Migrations, mémoire sociale et temporalités à Jisr al-Zarqāʾ : enquête sur l’histoire d’un village arabe israélien assiégé
Résumé
Along the highway that runs from Tel Aviv to Haifa lies the Palestinian Israeli village of Jisr al-Zarqa, the only Arab village that remained on the coast after the 1948 war / Nakba. Today, Jisr al-Zarqa is one of the poorest communities in Israel: its inhabitants experiment various social, political and economic hardships which seem to be directly related to a situation of "multiple marginality": as a Muslim, Arabic-speaking population within a mostly Jewish, Hebrew-speaking Israeli society; as a stigmatized group on accounts of its -real or imagined- African origins within Palestinian society; as people suspected of having maintained close ties with Zionist settlers during the British Mandate; finally, as a geographically besieged community, locked between the sea in the west, kibbutz Ma'agan Micha'el in the north, the Ramat ha-Nadiv natural reserve in the north-east, the Tel Aviv-Haifa highway in the east, and an earth embankment separating it from the wealthy Jewish town of Caesarea in the south. For decades, the people of Jisr al-Zarqa have been labelled -and often stigmatized- as "black" or "Sudanese" by both Arabs and Jews in Israel. The association of blackness with slave status or social inferiority has been instrumental in making this community a "minority within a minority" in modern Israeli society. However, the population of Jisr al-Zarqa is much less homogeneous than what has often been suggested in the media and retained in Israeli public discourses. Hence, investigating the historical roots of the village allows questioning the "Sudanese paradigm" and bringing out a far more complex picture. From a preliminary inquiry two important facts can be ascertained: 1) Jisr al-Zarqa's current population is composed of groups of various geographical origins, including present-day Palestine, Jordan, Iraq, Syria, Egypt and Sudan; 2) Different, sometimes conflicting, narratives coexist as to the migratory trajectories of groups whose descendants founded the village in the 1920s. Based on archival research and oral interviews, this paper reviews a number of different migration narratives pertaining to Jisr al-Zarqa. It examines how both written sources and oral accounts locate migration flows within specific temporalities. What are the various migratory sequences that are reported? How are they inscribed in the broader history of the South-East Mediterranean region, in particular in Ottoman history? In the case of oral sources, how does generational difference impact upon the perception of historical migrations and their framing into a narrative?