Jaffa: The Port City That Fed Europe

Before 1948, the harbor at Jaffa (يافا) was the busiest citrus port in the Mediterranean. In a good year, Palestinian farmers shipped 15 million boxes of oranges out of it, their crates stamped with the names of groves in villages that, within a generation, would be wiped from the map. The Shamouti orange, bred and grown in the orchards ringing the city, sat on the tables of London dining rooms and Berlin cafes. The British royal family ate them. For nearly a century, when Europe thought "orange," it thought Jaffa.

This is the story of the port city behind the trade. The story lives on today in the stamp printed on the back of every Jaffa Orange T-Shirt in the FALASTIN collection.

Jaffa Under the Ottomans

Jaffa is one of the oldest continuously inhabited port cities on the Mediterranean, mentioned in Egyptian texts from the 15th century BCE. It traded hands between Pharaohs, Phoenicians, Romans, Crusaders, and Arab caliphates, and by the Ottoman period (1517 to 1917) it had become the main seaport of central Palestine. Under Ottoman rule, it grew into a layered commercial city: the old walled town on a hill overlooking the sea, the citrus orchards stretching inland toward Lydda and Ramla, and the suburb of Manshiyeh spreading north along the coast.

By the late nineteenth century, Jaffa was also a pilgrimage gateway. European travelers to Jerusalem landed there, and the city had hotels, telegraph offices, and a municipal council that issued its own newspapers.

The Orange Empire

Palestinian farmers did not invent the orange, but they perfected a variety the world had not seen. The Shamouti, developed in the mid-1800s in the groves around Jaffa, was sweet, thick-skinned, and nearly seedless, and it survived long sea voyages without bruising. Those three traits made it the first commercial orange of the global market.

By 1939, Palestine was exporting around 15 million crates a year, and Jaffa oranges were the dominant share of Palestinian export revenue. The labor that produced them was largely Palestinian: fellahin families pruning and picking in orchards their grandfathers had planted, dock workers loading boxes onto British, Greek, and Italian steamers, women sorting fruit in the packing houses that ringed the harbor.

The citrus economy was inseparable from the land itself. Farmers maintained elaborate irrigation networks fed from wells and winter rains, and the packing houses employed thousands of workers from villages across the coastal plain. Just as the olive groves of the Palestinian interior represented one form of deep agricultural rootedness, the orange groves of the Jaffa coast represented another. The cultural resonance of both crops endures in the diaspora; the story of the olive is explored in The Palestinian Olive Tree.

The name "Jaffa" became the brand. Crates carried the stamp in Arabic, Hebrew, and English. In European groceries, "Jaffa" meant quality, reliability, and a taste of the eastern Mediterranean. The fuller story of the fruit itself lives in The Palestinian Orange.

A City of Poets and Publishers

Jaffa was not only commerce. Through the 1920s and 1930s, it was one of the cultural capitals of Mandate Palestine. The city had several Arabic-language newspapers, two cinemas (the Nabil and the Apollo), printing presses that exported books across the Arab world, coffee houses where writers and intellectuals gathered, and the literary salon of Khalil Beidas.

The poet Ibrahim Tuqan, brother of Fadwa Tuqan, worked in Jaffa and wrote some of his most famous verse there, including "Mawtini" (My Homeland), later adopted as the national anthem of Iraq and, informally, of Palestine. Edward Said spent part of his childhood in the city. Jaffa had theaters, weddings, soccer teams, and the full texture of a modern urban culture.

April 1948

In early April 1948, as the British Mandate neared its end, the Haganah and Irgun began a sustained offensive on Jaffa. The Irgun assault on the Manshiyeh neighborhood, followed by weeks of mortar fire into the old city, collapsed civic life within days. Panic spread. Thousands of families, believing as many Palestinians did that the displacement would last weeks, loaded what they could carry onto fishing boats or fled north by road toward Ramla and Lydda.

By the time the city formally surrendered on May 13, 1948, the population had fallen from roughly 70,000 Palestinians to around 3,500. Of the 120,000 Palestinians who had called Jaffa and its surrounding villages home, the overwhelming majority never returned.

What Remains

Jaffa today is an old city on a hill, a fishing harbor still in use, a clock tower from 1906 that tourists photograph without knowing its name, and a Palestinian community that never left, now a minority in their own city. The orchards are gone, paved over or absorbed into the sprawl of Tel Aviv. The port handles no cargo of consequence. What is left is memory, held in the kitchens of diaspora families who still cut their oranges the way their grandmothers did.

The same coast shaped its sister cities. Haifa, sixty miles north, shared Jaffa's character as a Palestinian port city transformed by 1948. Further up the coast, Akka (عكا), ancient Acre, held a similar position as a fortified maritime gateway to historic Palestine. Inland, Nablus carries its own version of what survived. For further reading on Jaffa's pre-Nakba life, the Palestine Remembered archive for Jaffa and the Institute for Palestine Studies are starting points.

Frequently Asked Questions

At FALASTIN, we aim to keep that heritage alive through our Jaffa Orange T-Shirt.

100% of profits from FALASTIN are donated to the United Palestinian Appeal.