Haifa as a wounded city

Karen Till defines wounded cities as cities that have undergone a historical process of physical destruction, displacement, personal and social trauma, and ongoing violence. The forms of violence that afflict wounded cities have persisted for decades and have long defined their social and spatial relationships.Footnote ¹³ The events that have left a gaping wound in the urban fabric of Haifa and shaped its planning in recent years occurred in April 1948 with the expulsion of the Palestinian inhabitants and the subsequent declaration of the state of Israel.

After the military operation to demolish the Old Town – an area extending from the city's eastern seaport to the slopes of Mount Carmel, comprising homes, markets, cafés, clubs and shops – the area became 300,000 cubic metres of mounds of rubble. As W. J. T. Mitchell explains, ‘The expulsion of the local inhabitants is not enough – the landscape itself must be cleared of vestiges of them, their demands, and their history’.Footnote ¹⁴ Of a population of around 70,000, only about 3,500 Palestinians remained in Haifa, and they were relocated to the neighbourhood of Wadi Nisnas, inhabiting homes of Palestinians who had been deported or had fled. ‘It's a horrific thing to see a dead city’, Golda Meyerson (Meir) reported following her visit to Haifa a few days after its occupation.Footnote ¹⁵ Ariella Azoulay notes that visual materials illustrate the scale of the Palestinian calamity (nakba in Arabic).Footnote ¹⁶ Fig. 1 shows Haifa in the wake of a military operation that began in May 1948, as part of the Jewish leadership's determination to obliterate the Arab towns. It was intended that the refugees who had fled or had been deported from these towns would have nowhere to return, and that those who remained would no longer feel at home.

Fig. 1 View of the destruction of the Old Town. Photograph by Jim Pringel, public domain.

Any Palestinian homes that were still standing were quickly deemed to be abandoned state-owned property. Within a few months, and with the municipality's encouragement, Jews (mostly immigrants from North Africa) replaced the Palestinian residents of Wadi Salib. Thus the Palestinian town was not only wiped out but continued to be destroyed and violently obliterated through seizure and appropriation. In the summer of 1959 hundreds of the neighbourhood's residents, fed up with living in abysmal conditions in the abandoned and crumbling homes with no infrastructure, staged violent demonstrations in the streets of the well-to-do Hadar HaCarmel neighbourhood. In their fury at their continued neglect and deprivation by the authorities, they threw stones, blocked roads, set cars on fire, broke shop windows and looted stores. Their protests brought to public attention the egregious gap between the living conditions in the posh neighbourhoods of Haifa's upper slopes and the disgraceful living conditions in the lower town. They prompted the mayor at the time to accelerate the relocation of all residents of Wadi Salib to apartment buildings in established Jewish neighbourhoods. Thus, as Yfaat Weiss points out, Wadi Salib was twice emptied of its residents.Footnote ¹⁷ By the end of this ten-year process, the neighbourhood had been entirely cleared. Many homes were demolished; others were sealed up to prevent squatting, abandoned and exposed to the ravages of time and vandalism. The neighbourhood became a site of ruins in the heart of town. It was both a terrifying and spectacular spectacle: a monument that no one had conceived, sprawling across the steep hillside like a tomb that refuses to disappear or assimilate into the city – a testament to what has vanished since April 1948.

Fig. 2 The then mayor of Haifa, Abba Hushi, looks on as the houses of Wadi Salib are demolished. Photograph by Dan, Photo Studio, public domain.

In the early 1980s plans were drawn up for the conservation and development of Wadi Salib, including designs for an Artists’ Quarter – the first conservation plan in Haifa.Footnote ¹⁸ The conversion of empty Palestinian neighbourhoods into a bohemian-style Old Town had already been done in Jaffa and in the Arab village of Ein Hud in the Carmel. Israeli culture sought to convert abandoned ruins into spaces for exhibitions and live performances and to repurpose desolate precincts into festival venues. Thus, for example, the Acre Festival of Israeli theatre was established in the early 1980s in the Crusader-age fortress complex of Ulamot HaAbirim (the Knights' Halls), after stripping it of all traces of its past legacy and Palestinian identity. In Wadi Salib, however, the high maintenance costs, the enormous investment required to develop a park, the buildings’ dilapidated condition, and the comparatively low value of the land made the Artists’ Quarter plan economically unfeasible, and it failed to materialize.Footnote ¹⁹ In the thirty years or more since, only a handful of buildings in the area have been conserved. Most are still standing empty.

