![]() Located outside the hip flea-market section of Jaffa, the historic port city abutting Tel Aviv, Anna Loulou was surrounded by neighbors who chafed at the nightlife that the bar brought to the street and launched numerous noise complaints, says Hawash. These DJs included people from inside the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where Israel controls freedom of movement. According to Hawash, Anna Loulou provided a platform for Palestinian artists and DJs who lacked other places to perform in the Tel Aviv area, or found themselves tokenized as Arabs when they did. On any given night, a rotating cast of DJs played tracks from the world over, especially the Middle East and North Africa, with a heavy dose of American hip-hop. The language of Anna Loulou was not Hebrew, or Arabic, or even English-which the multilingual staff used to communicated over WhatsApp-but music. He prefers the phrase “shared space,” a place to “just be normal, be humans, be the same, look into each other’s eyes,” he says. Hawash, 29, bristles at the term “coexistence,” which has often been used to describe what he and seven co-proprietors-like the customers, they include Jews and Palestinians-created at Anna Loulou. One Anna Loulou couple named their child after the bar, he says. ![]() People met their partners at Anna Loulou and held bachelor parties and weddings there. Across boundaries and identities, a community formed. Hawash, a Palestinian with Israeli citizenship, grew up in a Jehovah’s Witness family. The clientele included Christians, Muslims, Ashkenazi Jews (of European origin), and Mizrachi Jews (of North African or Middle Eastern origin), Russian Jews, and others. Some saw it as a lefty bar, some a queer bar, some a place to encounter the other. For its regulars, well, it depends on whom you ask, says Hawash. For the local and foreign press it was a place of fascination, one of the only bars where Arabs and Jews, Israelis and Palestinians mingled socially, the result of an ethos of openness cultivated by the bar’s owners. The DJ booth, the bar’s beating heart, sits empty.Īnna Loulou-the name means “I am pearls” in Arabic-was many things to many people. The last revelers departed at 7 a.m., leaving the bar quiet. It’s his first day off after a week of non-stop work and partying to say goodbye to the bar that he co-ran for the past three of its eight years of existence, the Anna Loulou, which closed at the beginning of February.Ī hand-rolled cigarette in one hand and a can of Coke in the other, Hawash sits on the bench just inside the bar’s cave-like entrance, opposite a mosaic of the Virgin Mary made of beads and cardboard. It’s early evening on a Sunday in Jaffa, Israel, and Marwan Hawash has just woken up.
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