Tel Aviv’s Hottest Area Demands a ‘Nationalism Premium’

A Jewish developer recently made an unsolicited offer for Nouha Siksek’s beachfront home in Jaffa, Tel Aviv’s historic port. With land prices surging in the city and the run-down neighborhood undergoing a major face-lift, he was prepared to pay millions of dollars for the two-story house, planning to raze it and build an apartment tower with views of the Mediterranean. Siksek said no. “I’m not interested in the money,” says Siksek, 69, sitting with fingers intertwined on her black leather couch, a mural of the Dome of the Rock—one of Islam’s holiest sites—on the wall behind her. “Where would I go?” she says. “My father was buried here. My uncles were buried here. I want to be buried here with them.”

The quandary Siksek and her neighbors face is an economic distillation of the struggle over land in Israel. Prices have almost tripled in some parts of Jaffa since 2010, enriching—on paper, at least—many of the area’s 16,500 Arabs. But cashing out means surrendering to a wave of new residents, mainly Jewish, and hastening the end of 1,400 years of Arab presence in the area. What’s resulted is a market in which buyers must pay what could be called a “nationalism premium,” the extra cash needed to persuade sellers to disregard ancestral loyalties. “Everyone has a price,” says Abed Abou Shhadeh, a member of a prominent family that’s been in Jaffa for at least seven generations. “But the price is outrageous, and a big portion of them just don’t sell.”