Thus what was demolished once was demolished yet again. Since the 1990s, Haifa has been gripped by a frenzy of construction. Neglected areas in Wadi Salib have also been slated for new construction, and various projects have been established, such as HaRova (‘the Quarter’) – a building utterly divorced from the historical context of its surroundings. Countering the destruction of the Palestinian town and its ongoing erasure, various artistic works have heralded the return to the urban space and exposed the repressed memory – for instance a series of photographs by Khulood Basel Tannous that she took as a theatre student. These photographs were part of the Layers exhibition (2010), curated by the painter Yaakov Hefetz, one of the instigators and founders of the Pyramida Gallery.Footnote ²⁰ As Basel Tannous explained in an email to me,

Fig. 3 Image of ghosts. A series of photographs at Wadi Salib. Photograph by Khulood Basel Tannous.

Fig. 4 Image of ghosts. A series of photographs at Wadi Salib. Photograph by Khulood Basel Tannous.

Fig. 5 Image of ghosts. A series of photographs at Wadi Salib. Photograph by Khulood Basel Tannous.

Khashabi: an independent theatre established in Haifa in the shadow of a big scandal

Khashabi Ensemble was founded in the autumn of 2011 by a group of students from the University of Haifa's Theatre Department, after staging The Belli Belli Bel directed by Bashar Murkus at the Acre Festival of Alternative Israeli Theatre (earning him the Most Promising Director award). The play was based on excerpts from Memory for Forgetfulness by Mahmoud Darwish, in which Darwish describes a single day during the Israeli siege of Beirut in August 1982.Footnote ²¹ Through a mosaic of memoirs, historical excerpts, song stanzas and a love story, a picture emerges of Palestinian life under fire and among bombed ruins. The stage language was inspired by Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett. According to the production's programme,

After that production, Murkus and his partners – Henry Andrawes, Shaden Kanboura, Khulood Basel Tannous and the stage designer Majdala Khoury – decided to establish the Khashabi Ensemble. As Murkus explained,

The Khashabi project is led by members of the same age group, who went through theatre training together. Initially, they performed at theatre festivals or in collaboration with other theatres. For example, in July 2013, at the Masrahid Festival in Acre – a festival of one- or two-person shows in Arabic – they staged A New Middle East. Based on a play by Muataz Abu Salah, it was directed by Murkus, and jointly produced with the Oyoun Theatre based in Majdal Shams, in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. In it, Amal Kayse (Oyoun Theatre) played a woman who is buried alive, and Henry Andrawes (Khashabi) portrayed a faceless soldier. The stage action made the audience part of the burial event and the show won the Best Production award at the Masrahid Festival.Footnote ²⁴

In 2014, Murkus and his partners, along with actors of the Al-Midan Theatre in Haifa, took part in a study of political (national-security) prisoners in Israeli prisons. This led to the play The Parallel Time – written and directed by Murkus, based on the story of Walid Daqqa – a Palestinian citizen of Israel, who in 1987 was convicted of involvement in the abduction and murder of an Israeli soldier, Moshe Tamam. His legal battle to prove his innocence failed, and the military court in Lod sentenced him to life in prison. The play follows the legal battle of a character by the name of Wadia – a political prisoner serving a twenty-year sentence – for his right to marry his beloved Fida. At the heart of the plot is the ‘Oud Pact’ that gradually forms between the prisoners, who wish to build a musical instrument to play at the wedding of Wadia and Fida. Their conversations turn to how to obtain the materials to build the instrument, and how to form its round shape. Salah proposes using the wooden boards of a backgammon set. The act of converting these into an oud (a lute-like musical instrument with a pear-shaped body and short neck) represents a search for meaning, since a game whose sole purpose is to pass the time becomes a tool for artistic expression and thereby of resistance through art and culture. The round belly of the oud is also a metaphor for Wadia and Fida's ardent desire for a child. Wadia cannot resist the temptation to divulge the secret and calls Fida on a mobile phone that he has managed to keep hidden. Hiding in a toilet cubicle, he excitedly tells her about the Oud Pact. A guard enters the cubicle and overhears the conversation. Wadia's punishment is then powerfully conveyed, with Wadia bearing a heavy torture device on his back (like Jesus carrying the cross on the Via Dolorosa). After a surreal wedding scene – a groomless wedding, with Fida, veiled in a wedding gown and carrying a bouquet of flowers, and Wadia's cellmates, holding balloons, walking about in a circle – Henry Andrawes, who portrays Wadia, then emerges from behind the scenes and reads a letter from Daqqa – either in character, or as himself, the actor:

