The Bride of the Sea: Safa’s Story

Name: Safa Kassas Younes
Title: Executive Director at Arous El Bahr Association for Women in Jaffa
Languages: Arabic (native), Hebrew, French, English
Identity:

“I am Arab, Muslim, and Palestinian. I live in Israel. It’s complicated, I have a lot of identities.”

Safa was born in Jaffa in 1975, to Siham and Ali Kassas, as the eldest of four children. Safa’s maternal family fled Jaffa in 1948 to Gaza, where they stayed– separated from the rest of their relatives– until after 1967 when some of them were able to return. In 1973, Safa’s mother was married to Ali, a relative of the family who still lived in Jaffa. Her brothers and sisters were unable to leave Gaza, where they stayed and operated a cosmetic manufacturing company until today.

The Story of the Orange

Just watched an excellent documentary from Al Jazeera “Witness.” Interviews with Jewish and Arab Jaffa-ites who recount the history and political imagery of the world-famous Jaffa orange. Touches on environmental ethics, art history, Zionist narrative, colonial dispossession of land, and an Arab-Jewish citrus cooperative that falsifies the notion that Jaffa was always a divided city.

Jaffa- The Orange’s Clockwork

Filmmaker: Eyan Sival

This film shows how Jaffa started out as a Palestinian place name before becoming an Israeli brand name and how the orange harvest shifted from being a joint undertaking into a symbol used by both parties in the conflict.

Archive film and photographs show how propaganda was used to erase the memory of a thriving place where Arabs and Jews worked together.

Art historians and political analysts talk about the images which are projected onto their walls, and elderly orange growers remember the time before their world was destroyed.

Please note that this film will only be available to watch online until March 15.