Word: jaffa
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When waves of Jewish immigrants arrived in the 1930s, escaping the rise of Nazism and persecution in Europe, Tel Aviv had to expand to accommodate them. Back then, it was the ancient Arab port of Jaffa, with a few Jewish settlements trying to take root in the nearby swamps and sand dunes. Most of the arriving immigrants were young, poor but fairly well educated and idealistic, and Tel Aviv's city planners sought an egalitarian architectural style in sync with the socialistic winds sweeping through Europe. They turned to Bauhaus. Founded in Weimar in 1919, the International or Bauhaus style...
...Hosam Tayseer Dawyyat, 30, a father of two described by neighbors as "an ordinary person," was a crazed madman acting alone, or had been acting on behalf of a Palestinian militant group when he swerved a 20-ton bulldozer out of a construction site and onto Jerusalem's busy Jaffa Road to begin his deadly ride. Most likely, said Police Commissioner Dudi Cohen, it was "a spontaneous attack...
...Soraya (Suheir Hammad), a young Palestinian woman born in Lebanon and brought up in Brooklyn, goes to Jaffa to claim money her grandfather lost in the "catastrophe" (the founding of the Israeli state). There she meets handsome young Emad (Saleh Bakri, the young stud from The Band's Visit) and gets embroiled with him in a crime that might be described as the reassignment of property. The politics are plausible, the lead actors charming enough, and it's nice to see Palestine by sunset. But in its making, this is an all-too-familiar melodrama. Ordinary is the last word...
...presence of Israeli security forces, and feared that by voting in Palestinian elections they may be forced to give up the right to live in Jerusalem - an idea Israel says is unfounded. Two hours after the start of polling just 17 people had voted at the small Jaffa Gate post office. The most exciting action came when Israeli settlers and right-wing politicians turned up to protest the fact that Palestinians were allowed to vote in Jerusalem at all. "This is the same as allowing Iraqi voters to vote for Al Qaeda and Zarqawi in a polling station...
...Nidal began life as a privileged bourgeois scion of what was formerly Palestine. His father, Khalil, was a prominent landowner and agricultural merchant in Jaffa who at one time had close ties with Israel's legendary first President, Chaim Weizmann. One of Abu Nidal's elder brothers, Mohammed, is still a prosperous merchant in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Abu Nidal attended school in Jaffa and Jerusalem, but his family fled before the 1948 war that accompanied the foundation of Israel. Eventually the family settled in Beirut. By some accounts, Abu Nidal attended the American University there, where he trained...