History
Wadi Salib was established near the old city walls in 1761, shortly after modern Haifa had been established by Daher el Omar. The neighborhood was populated by Muslim and Christian Arabs until the mid-nineteenth century, when development in Haifa began pushing outwards to other parts of the city.
After the arrival of Jewish settlers in early 20th century, Wadi Salib and nearby Wadi Nisnas remained important Arab neighborhoods in Haifa. In the 1930s and 1940s, both were sites of numerous riots over British rule and increased Jewish immigration to British Mandate Palestine.
By the end of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, 60,000 Arabs had left the city and few were permitted to return to their homes in Wadi Salib and other areas, as most of the buildings of Wadi Salib that had belonged to Palestinian refugees and internally displaced Palestinians were confiscated under the Absentee Property Law. The 3,000 Arabs remaining in the city, circa 8.5% of the total urban population of 268,000 previously living in Haifa, largely concentrated in the nearby neighborhood of Wadi Nisnas.
Between May 1948 and March 1949, about 24,000 immigrants, many of them survivors of the Holocaust, were settled in the former Arab quarters of Wadi Salib. Moroccan Jews were soon to follow.
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“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“There is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy; a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relation with the self, with the past, not infrequently with the present, always with History and, even, with the European tradition.”
—Umberto Eco (b. 1932)
“Yet poetry, though the last and finest result, is a natural fruit. As naturally as the oak bears an acorn, and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done. It is the chief and most memorable success, for history is but a prose narrative of poetic deeds.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)