In the shadow of the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem’s Old City lies the “African Quarter” – home to a little-known community of nearly 50 Arab families of African descent.
Descended from Muslim pilgrims from a variety of African countries, they now consider themselves proud Palestinians, despite widespread poverty and occasional discrimination from both Palestinians and Israelis. Several have even participated in violent attacks against Israel.
“We regard ourselves to be Afro-Palestinian,” said community leader Ali Jiddah.
Jiddah, a former member of the radical Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, spent 17 years in Israeli prison for taking part in a 1968 bombing that wounded nine Israelis before he was freed in a prisoner swap. Jiddah, who long ago renounced violence, is now a well-known tour guide in the Old City, offering what he calls an “alternative” perspective on the conflict with Israel.
Afro-Palestinians reside in various Palestinian cities, with large communities in Jerusalem, Gaza and the West Bank town of Jericho.
Some are the descendants of slaves or soldiers brought in during Ottoman times. The forefathers of Jerusalem’s African Quarter are mostly Muslim pilgrims from Chad, Sudan, Nigeria and Senegal who settled here or got stuck during periods of war.
“My father came from Chad, from the Salamat tribe,” said Mousa Qous, 55, director of the African Community Society, a grassroots center that serves black Palestinians in Jerusalem.
Standing under posters of the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Nelson Mandela, he said his father came to Jerusalem on a religious pilgrimage in 1959 and “then decided to stay to fight in the 1967 war.”
Others came with The Arab Salvation Army, an army of volunteers that fought on the Arab side in the 1948 war surrounding Israel’s creation.
“We are originally Nubians from Aswan,” in southern Egypt, said 30 year-old Hanan Bersi.
Some still have their ancestors’ identification documents, like Ibrahim Firawi, whose grandfather came from Sudan’s western region of Darfur.
“We have documents and letters, and even tried to contact the Sudanese Embassy in Jordan to help connect us with family in Sudan,” he said. Showing off his father’s old passport, he said he has not been able to track down any of his relatives.
Historic Palestine was a crossroads for different cultures, and some Palestinians trace back their roots to a range of non-Arab groups, from Kurds to Indians and Afghans. Afro-Palestinians were denied Jordanian citizenship after the 1967 war, as they were not seen as Palestinians.
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“Our parents were foreigners. They were more sensitive as foreigners, and people would tell them that they were foreigners, that their color was such and such,” said Hawa Balalawi, a shop owner whose father was from Chad.
Most of Jerusalem’s Afro-Palestinian residents live in old buildings that were originally built in the 10th century for the city’s poor. Made later into prisons by the Ottomans, the buildings were handed over to the Old City’s Islamic trusteeship during the British Mandate, which rented them to members of the African community because many served as guards or servants at the Al-Aqsa Mosque.
Despite these deep roots to the area, some Palestinians still refer to them with a local derogatory term, “abeed,” Arabic for “slaves,” and to their neighborhood as “habs al-abeed” or the “slaves’ prison.”
“We fought the usage of this term and mentality for many years,” Quos said. “Less people use it now.” But he said racism can still surface, in marriage proposals, for example.
“Sometimes when a black Palestinian wants to marry a white Palestinian woman, some members of her family might object,” he said. “It’s not a phenomenon, and recently, there have been more inter-marriages.”
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“The respect we get from Palestinians is because of our role in the national struggle,” said Jiddah, who sits daily at a café near the Old City’s Damascus Gate sipping Turkish coffee, chain smoking and waving hello to constant passers-by.
“More Catholic than the Pope? We are more Palestinian than Palestinians,” he said.
The first female Palestinian political prisoner was Fatima Bernawi in 1968, of Nigerian ancestry. She was imprisoned for a failed bombing attempt on a cinema in 1967, before being sent into exile. After an interim peace accord in 1993, Bernawi returned to serve as a senior Palestinian police official, and now lives in Jordan.
Qous, the director of the Jerusalem center, spent five years in prison for participating in the first Palestinian intifada, or uprising, in the early 1990s. Like Jiddah, he is a former member of the PFLP who has also put his militant days behind him.
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“I am Palestinian, it shouldn’t matter if I’m white or black,” he said.
Notice how they are not indigineous to this area at all, yet consider themselves “palestinian.” Just because they choose to identify themselves in this way.
Which is pretty much the deal with all those who call themselves palestinian.
A law school graduate, David Lange transitioned from work in the oil and hi-tech industries into fulltime Israel advocacy. He is a respected commentator and Middle East analyst who has often been cited by the mainstream media
A law school graduate, David Lange transitioned from work in the oil and hi-tech industries into fulltime Israel advocacy. He is a respected commentator and Middle East analyst who has often been cited by the mainstream media
