Jaffa

Jaffa mattered to Egypt because it was a harbour on the road north. From roughly 1460 BCE the town carried an Egyptian garrison, and it kept one on and off for more than three centuries. The monumental gateway excavated there is known as the Ramesses Gate (the name the excavation reports use) and Britannica notes Jaffa's role as an administrative centre in the New Kingdom and as a garrison city for Ramesses II in the thirteenth century BCE.

The more interesting finding of the recent work is how that ended. The excavators identified two destructions of the fortress in the second half of the twelfth century BCE, and radiocarbon results from those destruction layers, they argue, give the clearest basis yet for about 1125 BCE as a terminus post quem for the end of Egyptian rule in Canaan. Their reading is that this was not a single imperial collapse but local resistance to the Egyptian garrison, likely mounted from Canaanite centres across the coastal plain. Because Jaffa's is the only Egyptian fortress excavated in Canaan, they treat it as a unique window on that resistance.

None of this is easy to see today. The gate area has been partly reconstructed, and the antiquities collection in a former Ottoman building on the way into the old town (a post office and prison in the eighteenth century, later a soap factory) gives context, but expect a few courses of stone and a long caption. The story is worth more than the ruin.

Almost every stone you admire in Old Jaffa post-dates a catastrophe. Napoleon Bonaparte took the city in 1799 during his Syrian campaign, and the reconstruction under the governor known as Abu Nabbut ('father of the club', for the stick he was never seen without) gave Jaffa the shape it still broadly has. The municipal tourism service credits him with rebuilding the Mahmoudiya Mosque after Napoleon's invasion left much of the town in ruins.

Then came the century that made Jaffa rich. Britannica records that Ottoman-era Jaffa exported soap of olive oil, sesame, barley, watermelons, wine and especially oranges, becoming one of the most active ports on the eastern Mediterranean and the second largest city in Palestine. The infrastructure followed the trade. The first passenger train ran from Jaffa to Jerusalem on 27 August 1892, with the official ceremony that September: fifty-three miles of track that cut a two-day journey to about four hours, according to the Center for Israel Education, and the first railway project in the Levant. It was built to serve this harbour.

The clock tower at the top of Yefet Street belongs to the same confident decade. The Tel Aviv-Yafo tourism service dates it to 1902 and ties it to the thirtieth anniversary of Sultan Abdülhamid II's accession; its windows illustrate episodes from the city's history, from ships carrying Lebanese cedars to Simon the Maccabee, who took the port for the Hasmoneans. It is the natural place to start a walk, if only because everything else in Jaffa is downhill from it.

St Peter's Church, the Franciscan building whose facade dominates Kedumim Square, tells the same story of repeated rebuilding. A church was raised here in 1654 over the ruins of a Crusader church, destroyed in the late eighteenth century, and rebuilt between 1888 and 1894, with further renovation in 1903. Its altar faces west rather than east: an unusual orientation, and by tradition one that turns the church towards the sea and the house of Simon the Tanner, where the apostle Peter is said to have lodged.

• 1799: Napoleon takes Jaffa
• Early 1800s: Abu Nabbut rebuilds; the Mahmoudiya Mosque restored
• 1892: first Jaffa–Jerusalem train, 53 miles, about four hours
• 1902: clock tower, per the municipal tourism service
• 1888–1894: St Peter's Church rebuilt over Crusader ruins

Jaffa in the 1940s was a large, predominantly Arab city (Britannica calls it the second largest city in Palestine) and under the 1947 United Nations partition plan, on Britannica's account, it was designated an exclave of the proposed Arab state, surrounded by the proposed Jewish one. What happened next is the central fact of the modern town, and the figures cited for it differ, so it is worth naming who says what.

Britannica records that the Irgun Zvai Leumi attacked Jaffa on 26 April 1948, that nearly all of the city's 70,000 Arab Muslims and Christians were displaced in the battle, and that on 13 May the city was securely under the control of Jewish paramilitaries; it puts the number who remained at 4,000, concentrated in the Ajami neighbourhood south of the old city. The Associated Press, in reporting carried by The Times of Israel in April 2021, describes a predominantly Arab city of some 100,000 people before 1948 from which tens of thousands of Palestinian residents fled or were forced from their homes. Both accounts agree on the outcome: only a small remnant of the pre-war Arab population stayed.

The legal aftermath shaped the streets you walk. Under a 1950 absentee property law, the AP reports, the new Israeli government confiscated thousands of empty properties and handed them to state-run public housing companies. In the same year Jaffa was united with Tel Aviv, which is why the city's formal name is Tel Aviv-Yafo and why Jaffa has no mayor of its own.

Today roughly 20,000 Arab residents live in Jaffa, a minority within a Tel Aviv-Yafo of about 468,000 people at the 2021 estimate. It is one of Israel's mixed cities, and the friction is documented: Arab residents interviewed by the AP in 2021 described rents beyond the reach of working-class families and a market that has priced them out of restored quarters, while the same restoration is what draws visitors. Read the renovated courtyard houses of Ajami with that in mind.

The Jaffa orange is a real cultivar with a real origin, and the origin is here. Its proper name is Shamouti, and the Citrus ID reference guide records that it arose some time before 1844 in an orchard near Jaffa, presumably as a limb sport (a spontaneous mutation on a single branch) in a tree of the local beledi variety. It is thick-skinned, seedless or nearly so, and shaped distinctively enough that Citrus ID calls the form a natural trademark. It also ships well, which is the whole point.

That last quality made it an export crop. Shipped out of this harbour, the fruit reached European markets under the port's name rather than the variety's, and Citrus ID notes that the usage is now too entrenched to change. Britannica lists oranges among the exports that made Ottoman Jaffa prosperous, alongside olive-oil soap, sesame, barley, watermelons and wine.

The groves were Arab-owned and Jewish-owned in turn and in parallel, and the fruit is claimed as heritage by Palestinians and Israelis alike, which is why it turns up on both sides of a great deal of packaging and polemic. The botany is not in dispute: a single mutated branch near Jaffa, propagated by grafting, is the ancestor of the Shamouti trees grown around the Mediterranean.

The orchards are gone from the immediate hinterland, built over by the twentieth-century city. What you will find instead is the fruit in the market, wooden crate labels on the flea market's antique stalls, and the name on juice bars from here to Bat Yam.