It's hard not to see the walls squeezing the Hatab family as a metaphor in bricks and concrete for Jaffa's poor Arab families.Back to top >>TuesdayA SHORT walk from Old Jaffa is a narrow alley known as the Street of the Money Changers.
Without intervention, my life would spiral down into a mess of Doritos, Jaffa Cakes and bedsores until I drown in the depths of my own fleshy crevices at a tragically young age.
It is the city Tel Aviv swallowed up, Jaffa, where real history is found - it has been a port for 4,000 years.
Urs al-Bahr is based in an apartment in Ajami, a run-down quarter of Jaffa, which is blighted by high levels of poverty and unemployment.
I returned last month to make "Jaffa Stories", a film for the BBC.Old Jaffa still dazzles, but for all its beauty something is missing: the original inhabitants.
Jaffa's pillars were men like Ahmad Hammami, a scion of an old Jaffa family who, like many Jaffans, worked in the orange business.
Jaffa was awarded to the Arab side in the 1947 United Nations partition plan an Arab island surrounded by Jewish territory.
But Menachem Begin, leader of the right-wing Irgun, wanted to capture Jaffa to build his political capital in the already simmering rivalry between the left and right wings of the Zionist movement.So at the end of Passover the Irgun launched a rain of mortars onto the ancient port.
Israeli Jews from Tel Aviv who before the riots would shop and socialise in Jaffa boycotted the city for years.Arab activists bitterly recall that thirteen demonstrators were shot dead that day across Israel (none in Jaffa) by Israeli police, who deployed snipers against unarmed protestors.
Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | FridayFridayWHEN politics fails, artists try to make peace and nowhere more than at the Arab-Hebrew Theatre of Jaffa (pictured below).
Jaffa was neglected for decades after Israel's establishment in 1948.