In Diana Taylor's terms, the play removes Daqqa's letter from the archives and transforms it into a repertoire – that is, the play delivers it in a live, physical mannerFootnote ²⁶ – comprising mise en scènes of Daqqa's description of ‘parallel time’, and exploring the prisoners’ relationship with objects, visits and hope. One such scene is a re-enactment of ‘photo development’ – Palestinian prison slang for lying on the bed, after a visit by one's girlfriend or wife, staring at the ceiling, and reconstructing intimate moments experienced during the visit. When such archival materials are performed, a reality is created – one which, according to Erica Fisher-Lichte, has transformative potential that helps establish a sociopolitical collective that engages in a creative endeavour.Footnote ²⁷ Thus the play offers spectators an opportunity to participate in a liminal alternative reality, in which a prison becomes a creative site that infuses life with meaning.

In April 2015, after forty-four productions in Arabic, the play was staged for the first time with a Hebrew translation on the occasion of Palestinian Prisoners’ Day.Footnote ²⁸ But on the evening of the premiere Ortal Tamam – niece of the soldier whom Daqqa was convicted of murdering – led a protest demonstration at the entrance of the Al-Midan Theatre. Word of the protest reached the media, Facebook and YouTube, sparking a big scandal – such that eventually brought an end to Al-Midan Theatre's activity. Its cast, unpaid for months on end, tried to continue working voluntarily, but they were unable to hold out and left, one by one. This marked the end of an era of establishment-backed Palestinian theatre in Israel, in which the city's establishment recognized the right of all its inhabitants to culture, and theatre creators agreed to produce such culture with the state's financial assistance.

In the wake of the furore, Murkus was interviewed in the Hebrew media and said, ‘I need to understand that I am not in a democracy, because this country tells me, “Bashar, you can't say what you want”. I've now understood that, and from today I start to act accordingly.’Footnote ²⁹ Consequently, in the summer of 2015 Khashabi members rented a building at 10 al-Khatib Street, and began converting it into a theatre. The Khashabi Ensemble is not supported by the Israeli establishment but by European civic organizations – including the Rosa Luxembourg Foundation – and local commercial and philanthropic bodies. The ensemble was registered as a non-profit in 2012, thus obtaining legal status. Since language is a key component of culture and identity, the plays are staged in Arabic with simultaneous English translation – an arrangement that also accommodates many Hebrew-speakers.

Haunted location: the theatre building as a manifestation of return

The politics behind the location of theatres in Haifa is echoed in the theatrical events. In some instances, a theatre's location profoundly affects both the events and the theatrical content. Al-Khatib Street is situated on the city's eastern slope. At one end of it stands the monumental Law Courts building (inaugurated in 2001); at the other, scattered dilapidated houses and buildings – some abandoned, some sealed and some serving as workshops. It lies at the edge of the Old Town, most of whose street names have been converted into Hebrew names alluding to Israel's pre-independence history. The entire area was formerly known as Jamaat al-Istiklal – after the mosque that was built there in the 1920s. Above al-Khatib Street is Paris Square (formerly Khamra Square); built in the Ottoman period, it was a major plaza during the British Mandate period. Unlike neighbouring streets, al-Khatib Street has not been given a Hebrew name – perhaps because it is merely a back alley, rather than a major thoroughfare – making it one of the few vestiges of an environment that has been symbolically and physically eradicated.

