Abstract
The Bulgarian working-class restaurant ‘Monka’ is a little unmarked joint, just off Jerusalem boulevard in Jaffa. It serves big chunks of basic but freshly baked white bread to dip in simple, traditional Bulgarian dishes, like white-beans soup. Monka on Fridays’ lunchtime was my family’s place to go in Jaffa, our ‘little Bulgaria’. In 1948 Jews, particularly mass immigration from the Balkans, were settled in this town that was depopulated from its Palestinian inhabitants during the 1948 Nakba. The remaining Palestinian families joined by refugees from destroyed villages in the area were herded into a ‘ghetto’ in the southern part of the city. The southern neighborhood of Jabalia, which was re-named Givat Aliyah (in Hebrew ‘immigration hill’) is where my family landed. My family had moved by the mid-1950s to a housing block in Holon, yet this remarkably brief presence became our Jaffa Bulgarian mythology. It is a Zionist mythology shrouded in silence and ignorance about Palestine and the Nakba, that remains a sacred taboo. Twilight Nationalism is a book looking beneath and on the side of the ‘big’ narratives of the Nakba and Zionist redemption through the eyes of Jaffaites who reached old age. The elderly interviewed are a mosaic of the generation, that lived through the epoch of Jaffa’s most defining and dramatic transformations.
It makes sense that this ethnography of the experience and recounting of the past of that generation leads the authors, Daniel Monterescu and Haim Hazan, to reject outright theoretical framings such as ‘methodological nationalism’ and the settler-colonialism frame. In offering a ‘metanationalist approach’ they wish to highlight interwoven and intersectional realities that undermine traditional paradigms of the ethno-national conflict in Israel/Palestine. According to Monterescu and Hazan, ‘the politics of existence’ is a strategy people deploy in recounting their own life stories while negotiating the upheavals that befall them. This approach is no mere methodology, but an ideology. Monterescu and Hazan insist that people do not embody nationalism and collective identities, but rather constantly try to escape or resist them. The bright lights and sharp contrasts, or ‘binaries’ of structures such as patriarchy and nationalism are intentionally dimmed. ‘Twilight’ in the title is thus imbued with many shades of grey and layers of meanings that the book explores – referring to the end of life of the subjects, obviously, but also to everyday life, or existence outside of or on the margin of ‘big’ time and space. It is worth noting that the conversations with the elderly interviewed took place almost two decades prior to publication. The book is then populated by ghosts. This raises a specter and a haunting question, what can the ghosts of the past tell us about Jaffa today? This question is unfortunately left unanswered. The closing chapter alludes very briefly to Jaffa’s great transformations in recent years, to new generations, their new and very different horizons and struggles. What is missing then is an articulation of how ‘the heavy hand of the past continues to strum the chords of Jaffa’s present’ (p. 234), a line taken from a poetry collection of works by young, Jaffa-based Jewish and Palestinian poets (Granowski et al., 2009).
Ironically, while the elderly stories are conveyed as uniquely singular, nationalism is the primary and indispensable lens by which they are interpreted. Each portrait gets a label, such as the ‘Worn-Out Nationalism’ of the lone and impoverished Rabbi Avraham Bachar of the Bulgarian community, or ‘Circumventing Nationalism’ of the upper-class Palestinian Hakim Sisters. The silver lining is human commonalities – wrestling with collective identity; the indignities of old age; the anti-pathetic and critical stance towards their own communities; the connection to Jaffa to which all protagonists belong. The most valued commonality in the eyes of the authors is the latter, their shared indigeneity and co-existence in that place. Yet, could it be that the metanationalist approach produces just what it seeks to evade? Zionism always insisted on Jewish indigeneity, relying on diasporic ‘roots’ for its legitimation (Raz-Karkotzkin, 1995). Ethnic diasporic roots underline rather than undermine the eternal necessity of Israel as a place of refuge. To return to the story of my family, our ‘Bulgarianess’ makes sense only in the Israeli context. It is not subversive, sub or anti-nationalist, but what makes Jaffa ours under the logic of what Reif Zreik dubbed a ‘settler-colonialism of refugees’ (Zreik, 2016: 359). Moreover, the metanationalist approach employed here itself channels nationalism despite constantly disavowing it. That said, people are portrayed in this book with touching compassion and humanness in a moving gesture of respect for their human dignity that truly transcends any categorical separations and ‘big’ structures. This is not a book about people as depositories of ‘collective memory’ but about possibilities for a future foregrounded in lived commonalities and shared space for both Palestinians and Jews.