Jaffa Before the Emptying: A City Built on Citrus and Sea
In the spring of 1948, Jaffa was the cultural and commercial heartbeat of Palestinian Arab life. Its port had for generations shipped the celebrated shamouti orange — the Jaffa orange — to markets across Europe. Its streets held newspapers, banks, cinemas, and coffee houses. The United Nations Special Committee on Palestine estimated the city’s Arab population at roughly 70,000 on the eve of the war. As Walid Khalidi documents in his foundational work for the Institute for Palestine Studies, Jaffa was among the most densely populated and economically developed Palestinian Arab cities — a place whose name, in the minds of its people, was inseparable from the scent of orange blossom and the sound of the sea.
What happened to that city between April and May 1948 was not a gradual dispersal. It was a collapse — sudden, violent, and irreversible.
The Irgun Attack on Manshiyya and the Shelling of Civilian Jaffa
The neighbourhood of Manshiyya lay on Jaffa’s northern edge, abutting the Jewish city of Tel Aviv. It was from this seam that the most devastating blow came. Beginning on 25 April 1948, the Irgun — the Zionist paramilitary organisation commanded by Menachem Begin — launched a sustained assault on Manshiyya. Mortar fire and artillery were directed not only at defensive positions but into densely populated residential streets. Adam LeBor, in City of Oranges: Arabs and Jews in Jaffa (2006), reconstructs the terror of those days: families sheltering in ground-floor rooms as shells fell on the neighbourhood, the dead left in rubble, the living fleeing toward the port or southward along the coastal road.
The assault on Manshiyya was part of a broader Irgun operation that Israeli military historians, including Benny Morris in 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War, acknowledge involved deliberate psychological pressure on the civilian population. Mortar rounds were fired into Jaffa’s market areas and residential quarters. The UN Conciliation Commission for Palestine archives, held at UNISPAL, contain contemporary reports documenting the panic the bombardment produced and the breakdown of any organised Arab defence of the city.
The Flight from Jaffa Port: Boats, Bodies, and the Open Sea
As the shelling intensified, the population of Jaffa moved toward the only exit that remained open: the port. What followed was one of the most harrowing scenes of the Palestinian Nakba. Tens of thousands of people — the elderly, mothers with infants, families carrying whatever they could lift — converged on the waterfront. Boats of every size, including small fishing vessels wholly inadequate for the open Mediterranean, were loaded far beyond any safe capacity.
LeBor’s account in City of Oranges draws on the testimony of survivors and contemporaneous witnesses to describe the chaos at the quayside: people falling into the water, boats so overloaded that the gunwales barely cleared the sea’s surface, the desperate negotiation for passage. Some vessels headed north toward Acre; others turned south toward Gaza or Egypt. Many passengers had never left Jaffa in their lives. They left now with no certainty of where they would land or whether they would ever return.
The Zochrot organisation, which documents Nakba memory and the geography of destroyed and depopulated Palestinian localities, has recorded testimony from descendants of Jaffa’s displaced regarding the port flight — preserving the spatial and human memory of a departure that was never meant to be permanent. Their Jaffa documentation is accessible through zochrot.org.
From 70,000 to 4,000: The Arithmetic of Erasure
By the time Israeli forces formally entered Jaffa on 13 May 1948 — one day before the declaration of the State of Israel — the city that had held approximately 70,000 Palestinian Arabs was home to no more than an estimated 3,000 to 4,000. Walid Khalidi’s research, published through the Institute for Palestine Studies, places Jaffa among the largest single sites of Palestinian displacement during the 1948 war. The remaining Palestinians were confined to the Ajami neighbourhood under military administration, their movement restricted, their property subject to the Absentee Property Law that the new Israeli state would pass in 1950 — a law that transferred the assets of those who had fled, or been driven, into state and Jewish National Fund hands.
The orange groves outside the city, the warehouses at the port, the family homes of Manshiyya and Jabaliyya and Nuzha — all passed out of Palestinian hands within months. The port that had given the Jaffa orange to the world fell silent as a Palestinian place.
Memory, Denial, and the Ongoing Significance of Jaffa 1948
The Palestinian exodus from Jaffa did not occur in a vacuum of chaos or voluntary decision-making. The UN Conciliation Commission’s contemporary documentation, Khalidi’s historical analysis, and LeBor’s granular reconstruction together establish a clear sequence: military assault, deliberate bombardment of civilian quarters, mass terror, and flight. The question of whether residents expected to return — and were prevented from doing so — sits at the heart of the Palestinian refugee question that the UN General Assembly addressed in Resolution 194 (December 1948), which affirmed the right of refugees wishing to return to their homes to do so at the earliest practicable date.
For Palestinian families now scattered across Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon, and the diaspora, Jaffa is not a historical footnote. It is a lost address — specific streets, specific houses, specific orange trees — that has been carried across generations as both wound and witness.
Sources
- Walid Khalidi and the Institute for Palestine Studies — Palestinian city population data and 1948 displacement analysis
- Adam LeBor, City of Oranges: Arabs and Jews in Jaffa (Bloomsbury, 2006)
- UN Conciliation Commission for Palestine archives, via UNISPAL — United Nations Information System on the Question of Palestine
- Benny Morris, 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War (Yale University Press, 2008)
- UN General Assembly Resolution 194 (III), 11 December 1948
- Zochrot — Jaffa Nakba memory documentation project
