JAFFA, Israel — The young owner of a new hip eatery in Jaffa characterizes his environs with a skeptical eye.
“Coexistence in Jaffa? I don’t know if you could call it that. People live next to each other, but they carry on their separate lives. You’ve got multimillionaire Jews and you’ve got the poorest Arabs you’ll see anywhere.
“Why do the rich Jews come to live in the middle of crime and poverty? It doesn’t touch them. They park their cars in their garages, go into their homes, go to work, go to some French restaurant, come home and hardly have to look at what’s going on around them.”
There are other cities, like Ramle, Akko and Haifa, where one can find Jews and Arabs living more or less next to each other. There are other parts of Israel, especially in the older quarters of Tel Aviv, where intense gentrification is taking place and where million-dollar homes, new or refurbished, stand in the midst of rows of slum houses.
But nowhere in Israel do the two contrasts come together — rich and Jewish, smack in the middle of poor and Arab — except in the capital of quaint, the tourist’s paradise of Jaffa.
To foreigners and out-of-towners, who visit Jaffa, the city is the picturesque, exotic, old Middle East with a heavy dash of artsy. Jaffa is the clocktower, fish restaurants, Abulafia’s 24-hour bakery, art galleries along winding stone alleyways and ethnic nightclubs.
About 60,000 people call Jaffa home. Roughly one-third are Arabs, concentrated heavily in the Ajami section, which runs from Yefet Street to the sea.
On a bluff overlooking the pier, an old, unshaven man sits in the dirt yard of his shack. He can only mumble incoherently in response to the questions put to him. No more than 50 yards behind and above him, great, gorgeous apartments of sandstone, marble and glass — the Jaffa Seashell project — are under construction.
Ilan Pivko, the owner and architect of the project, welcomes guests into his home-office, which stands next door in a block of high-ceilinged, achingly beautiful apartments that he also designed.
Jaffa is a unique case in gentrification, Pivko said. In other places, when the rich buy up old properties and turn them into mansions, poor renters are forced out and poor homeowners take the windfall that comes with the increase in property value to buy homes in other areas.
But the Arabs of Jaffa don’t want to leave because they are rooted to their homes, and because they have no place better to go — the better places are all prohibitively expensive and exclusively Jewish.
Pivko leads a grand tour of his latest project. One of the more modest homes costs about $900,000.
Nearby are apartments. The owner of one, it turns out, is part of the trio of young Israeli computer whizzes who founded the Mirabilis company and later sold its flagship Internet program, ICQ, for more than $400 million. His particular apartment costs more than $3 million.
“My clientele is a rare combination — wealthy and tasteful,” Pivko said.
Today, rich Jews are moving into Ajami; a generation ago, poor Jews were moving out. These were families, or descendants of families, of the roughly 50,000 Jewish immigrants who moved into homes in Jaffa that were abandoned by their fleeing Arab owners during the 1948 War of Independence.
Public housing agencies took over the old homes, and Jewish tenants rented them.
Beginning in the 1970s, as the first glimmerings of prosperity were felt in Israel, many thousands of Jews put together enough money to move out and buy apartments in Bat Yam, Rishon Lezion, Holon and other nearby cities.
At the same time, beachfront property became too valuable to leave in the hands of poor people paying low rent. Real-estate developers and their allies in government, notably then-Tel Aviv mayor Shlomo “Chich” Lahat, saw Ajami as a future seaside paradise for the well-to-do.
The government began offering apartments in Lod, Ramle and other cities to Jaffa’s Jewish public-housing tenants if they would give up their apartments. Once the tenants moved out, the homes were destroyed.
Between 1975 and 1985, more than 3,000 homes were bulldozed in Jaffa according to city records. Life for the remaining local Arab and Jewish populations became even grittier.
A few blocks away from the glamour, 13 members of the Amira family live in an apartment that’s been condemned. On the walls are pictures of Jesus and Elvis, and a placard that reads, “God Bless Our Home.” Cracks run up, down and along the walls, and look more like earthquake faults. The roof beams are exposed, and not for aesthetic reasons. It feels dangerous to stand inside this home.
Like his brothers, 29-year-old Nassim Amira is a construction worker. Engaged, he plans to move his spouse in with the rest of his family, just like his brother and sister did. “Who has money to rent an apartment? We just make enough to live from day to day,” he said.
Ownership of and responsibility for the building is divided between the city of Tel Aviv and a public housing agency. Because of that division, the order to repair the building — issued about a year ago by the municipality — was never carried out, and subsequently the city condemned the building to destruction.
Not all of Jaffa’s poor are Arabs. Slightly south of Ajami, at the edge of a sandlot in the Givat Aliya neighborhood, 77-year-old Yazza Nataf sits in a wheelchair in her two-room flat. Portraits of Jewish spiritual leaders adorn the walls. Right next to her home is Or Sa’adia, a tiny synagogue named for her late husband, Sa’adia, who started the congregation.
The synagogue and the memories attached to it are the reasons why Nataf never left the apartment. She, her husband, their two children and her mother-in-law received the apartment when they came from Tunisia in 1948. Eventually the Natafs raised six children in it.
“Today I have a few Jewish friends left in the neighborhood. But the only complaint I have is with the children who throw stones and break my windows. The Jews and Arabs here get along very well. If I see one of the Arab neighbors on the street we always greet each other.”
Just as not all of Jaffa’s poor are Arabs, not all of Jaffa’s rich are Jews.
One of architect Pivko’s partners is Talal Abu Manna, who built a 10-unit luxury apartment building in Ajami designed by Pivko, for $2.5 million. Abu Manna is an Ajami native.
“I was born in s—. Today I’m an entrepreneur,” the 40-year-old said. He and his family live in the building’s penthouse.
A Christian Arab, Abu Manna rents out his apartments for $1,800 to $2,500 per month.
“Only to embassies,” he said, adding as a comic afterthought: “I don’t rent to Arabs or Jews — they’re too much trouble.”