HAIFA BEFORE & AFTER 1948 NARRATIVES OF A MIXED CITY INSTITUTE FOR HISTORICAL JUSTICE AND RECONCILIATION SERIES Published under editorial responsibility of The Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation The Hague VOLUME 6 HAIFA BEFORE & AFTER 1948 NARRATIVES OF A MIXED CITY Edited by Mahmoud Yazbak and Yfaat Weiss DORDRECHT 2011 Cover design/ Illustration: Studio Thorsten Photograph: Getty Images/John Philips This book is printed on acid-free paper. This project has been sponsored by funding from the Ford Foundation, the Arcadia Trust, the Sigrid Rausing Trust and the Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung The views in this book are the responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data ISSN 2211-3061 hardbound ISBN 9789089790910 paperback ISBN 9789089790927 © 2011 Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation and Republic of Letters Publishing BV, Dordrecht, The Netherlands/ St. Louis, MO. All rights reserved. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Republic of Letters Publishing has made all reasonable efforts to trace all rights holders to any copyrighted material used in this work. In cases where these efforts have not been successful the publisher welcomes communications from copyright holders, so that the appropriate acknowledgements can be made in future editions, and settles other permission matters. 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TABLE OF CONTENTS Contributors Preface Catherine Cissé-van den Muijsenbergh ix Towards Mutual Historical Writing: An Introduction to the “Haifa Project” Mahmoud Yazbak and Yfaat Weiss 1 A Tale of Two Houses Mahmoud Yazbak and Yfaat Weiss 11 Arab-Jewish Architectural Partnership in Haifa during the Mandate Period: Qaraman and Gerstel Meet on the “Seam Line” Waleed Karkabi and Adi Roitenberg 43 Arabs and Jews, Leisure and Gender, in Haifa’s Public Spaces Manar Hasan and Ami Ayalon 69 Commodities and Power: Edible Oil and Soap in the History of Arab- Jewish Haifa Mustafa Abbasi and David De Vries 99 Historicizing Climate: Haifawis and Haifo’im Remembering the Winter of 1950 Dan Rabinowitz and Johnny Mansour 119 “Eraser” and “Anti-Eraser” – Commemoration and Marginalization on the Main Street of the German Colony: The Haifa City Museum and Café Fattush Salman Natour and Avner Giladi 149 Haifa Umm al-Gharib: Historical Notes and Memory of Inter-Communal Relations Regev Nathansohn and Abbas Shiblak 181 Bibliography 205 Index 217 CONTRIBUTORS EDITORS Mahmoud Yazbak is a professor of Palestinian History, head of the department of Middle Eastern History at the University of Haifa. Served as the Chair of Adalah (2008-2011), and headed MEISAI (Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies Association in Israel, 2008-2011). He publishes frequently on social history and issues concerning the modern Palestinian society. Yfaat Weiss is a professor at the department of History of the Jewish people and is the former head of School of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The scope of her publication covers German and Central European History, and Jewish and Israeli History. AUTHORS Mustafa Abbasi, is a lecturer at Tel Hai Academic College in Upper Galilee. His main fields of research are the Galilee towns Safad, Acre, Nazareth and Tiberias during the Mandate period (1918-1948). He publishes frequently on social history and issues concerning the modern Palestinian society in Galilee. Ami Ayalon is a professor of Middle Eastern history at the Department of Middle Eastern and African History, Tel Aviv University. His research over the years has dealt primarily with aspects of Arab cultural history in modern times. David De Vries is professor at the Department of Labor Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, Tel Aviv University. His research interests are labor and business history and the social history of Palestine and Israel. Avner Giladi is professor of Islamic Studies in the Department of Middle Eastern History, University of Haifa. His main fields of research and publication are Family History, History of Education and Childhood and Women’s and Gender History in medieval Islamic contexts. Manar Hasan is a lecturer of sociology at Zefat Academic College and the Program for Gender Studies at Bar-Ilan University. Her main research interests are; Urban and Space Sociology, Gender studies, Postcolonial and Colonial studies, collective memory and secular studies. Waleed Karkabi is head of the building conservation team in the Haifa municipality. He is specialized in building conservation during his CONTRIBUTORS second degree (Magister) in Architecture at The Faculty of Architecture of The Building Institute of Leningrad (St. Petersburg Russia). Johnny Mansour is a lecturer at the History Studies Department at Beit Berl Academic College, Israel. He has written on the philosophy of a two state solution and Palestinian local history. His interests and studies are specifically on the history and development of Haifa. Salman Natour is an author and playwriter. He is the writer of numerous novels, satires, short stories and articles covering cultural, political and social issues, and Arabic plays that have been performed in theaters across Palestine and the Arab World. Dan Rabinowitz is an anthropologist writing on ethnicity and nationalism, the Palestinian citizens of Israel, the Arab-Israeli Conflict and the nexus between environment and society. He is a professor of anthropology at Tel-Aviv University and at Central European University in Budapest, Chair of the Israeli Association for Environmental Justice and Vice Chair of Greenpeace UK. Adi Roitenberg graduated from the Neri Bloomfield Acadamy of Design (“Witzzo”) in Haifa as an architectural practical engineer. She is part of the building conservation team of the Haifa municipality. Abbas Shiblak is a scholar and human rights advocate. He is a research associate at the International Development Centre at the University of Oxford. His main research areas are human rights, migration and minority status. Regev Nathansohn is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His research focuses on genealogies of coexistence in Haifa, and deals with questions regarding ethnic and racial relations, the politics of history and memory in a multi- cultural society, and the relations between oral and visual representations. viii PREFACE The Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation (IHJR) is pleased to present the publication Haifa, Before & After 1948, Narratives of a Mixed City. This unique publication is a result of a project that was initiated and implemented under the auspices of the IHJR. The IHJR was founded in 2004 by Elazar Barkan and Timothy Ryback, with the aim of dispelling myths and misconceptions of history. The IHJR believes that confronting and overcoming distortions of historical reality can provide for a better understanding and can contribute toward laying the groundwork for reconciliation. The project on the City of Haifa is an endeavor of 14 Israeli and Palestinian scholars and experts – Arabs and Jews –, mostly Israeli citizens, working in the fields of Middle Eastern history, social and economic history, anthropology, sociology and architecture. During meetings from 2008 to 2011 in Salzburg, Hamburg and Tel Aviv, the group collectively conducted research and engaged in the process of writing shared narratives. From the inception of the project, convening scholars and experts from different backgrounds – each with a special connection to Haifa – proved to be challenging. However, throughout its tenure several authors sought rapprochement and in some cases became friends. The development of these friendships became apparent when the group took the initiative to organize a tour along the neighborhoods described in this publication. The result of this project is a publication incorporating seven shared historical narratives on the economic, social, cultural and political life of Haifa surrounding the period of 1948. The study, Haifa, Before & After 1948, examines the liaisons between the Palestinian and Jewish communities in Haifa in an attempt to unravel not only the complicated relations in this mixed city, but also to underscore extensive periods of cohabitation. The authors explore the events surrounding 1948 on a micro-level, through the lens of architecture and the urban fabric of Haifa. Consequently, they aim at transcending boundaries and to foster a better understanding of the history of the region. This groundbreaking approach serves as an innovative model that could be applied to other mixed cities around the world, such as Sarajevo, Beirut, and Cairo, to name only a few. I wish to thank the authors for their dedication and continuing work on the project. In addition, I would like to extend my gratitude toward our funders the Ford Foundation, the Sigrid Rausing Trust, the Arcadia Trust and to Ulrich Bielefeld of the Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung, who Mahmoud Yazbak and Yfaat