גבולות של נייר: ההיסטוריה המחוקה של שכונת נווה שלום

From the early 1890s until the late 1920s the urban space in northern Jaffa was perceived among Hebrew speakers as consisting of two distinct regions—a southern suburb called “Neveh Shalom” and a northern slum dubbed Harat A-Tanak (Arabic for “Tin Neighborhood”). Jews and Arabs alike resided in both parts, living side by side. Only a few years later and without the occurrence of any substantial physical or demographic transformations, the public image of the same space was profoundly transformed. Instead of spatial distinctions based on morphological, social and economic differences, the common Hebrew consciousness accepted now a “national” partition of space between a modern Jewish urban fabric in the precincts of Tel Aviv and a deteriorated and Arab urban fabric called “Manshia.” This division based itself on the borderline drawn between Jaffa and Tel Aviv in 1921, a border that was since the time of its inception a “paper boundary” which never materialized in a physical sense. The result was a total oblivion of the former urban perception of space. More than anything else, the history of Neveh Shalom, a neighborhood cut in half by the border, was distorted. The new, anachronistic point of view overlooked the parts of the neighborhood which remained in Jaffa and began to view it as a natural-born Jewish “borderline neighborhood,” a forward post in an imaginary confrontation with an “Arab” neighborhood called “Manshia.” This view was also wrongly accepted as an undisputed truth among critical scholars of recent years. This paper aims at recollecting the history of Neveh Shalom while showing how the delimitation of the “paper boundary” between Jaffa and Tel Aviv resulted in the oblivion of the neighborhood’s past.