

by Yfaat Weiss

Overview

Yfaat Weiss tells the story of an Arab neighborhood in Haifa that later acquired iconic status in Israeli memory. In the summer of 1959, Jewish immigrants from Morocco rioted against local and national Israeli authorities of European origin. The protests of Wadi Salib generated for the first time a kind of political awareness of an existing ethnic discrimination among Israeli Jews. However, before that, Wadi Salib existed as an impoverished Arab neighborhood. The war of 1948 displaced its residents, even though the presence of the absentees and the Arab name still linger.

Weiss investigates the erasure of Wadi Salib's Arab heritage and its emergence as an Israeli site of memory. At the core of her quest lies the concept of property, as she merges the constraints of former Arab ownership with requirements and restrictions pertaining to urban development and the emergence of its entangled memory. Establishing an association between Wadi Salib's Arab refugees and subsequent Moroccan evacuees, Weiss allegorizes the Israeli amnesia about both eventual stories—that of the former Arab inhabitants and that of the riots of 1959, occurring at different times but in one place. Describing each in detail, Weiss uncovers a complex, multilayered, and hidden history. Through her sensitive reading of events, she offers uncommon perspective on the personal and political making of Israeli belonging.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231152266
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	12/27/2011
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Yfaat Weiss is professor in the Department of the History of the Jewish People and head of the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center for German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is the author of various studies on German and Central European history, as well as on Jewish and Israeli history. Together with Daniel Levy, she is coeditor of Challenging Ethnic Citizenship: German and Israeli Perspectives on Immigration.

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments
Prologue: The Neighbors Who Get Rich on Our Account
1. War: Diachronic Neighbors
2. Commotion: "And I Wanted to Do Something Nice, Like They Have Up in Haddar"
3. Evacuation: City Lights
4. Khirbeh: Altneuland
Epilogue: Iphrat Goshen and His Wife Miriam Move Into Said's House in Hallisa
Notes
Bibliography
Index

What People are Saying About This

Salim Tamari

In this superb work of ethnic archeology, Yfaat Weiss has produced a penetrating history of Haifa's Wadi Salib. This district was a crucial site of the early Ottoman modernity of Palestine through the construction of Hijazi Railway, linking the Syrian Coast to Anatolia, Arabia, and Suez. In her poignant narrative, Weiss has encapsulated the contours of the Arab Israeli conflict as it manifested itself in the voices of embattled Jewish Moroccan immigrants and native Arab Haifites, whose lives were transformed by war, conquest, and displacement.

— Salim Tamari, director of the Institute of Jerusalem Studies and associate professor of sociology, Birzeit University

Editorial Reviews

[T]his study adds to the broader discourse on identity and conflict in Israel.

Choice

[An] important contribution to the growing literature on collective memory and forgetting.

Michael Feigen Historical Review

This beautifully written book tells the story of refugees and immigrants who lived during the twentieth century in a single neighborhood in Haifa (Wadi Salib), enduring victimization as a result of war and long ethnic, national, and social discrimination and transformation. Yfaat Weiss focuses on a pre-1948 Palestinian neighborhood in a predominantly Jewish City, laying out the way the displacement of Palestinians gave way to Jewish migrants, who were themselves refugees enduring social discrimination in Israel and were evicted as a result of Israel's most famous social upheaval (1959), a watershed moment in Israeli ethnic relations between Ashkenazy and Sephardic Jews. This captivating history of a mosaic of exclusion and inclusion of national and immigrant minorities—in addition to its other merits, it is an outstanding urban study—reveals the parallel and separate experiences of repeated displacement. This community of 'diachronic neighbors' illuminates the memory of a place and a sequence of displacements. Weiss brings to life and revives the memory of disappeared cultures displaced by war and the drive to modernization.

Elazar Barkan

[An] important contribution to the growing literature on collective memory and forgetting.

American Historical Review - Michael Feige