Marina Parisinou

At The Regent

Two heads, one bald, one full-hair, are peeking out from above the red velvet chairs. Their owners, Anwar Ben Badis and Mona Hajjar Halaby, who conduct the Arabic and English tours, respectively, of the Jerusalem, We Are Here (JWRH) interactive documentary, are exchanging family memories of the place. Dorit Naaman, the creator and director, joins them as up on the big screen fragments of an old reel start rolling.

It’s July 2015 and we are filming the opening shots of JWRH at the Regent, the longest-running cinema in Jerusalem. Today it has a different name, but to us, as we go about remapping this area and bringing back, albeit digitally, the people and the life that existed here till 1948, it is and always will be the Regent.

Filming at the Regent – July 2015
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Dorit Naaman

The Assassination of Count Folke Bernadotte

The junction of Hapalmach and Ha’Gdud Ha’Ivri streets in Jerusalem is unassuming. Hapalmach  — an acronym meaning strike forces/company — is a street named after the elite militant wing of the Haganah, the underground army of the Jewish community in pre-1948 Palestine. Ha’Gdud Ha’Ivri, or the Jewish Legion, was established following the British conquest of Palestine from the Ottomans in World War I, and disbanded in 1921. Like many other streets in Katamon, the names assigned after 1948 commemorate the 1948 war. But the victor did not leave a trace to the horrific events of 17 September 1948. 

Here, the Stern Gang (a right wing Jewish paramilitary group) ambushed a convoy of vehicles carrying Count Folke Bernadotte, the U.N. Mediator in Palestine, and assassinated him.

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Anwar Ben Badis

The House with the Stairs That Hug You…

A few days ago, I guided a tour in the Talbiyeh neighborhood, and we came to the house of Dimitri Hanna (the current address is Disraeli 13). When entering the house through the gate, one is astonished by the symmetrical staircases, both rolling like a vine, as if hugging the one who enters. I felt the stairs’ hug, and I heard a voice: “Don’t be afraid, we, the stairs, speak Arabic. Ahlan Wa Sahlan. Welcome.”

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Anwar Ben Badis

The Second Destruction of the Semiramis

On Wednesday, 16th May, on the eve of Ramadan, I guided a group of people in the neighborhood of Katamon. In the tour I discussed the relationship between memory and history, and I told them about the bloodbath that took place at the Semiramis hotel on the night of 5th January 1948.

Rescue efforts at the bombed Semiramis hotel
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Mona Hajjar Halaby

Entering My Mother’s House

“Come on, let’s knock at the door,” urged my Israeli friend, Dan*, “it looks like someone’s in the garden.”

I was in Jerusalem working on our interactive documentary, Jerusalem, We Are Here. That day Dan and I were strolling down a public trail, which used to be the original Jaffa–Jerusalem railroad tracks. He had requested that I show him my mother’s house in Lower Baq’a, a West Jerusalem neighborhood.

Then I saw the blue gate and walled-in garden of my mother’s house. I had seen the house from the outside many times before, always with a tightening in my heart. Once I even toured the garden while the current owners were on vacation, thanks to the upstairs neighbor, who had a key to the garden gate.

“But Dan, what if they don’t let us in?” I asked, hesitating about going further, worrying that my request would be turned down, anticipating the same pain of rejection many Palestinians have experienced at the front door of their ancestral homes.

“But Mona, you won’t know unless you try.” And Dan was right.

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Dorit Naaman

Lessons for the Future from Jerusalem’s Palestinian Past

The following was published in The Conversation, “an independent source of news and views from the academic and research community, delivered direct to the public“, on 13 May 2018 and revised on 15 May 2018.

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Dorit Naaman

On the “Here” in Jerusalem, We Are Here

In 2007 I rented an apartment in Katamon for a six-month sabbatical from my university in Canada. I grew up in a different part of Israeli Jerusalem, but my parents had moved to a new development in Katamon (over the old soccer field), and as I had a one-year old baby, I wanted to be close to them.  When I arrived, I could tell that the house I rented had been built before 1948 in the International architectural style common in the 1930s-40s. The staircase exuded spaciousness, but the apartment itself was small and entirely remodelled. In fact, what was once a two-family duplex, was now subdivided into seven or eight apartments.

I knew very little about Katamon, but I did know that it was Palestinian before 1948. A few years earlier I read Ghada Karmi’s memoir In Search of Fatima and while the book left a deep impression on me, her Katamon and the one I was wandering with a stroller in tow did not quite align.  For one thing, there were no markers for any of the landmarks, such as the Semiramis or Bellevue family-owned hotels, the Lebanese and Iraqi consulates, or the perimeters of security zone A, which the British set up when the “troubles” (to use an imperial euphemism) started. How could I find out where those places were?

Khalil and Sultana Sakakini’s house
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Admin

We Are Here!

We are excited to introduce this new informational website to supplement the main Jerusalem, We Are Here project website. It will serve as our main platform for all project-related information. (We will continue to cross-post on Facebook.)

More importantly, this website will host our blog – a space to represent all our voices and a vehicle for continuing to tell the story of Palestinian Jerusalem. We hope that these voices will include not only those of our team members but also some of the many contributors to this project as well as other guests’.

We invite you to take a few moments to browse the site. You will find details on how the project came to be and who made it happen by contributing in different ways, big and small (About); how the project has been received in the media and in academia, and the awards it has earned (News); where it has been screened so far and is scheduled to be presented in the future (Events); and a slew of resources (books, articles, films and websites/social media pages) we recommend that relate to the subject (Resources).

If you would like to be notified of new events and blog posts, please use the Subscription form at the bottom of the page to sign up for email updates.

We look forward to continuing the conversation!
The Jerusalem, We Are Here Team

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