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About half of Jaffa’s 20,000 Arab residents live in premises that belonged to Jaffa’s original Arab residents, and were abandoned during the War of Independence. The state expropriated this abandoned property and housed Arabs in the premises who were “internal refugees” – that is, Arabs from Jaffa whom the state evicted from their homes, then gave them the right to live in abandoned Arab homes as protected tenants.
That was not the end of the damage done to Jaffa’s Arabs. When their status as homeowners was stolen from them and they instead became protected tenants, the state did everything in its power to restrict them. It determined that the right to protected tenancy ended with the third generation, so most of Jaffa’s young people found themselves at risk of eviction in the house where they grew up and in which their families have lived since the 1960s.