Sometimes I think that the greatest tragedy of this place is not what it has become, but what it could have been. The greatest rupture in the Middle East was the destruction of the train route from Alexandria to Istanbul – precisely where Israeli existence takes place, spatially and linguistically. “From Yaffa to Beirut,” a tour put on by Zochrot, an Israeli NGO dedicated to raising awareness of the Nakba, attempted to fill the gap created by this rupture. The tour seeks not only to mark the old border, but aspires to cross and do away with it. The day starts in the ruins of Manshiyya, the border between present-day Tel Aviv and Jaffa, near the Hassan Bek Mosque and a museum dedicated to the Irgun, a right-wing Zionist militia. I decide to sleep in and join the tour just as it is about to head north. On the bus, people share stories about the Middle East of the past; they tell of a space characterized by movement, about grandfathers who drove from Tulkarem to Syria to sell their melons and about Jews who studied in the University of Beirut, where my grandmother studied. [Link]