Protests took place in the city of Jaffa near Tel Aviv on Friday over plans to evacuate buildings inhabited by Palestinian citizens of Israel in the al-Ajami neighborhood and sell them to Jewish investors.
Using the slogan “Jaffa is not for sale”, demonstrators have criticized plans by the state-owned Israeli housing company “Amidar” to sell off the buildings.
Tel Aviv-Jaffa council member Abd Abu Shehadeh told The New Arab’s sister site Arab 48 that the plans aim to dismantle the social fabric of the Palestinian community in Jaffa.
“Jaffa is not for sale,” “Amidar = silent Nakba” – protests over the proposed sales of absentee property in Jaffa, which would mean the evictions of current tenants pic.twitter.com/ABI5ho8OLk
— Jonathan Shamir (@jonathan_shamir) April 24, 2021
Most of Jaffa’s Palestinian population were forced to flee the city during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, in an event referred to as the Nakba (catastrophe), but a community of approximately 15,000 Palestinians, who now hold Israeli citizenship, remains.
Many Palestinian institutions, schools, and places of worship remain in Al-Ajami. Abu Shehadeh accused Israeli authorities of trying to remove the area’s remaining Palestinian inhabitants in order to erase its character.
“After targeting the social fabric and dispersing the Arabs, the Israeli authorities will work to remove the Arab presence, using arguments such as ‘who needs mosques and churches, as long as there are no Arabs next to them?’” he said.
“The struggle in Jaffa and Jerusalem is the same – it is to counter Israeli plans to uproot Jaffa and Jerusalem’s identities,” said Mohammed Baraka, a former member of the Israeli parliament and chairman of the High Follow Up Committee for Arab Citizens of Israel.
Jaffa is not for sale 👎🏾
Palestinians are facing forcibly evection in Jaffa
“Jaffa for Jaffans " 🇵🇸https://t.co/uDMbcCROgN— رُولا (@Rolaa104) April 23, 2021
“Not far from this area, [Israeli] snipers stood in 1948 directing their fire at the Arab people of the city,” Baraka said. He added that Israel had not stopped trying to evict Palestinian inhabitants of Jaffa from their city since the time of the Nakba.
“It is the plan of the government to uproot Jaffa from its identity and history. This coincides with what is happening in occupied Jerusalem, whose people are facing terrorist attacks by thousands of settlers,” Baraka continued, referring to events in Jerusalem earlier this week, when far-right extremists marched through the city attacking and injuring scores of Palestinians.
Last Monday, three Palestinian men were detained for two days following similar protests on Sunday evening.
An upcoming vigil in Jaffa is scheduled for next Friday.
(The New Arab, PC, Social Media)
