Jadal 1 Mada al-Carmel Jadal, Issue 18, October 2013 www.mada-research.org Radical Gentrifiers: The Changing Landscape of Social Action in Jaffa Daniel Monterescu* Historically known as the “Bride of Palestine” (‘arus falastin), Jaffa was the symbol of political modernity and the largest urban center in pre-1948 Palestine (LeVine, 2005). Faced with Zionist expansion, the Arab metropolis underwent radical demographic changes when the majority of its Palestinian population— including most of the local elites—was forced into exile during the hostilities of 1948. Only 3,500 out of the estimated 100,000 members of the Arab population remained. Jaffa, which had been a regional seaport and international trade center under late Ottoman and British rule, was transformed overnight into the notorious and dilapidated “Quarter 7”–Tel-Aviv’s “Arab neighborhood.” More than 60 years after the Nakba, Jaffa is an ethnically “mixed town” (Rabinowitz & Monterescu, 2008). Located minutes away from Tel-Aviv’s metropolitan center yet marked as sui generis cultural and political alterity, it is home to approximately 17,000 Palestinian citizens of Israel (Tel-Aviv-Jaffa Municipality, 2012). Struggling since 1948 to sustain viable collective existence, the Palestinian community makes up a third of Jaffa’s total population and altogether 5 percent of the Tel-Aviv-Jaffa metropolitan demographic composition. For the municipality and the state, Arab Jaffa has long presented a political “problem,” thus resulting in recurrent strategies of containment, surveillance, and control. Nowadays, Arab community members often describe themselves as a “double minority” excluded twice over: First, on the national scale of state institutions, and second on the municipal level vis-à-vis the City of Tel- Aviv-Jaffa. Bereft of a united leadership and with no stable middle class to speak of, Palestinians in Jaffa ache for