Do Palestinians live across the road? Address and the micropolitics of home in Israeli contested urban spaces

This paper develops a substantive argument of the ‘home exchange as contact zone’ for addressing the ‘other’, focusing on Israeli–Palestinian mixed urban spaces. By analyzing original archival research of a specific address, along with personal narratives of Palestinian and Jewish inhabitants of this address, the paper aims to understand politics of nations through the microgeographies of home. Thus, the analysis of asymmetric power in the politics of Israeli urban planning becomes the context of analyzing the archaeology of the address—more specifically, 218 Yefet Street, Jaffa, originally the home of my mother and grandparents. The ‘home exchange as contact zone’ argument facilitates the examination of the language, conversation, and text derived from meetings with the Palestinian owners and with my mother, and exposes the complexities of the binary divisions of coloniality.