A Confiscated Memory

Until the War of 1948, Wadi Salib was an impoverished Arab neighborhood in Haifa, Israel. A single day of fighting uprooted its residents. Yet Wadi Salib retained its Arab name, even after Jewish immigrants from Morocco resettled it, replacing one layer of existence with another. In 1959, Misrahi protest against continual discrimination turned the neighborhood and into an icon of ethnic strife between Israeli Jews. Nevertheless, its Arab inscription and the acts committed there lingered in its stones. Yfaat Weiss investigates the erasure of Wadi Salib's heritage and its emergence as an Israeli site of memory. At the core of her quest lies the concept of property, as she merges the constraints of former Arab ownership with requirements and restrictions pertaining to urban development and the emergence of memory. Establishing a relationship between Wadi Salib's Arab refugees and subsequent Moroccan evacuees, Weiss questions the Israeli public's eerie lack of awareness about this neighborhood's former inhabitants and the impact of this amnesia on the riots of 1959. Describing the protests in detail, Weiss traces in their complex dynamics the echoes of Wadi Salib's multilayered and hidden history. Through her sensitive reading of this contested real estate, she offers a different perspective on the personal and political making of Israeli identity.