In January 2018 I met with architect Walid Karkabi, then director of the Conservation Department of the Municipality of Haifa, to uncover the ‘archaeology’ of the building that had been converted to serve as the Khashabi Theatre. According to Tobi Fenster, micro-geography – including what she calls the ‘archaeology of an address’ – is a methodology that allows for an alternative reading of space by analysing planning and legal documents in the building's files. These documents make it possible to trace the historiography of any given address from the period before 1948, through the 1948 crisis, to the present day.Footnote ³⁰ In the case of Haifa and other ‘mixed cities’, they reveal the names of homeowners, building permits, correspondence with the authorities on various issues, and more.

According to a 1933 document, the theatre building belonged to Yusuf Khatib and Mohammed Ibrahim Khatib, members of a Muslim family belonging to Haifa's economic elite during the Mandate period. When they originally bought the building, it was a single-storey structure on a street known as ‘New Street’, as it lay beyond what was commonly called the ‘Old Town.’ Haifa City Council then decided to rename the street ‘al-Khatib Street’.

None of the Khatib family members, it seems, remained in Haifa after 1948, and their family home was then declared ‘absentee property’. In 1951 it was leased by one Eliyahu Bilaus, who received a permit to make changes. Today, the house belongs to a Hong Kong real-estate company with a legal representative in Israel, with whom the members of the ensemble arranged the rental. Before that, it had been abandoned for around ten years – and before that, it had served as a carpentry workshop and then as a restaurant. In the corner of the central space of the house there remains, to this day, a mural of cornucopias, symbolizing prosperity and wealth.

The building was converted into a theatre in the summer of 2015 with the help of members of the local community. When a building is remodelled in this way, periods and spaces appear to become entwined and to coexist: one is the new emerging structure, which is real in the physical sense; the other is the past and memories etched in it and associated with the various historical narratives of the city. Gay McAuley, who has studied the impact of theatrical works staged in ‘reuse buildings’, uses the concept of matrix of sensibility, coined by the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, to denote theatre as an urban practice that is rooted and emerges in certain buildings, urban ways of transport, social life and the politics of a given town, in support of theatre culture.Footnote ³¹ Situating the Khashabi Theatre in the home of a displaced Palestinian family harks back to a Palestinian Haifa that no longer exists, of homeowners who became refugees overnight. This urban setting marks a return to an urban space that embodies the transition to the future in which Haifa's past is embedded. It is not a return in the form of conservation imposed ‘from above’ that reshapes the story; rather, it is a re-entry into Haifa's history – one that conveys presence, movement and creativity and unveils what has been erased and hidden. As a building with a multi-layered archaeology, the house triggers memory, reinforcing a sense of belonging and a claim of possession. Thus, by converting this particular structure on al-Khatib Street, the Khashabi Ensemble allow us to imagine both what has been erased and the future through performances about their actual and theatrical spaces.

Fig. 6 The entrance to Khashabi Theatre. Photograph by Henry Andrawes.

Sitt Bil-Auffah: smell, taste, sound and memory

Sitt Bil-Auffah – the production that marked the inauguration of the new theatre building – is a ‘theatrical dinner’ performed by actresses Shaden Kanboura and Khulood Basel Tannous. Based on the memories of their respective families, it began with the performers introducing themselves, addressing the viewers, welcoming them, and offering a blessing of Haifa, with the audience responding enthusiastically. They then drew back the large white lace curtain – a cross between a theatre curtain and a domestic one – that divided the stage from the auditorium. During the show, Shaden stood centre stage behind a heavy wooden table and prepared sitt bil-auffah – a traditional Palestinian dish that is customary during olive harvest season, consisting of bulgur, lentils and various spices.

Using a kitchen as the dramatic space marks home as both a personal, private realm and a political one. As she prepared the food, Shaden's story blended with that of her grandmother as a child in the village of al-Bassa.Footnote ³² Unlike the endlessly chatty Shaden, Khulood played a taciturn character, who conveyed her family's stories through the fancy, stylish dresses her grandmother used to wear, which hung behind her as part of the stage set. During the performance Khulood put these on, one on top of the other, played the music her grandmother loved to listen to, and, in just a few words, spoke about her love of dancing. The empty, hanging dresses evoked the ghost of the grandmother which became presence through her granddaughter's body and the music.

