Every year I visit my family, and I am faced with an indelible image that is somehow buried in the heart of Tel Aviv. As a young woman I thought it a strange curiosity: wedged between skyscrapers and three-story apartment houses, a ramshackle village of small stone houses and thin trailing alleys. It was like seeing a wigwam on Wall Street.
More bizarre in the fact that it was totally ignored by everyone and everything surrounding it. I speak of the remnants of the Palestinian village of Sumayl pronounced Soo-Mey-l. No one ever mentioned to me that there had been a Palestinian village in the heart of Tel Aviv.
Maybe it was just too obvious to mention. When I first noticed Sumayl in the late s, I had already been living in Israel for many years. I had walked up and down the streets of Tel Aviv many times. No one had ever mentioned the name Sumayl. There were remnants of the reality of Palestine everywhere in Israel β in Jerusalem, in Haifa, in the many Arab villages that had remained intact throughout the Galilee in particular, and in other places too.
These Palestinian locals were acknowledged, even if at times begrudgingly. The first place I lived after emigrating to Israel was a school next to the large Palestinian village of Abu Gosh, outside of Jerusalem.
We used to buy popsicles at the corner store in Abu Gosh in the summer heat. I was 15, then. That was Abu Gosh is now the size of a town. No one denied Abu Gosh then, or now. But Tel Aviv was an Israeli invention, an Israeli city. Even though it sat right next to Jaffa, a largely Palestinian port town, the city proper of Tel Aviv was known as Israeli through and through, as though there had been nothing there previously.
