In the agonistic landscape of Israel/Palestine nowhere has been more continuously inflected by the tension between intimate proximity and visceral violence than ethnically “mixed towns.” In these cities the ambivalence of the binational encounter bespeaks the paradox of the co-presence of political Others who are also immediate neighbors. Consequently these cities are marked by a twilight zone of borderline sociality, which implicates coexistence and domination, hope and despair. This paper follows three trajectories of hope in Jaffa, a Jewish-Arab city located minutes away from Tel-Aviv’s metropolitan center yet marked as sui generis cultural and political alterity. These trajectories extend from the history of nationalist mobilization to binational initiatives (such as the bilingual kindergarten) and postnational artistic activism (or artivism). Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Jaffa, I show how the dialectics of hope and despair places Jaffa in a position of troubled ambivalence – the city is depicted as site of nostalgia and utopia, the “museum of the Nakba” and the hopeful future of the region at one and the same time. The 2011 Social Protest, which resonated with the Arab Uprisings, will illustrate some of the paradoxes of the binational city that enabled one (Jewish) activist to coin what became the most powerful Palestinian call for justice. Bridging the national and the urban scale in one phrase repeated during the 2011 protests, the slogan called for "the Right of Return to Old Jaffa."