The repeated lines voiced by Shaden in various forms during the performance expressed the geography of her identity, and the ‘here and now’ of her generation:

The taste, smell and texture of the food and meal convey memories and spark personal, family and national memories. Through them we remember not only the food but also the place, the mise en scènes, and the profound emotions experienced at the time of the events. During the performance, the hall filled with the scent of fried onions and cooking lentils – casting the spectators in the role of household members, watching the food being prepared:

As though recounting a family story, Shaden remaps the geography of displacement, which she is a part of:

The voice representing the Occupation is dubbed by an imitation of an imitation, as Shaden ironically recounts, and emulates her grandmother's father, who used to shape his hair to mimic various figures, including Israel's first prime minister, Ben-Gurion, announcing Israel's independence – a ghost of the Palestinian Nakba:

At the end of the performance Shaden and Khulood handed out portions of the lentil stew, some prepared in advance and some cooked during the show, to members of the audience. On the opening night – which was also the theatre's inaugural night – we wandered into the street with our portions of lentil stew, stood around in groups, or sat on the steps. Groups came together and fell apart, amidst a medley of languages (Arabic, English, German and some Hebrew). The gatherings and the shared meal created a sense of togetherness and embodied the recognition of belonging to a place that conveys the memory of the local community. Through the theatrical event the contemporary Palestinian community returned to a space that its members had been uprooted from – and thus what used to be hidden and repressed was present once again, belying the attempt to bury both the violent past and the urban renewal efforts in the present.

The Year of the Snow: objects and ghosts

The dramaturgy of The Year of the Snow – featuring Andrawes, Kanboura and Basel Tannous – was based on memories of the residents of Haifa, the actors’ immediate families, and on the historical study by Rabinowitz and Mansour of a snowstorm that hit the region in February 1950.Footnote ³⁴ Their study included short videos that were uploaded online, in which someone enters the same living room, sits down and answers the question put to them by the invisible interviewer: ‘What do you remember from the snow of 1950?’ These videos prepare viewers for the encounter with a typical living room of the Palestinian bourgeoisie and respond to the repressed memory of the urban space. According to Manar Hassan, in both the Zionist and the Palestinian historiography and discourse, Palestinian society was imagined as a rural society that had not undergone substantial urbanization.Footnote ³⁵ However, the Palestinian intellectual Azmi Bishara (1996) points out that modernization was, in fact, well under way in Palestinian towns before 1948.Footnote ³⁶ ‘The real tragedy happened to the urban Arabs’, said Palestinian writer Emil Habibi. ‘In Haifa, for example, they dispersed in all directions. They were entirely uprooted and disappeared. That's what happened to me, too.’Footnote ³⁷

The Year of the Snow captures the disaster that befell a family who remained in Haifa but were expelled from their spacious home to a small, cramped apartment. Their original house had been divided into twelve apartments, each housing a Jewish family. The play begins following the death of the mother and father, who failed to fulfill their dream of regaining possession of their stolen home. It focuses on the children: the eldest, Jamal – who collects items from the city's abandoned houses and streets in hope of selling them to raise enough money to buy back the spacious family home – and his sisters Mariam (who is waiting for her fiancé) and young Zina, who suffers from a respiratory illness. Their costumes, in keeping with the fashions in the British Mandate period, underscore their urban character: Jamal wears a tailored suit, Mariam an off-the-shoulder black dress with a plunging neckline, and young Zina a colourful dress. The stage action is marked by performative repetition. The play is not a realistic psychological story but modelled on the theatre of the absurd, with intertextual references to various iconic images of the modern theatre canon – such as The New Tenant by Eugène Ionesco, where objects are hoarded in a small room, ultimately suffocating its occupier. Similarly, the bird in a birdcage that Jamal finds and brings to Mariam as a birthday present echoes August Strinberg's Miss Julie. (Mariam roams the city with it and ultimately wrings the bird's neck.)

The set – designed by Majdala Khoury – features the highly cluttered living room of a middle-class Palestinian home at the centre of the auditorium, with furniture and items spilling out beyond the set into the theatre's foyer – reinforcing the theatre's domestic feel. The steps down to the front door of the house suggest a basement apartment, heightening the sense of impending, unheimlich (uncanny) peril, with all the interpretations and contradictory senses of that Freudian term – namely close, intimate and familiar, cosy yet terrifying. The placement of the spectators was also significant: they sat on bleachers on either side of the stage, with Arabic-speakers on one side and on the other viewers who needed translation through subtitles projected on a screen. Although this was done for technical reasons, it also separated the two audiences, allowing the non-Arabic-speaking spectators to gain a closer look of a gathering of the actual Palestinian community in the theatre, thus evoking the ghosts and the memory through the unconventional movement of objects and furniture.

