Planning, Control and Spatial Protest: The Case of the Jewish-Arab Town of Lydd/Lod¹

This chapter highlights the Jaffa’s premodern religious history. The key to understanding the actions of the various community organizations in what remains of “Arab” Jaffa today, specifically the relationship between historical memory, identity and contemporary urban politics. Hassan Bey’s brief but eventful rule in Jaffa and the spatial development in both communities that accompanied it suggest that religion was beginning to play an important role in the conflicts over territory and identity in the Jaffa-Tel Aviv region. The Palestinian Arab parts of Jaffa remain among the poorer sections of Israel, with levels of education, income and similar variables far below the averages for Jewish Israeli neighborhoods, never mind Israel’s “world city”, Tel Aviv. It is in this context that we can understand Eli Rekhess’s argument that the Palestinian component of Israeli Palestinian identity began to grow in the mid-1990s; that is, just when the Oslo process and neoliberalization of the economy swung into high gear.