balata data
2021
From 2018 to 2021, I lived in southern Jaffa, an ancient Arab port city that was occupied by Israel during the 1948 War—known as the Palestinian Nakba (Catastrophe), which led to a massive flight of its Palestinian citizens. In December 1948, Jaffa was declared part of the 'Tel Aviv-Jaffa' municipality, and the Palestinians in Jaffa went from being a majority in their city and homeland—120,000 before the war—to only 4,000, a minority in Israel’s main metropolitan area.
The neighbourhood where I lived was established by fishermen who arrived in the mid-19th century from the village of Jabalia, located in the north of Gaza City. They named the neighbourhood after their place of origin. During the early 1950s, as part of the program of 'Judaization' of Jaffa, many streets carrying Arabic names were renamed after leading Zionist and Jewish rabbinical figures. The name ‘Jabalia’ was then Hebraized to ‘Giv'at Aliya’ (literally meaning ‘Hill of Ascension’), possibly referring to the new European Jewish immigrants from Bulgaria and Romania who resided in Jaffa as part of the plan to Judaize the city.
On my first walk along the beach, I stumbled upon a striking phenomenon: colorful pebbles like terrazzo stones and pieces of colored floor tiles, parts of kitchenware ceramic, and fragments of windows glass, all shaped by years of erosion in seawater—washing ashore. My beach walks soon turned into an obsession that formed itself into a ritual. I spent hours picking up fragments of what I would soon discover were remnants of Jaffa’s demolished homes reapearing on its shore.
In October 1969, a short report in a local Hebrew newspaper announced the municipality decision to officially declare 1,100-meter-long of Jaffa’s coastline as a designated location for evacuation of building waste. This decision was part of another municipal plan to dry out some land to enlarge its coastal area. For the next three decades Jaffa’s coastline evolved into an environmental hazard—a mountain of debris, reaching a height of 15 meters, slowly changing the landscape and eventually obscuring sea view from the neighbourhood apartment windows, and leading to a high level of criminal activities in Jaffas neighbourhoods.
In 2005, a municipal urban renewal plan was initiated, addressing decades of neglect. In the heart of the renewal plan—1.2 million tons of debris from a total of 7 million tons of building waste was recycled on-site and reused as foundation of 'Park Midron'—a public park spanning over 200 thousand acres of land. The remaining 5.8 million tons were split—half of it was properly evacuated to another location, the other half was pushed into the sea. Every year since, just before the beach season officially opens, heavy trucks and tractors work for a few days, sifting the entire beach to remove Jaffa’s old building waste that keeps appearing on its shore.
In a local factory, originally located in Jaffa, floor tiles are still handmade today by the owner's son. The factory was under Palestinian-Jewish management until the 1948 war, when the Jewish owner was forced to move the factory to Tel Aviv, while the Palestinian partner fled to Amman. Years later, after the 1967 war, they met each other in Gaza but their partnership was never renewed. In this factory, I worked to repurpose the stones I have collected into new floor tiles.
The found objets embedded in the cement serve as a persistent reminder of Palestine’s history, which, to this day, faces constant attempts at erasure. The new floor tiles act as an archive, serving as a preservation capsule for the life once imprinted on them and now holding a physical potential for reuse.