The Lights of Jaffa

The Palestinian writer and human rights lawyer Raja Shehadeh has an okay piece in The New Yorker on the death of Ariel Sharon. Shehadeh can be a wonderful writer, but this reflection of his seems flat and perfunctory. Seeing his byline, however, reminded me of one of the most affecting passages in his memoir Strangers in the House about his relationship with his father and growing up in the West Bank.

Shehadeh’s family had been expelled in 1948 from Jaffa, a port city with a thriving Arab population just south of Tel Aviv. Throughout his youth, Shehadeh and his father would walk in the evenings to a hilltop near Ramallah and look out on the twinkling lights of Jaffa, far off to the west. They would notice with satisfaction how the town was growing, gradually eclipsing Tel Aviv, its much smaller Jewish neighbor to the north. It was one of his father’s great solaces and pains, to see those lights of Jaffa and think of returning home.

But at some point in Shehadeh’s life, he or perhaps he and his father—my copy of the memoir is buried in Greg Grandin’s basement, so I’m going on memory here—had a terrible realization: the lights they saw were really Tel Aviv. It was the Jewish city that had grown to such massive proportions, surpassing and ultimately incorporating the Arab city to the south.