Trapped Neighborhoods, Trapped Identities: Wadi Salib and Musrara Compared, 1949-1967

Using the concept of “trapped neighborhoods,” this paper focuses on two impoverished neighborhoods between the years 1949 and 1967 that were a symbol of Mizraḥi protest in Israel: Wadi Salib in Haifa and Musrara in Jerusalem. We consider their residents as not only people living in the margins of the city but also as communities that were trapped within the cultural, social and geographical margins on the border of the Arab existence and recent past, and the Jewish-Israeli present. While Musrara was “trapped” between a physical border in the Eastern-Arab part of the Jerusalem, and an imagined border on its western side, Wadi Salib was “trapped” between “upper” and “lower” Haifa, and between the Palestinian repressed past and the Arab-Jewish identity of its residents. The article examines both the nature of the borders and the mechanisms of crossing them.