The Lost Cities of Palestine

Al Jazeera (2011)

Film Review

This documentary, made from rare archival footage, concerns Jaffa, Haifa and Jerusalem, Palestinian cities that were deliberately destroyed during the 1948 Nakba.* In driving 700,000 Palestinians from their homeland, Israeli militias deliberately targeted cities. They had an explicit goal of destroying Palestinian culture, thus justifying the Israeli claim that the Palestinian people have no cultural heritage.

The film focuses mainly on Jaffa, a once thriving Mediterranean port. A thriving trade in citrus, cotton and manufactured goods, enabled Jaffa to develop a more advanced technological sector than any other Middle East city. Their factories produced cigarettes, ice cream, coffee, salt, glass, steel and other goods.

Railway lines connected Jaffa to Egypt, Lebanon and Syria, facilitating robust cultural exchange. Jaffa alone had 100 weekly newspapers, as well as an orchestra, several theaters and cinemas and even a fledgling movie industry.

When Zionist forces invaded Palestine’s cities in 1948, they took over nearly all Palestinian homes and land. They also looted their factories, shops and libraries and sacked their schools. For the most part, the Palestinian intellectual and middle class fled. This left the few thousand Palestinians who remained to be herded into ghettos and camps – exactly as the Nazis had done to European Jews.

*The Palestinian Nakba, or catastrophe, refers to the mass expulsion of Palestinian Arabs from the British Mandate of Palestine during the creation of the state of Israel.