While props in a production are actual objects that inhabit the theatre, they may also be markers of missing realities. The physical ‘things’ that repeatedly appear in the play become the essential ghostly mechanism. Jamal collects the objects offstage, effectively gathering the memories of their owners and making them present again, through stage action and words. When he first appears, Jamal brings in four chairs and then a dining table, arranges the chairs, and performs various ceremonial acts – gazing at the image of his father hanging on the wall, lighting a candle, turning on the old record player and playing classical music. He then brings in coffee tables, dressers, clothes racks, mirrors, picture frames and more. These generate action in the play and replicate the theatre mechanism itself, thus making them come alive. When Jamal feels that the father is ‘looking at him’, he removes the picture from the wall – but instead of hiding it, he places it on an empty chair at the table, centre stage. After Jamal removes the clock from the wall Zina continues to gaze at the spot where it used to hang, thereby making it still present. Similarly, the wristwatches that Jamal gathers invoke the city's missing residents. In the final scene, the objects fill the acting space: the living room has become a storeroom of mementos. The siblings sit, in frozen poses, around the family table. After a while, Zina walks up to the front door, looks outside and says,

She leaves. Jamal runs after her, and returns, carrying her in his arms, placing her lifeless body on a chair.

The objects and dramaturgy evoke the ghosts of the city, giving Palestinian urbanism a dual presence – both in imagination and during the theatrical event. The actors and objects that flesh out the ghosts of the former inhabitants of the historic town not only tell their stories but most particularly harness the theatre as a medium that enables the encounter with inexpungible memories.

Final remarks: haunted past and the return to Haifa

This article has sought to shed light on the first season of Khashabi Theatre, and how it created a ‘dual presence’ of Palestinian urbanism by exploring the history and archaeology of the house at 10 al-Khatib Street, which was reused and converted into the theatre. Located in a wounded environment that bears the marks of historical violence, the building highlights the injustice of the urban renewal process currently under way. Thus spectators are invited to take part in hopeful performative efforts. These are not only ‘utopian performative’, as Jill Dolan puts it, or a simplistic representation of a utopian future, but rather a social and aesthetic framework that turns participants into active partners in processes of change and political activism.Footnote ³⁹ Before and after each performance some ninety people mill about on al-Khatib Street and thus bring the Palestinian urban space back to life. Al-Khatib Street has become a site of social gatherings and occasions, ranging from street parties to cultural events. At the theatrical event, the community is present and becoming – as Lefebvre dubs participation in the process of a city's emergence, through daily routine, art and culture. Theatre – as a cultural institution that has always been associated with cities and civic life, and as an artistic practice that allows alternative places to be established – plays a key role in the struggle for the ‘right to the city’, which is also the struggle for the right of return.

The return of the ghosts to the space from which they were uprooted was reflected in the productions of the theatre's first season. The smells, tastes and stories of Sitt Bil-Auffah and the objects and actions in The Year of the Snow conjure up not only what has been lost but also the tangible presence of loss. All these are gripped by the ghosts and require narrative and theatrical actions to rebuild their connection with their past. The qualities of theatre as a craft of time, material, action and process produce moments of repetition. This return is made possible through the actors, designers, director and audience, who come together and tell their stories – in a space of ‘relative autonomy’. In this theatrical space, a ‘dual presence’ of Palestinian urbanism is being forged. As Bashar Murkus summed it up in conversation with Daniel Teehan,

It is said that creating a theatre group is ‘easy’ – it is developing and maintaining it over time that is difficult. This was not the case for the Khashabi Ensemble. Prior to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, its founders managed to launch five new seasons, and were invited to perform at European theatres and festivals and gained international renown. It is quite possible that part of the theatre's international success should be attributed to its practitioners’ triumph in making a place for themselves, and their ongoing struggle to the right of the city while intervening in Haifa's urban space through the right to artistic expression.