City of Oranges

by Adam LeBor

  Ahmad had chosen well. Her name was Nafise Shattila, and she was a couple of years younger than Ahmad, a good age. Usually an Arab man would take a wife eight or ten years younger than himself, to be sure that she would have many years of child-bearing ahead. But Ahmad was more modern-minded. He did not want to wait, and he liked the idea of a wife his own age. Nafise had an independent streak. She had been engaged once already, but had changed her mind and broken it off. Nafise knew knitting, embroidery, painting and the arts of housekeeping. But she had started school late, and even though she could speak fluent Italian, like many Arab women of her generation, she was illiterate. When Nafise had children of her own, she would ensure they were properly educated, and would never suffer the same stigma.

  Ahmad and Nafise’s wedding was a great celebration, and family, friends and dignitaries attended from all over Jaffa. Weddings were the biggest events in Palestinian family life. The groom would leave the mosque with his male friends, and they would dance down the street in a procession, sometimes the length of Jaffa from Hasan Bey mosque, in Manshiyyeh, through Clock Tower Square, down into Ajami, accompanied by musicians. Wedding guests gave the groom’s family sweetmeats and chocolates, rice and sugar and a golden British pound, or even a whole sheep. The women would cook a special wedding dish of rice with mutton, and it was not uncommon for the feasting and celebration to last three or four days, or even a week.

  Ahmad built a new house in Jebaliyyeh, on Jaffa’s southern edge, not far from the sea. The house had high ceilings, stone floors and wooden shutters. There was a spacious veranda and a garden full of fruit trees – whose crops of custard apples, pomegranates, lemons, pears and persimmons Nafise turned into delicious jam – as well as a separate, smaller rose garden at the front of the house. Nafise had three daughters in quick succession: Nahida, Faizeh and Fatimah. Ahmad loved them very much, but in his heart, he longed for a son.

  Like his father Shaker, Ahmad Hammami was profoundly disturbed by the 1921 violence. Muslims, Christians and Jews had always lived as neighbours in Palestine. All three religions were respected in the Hammami household – that was an iron rule. Certainly, there was room for some Jewish immigrants who wanted to live in harmony with the Arabs. Palestine and Jaffa had always welcomed immigrants, such as Greeks and Italians. Ahmad himself sometimes leased orange groves from Jewish growers. But Palestine was a small country and their numbers, he and Shaker agreed, should be limited. Many of the Jewish immigrants seemed to have a more fundamental aim: the a’yan, the Arab notables, sold them large tracts of land where they established their own Zionist colonies. Ahmad and Shaker were especially angry that the Arab tenant farmers were then thrown off their former holdings, with no provision for their families.

  The biggest Zionist colony was Tel Aviv, adjacent to Jaffa. Palestinians often felt uncomfortable in Tel Aviv. The city was an unsettling European implant, where brazen women went unveiled and wore shorts, whose inhabitants spoke Hebrew, or German and sat in cafés eating cake, plotting their steady takeover of Palestine. It was not an entirely inaccurate assessment. ‘In daylight it looks like Whitechapel, and at night like Monte Carlo,’ Arthur Koestler wrote of Tel Aviv in his semi-autobiographical novel Thieves in the Night. ‘It was a frantic, maddening city which gripped the traveller by his buttonhole as soon as he entered it, tugged and dragged him around like a whirlpool, and left him after a few days faint and limp, not knowing whether he should laugh or cry, love or hate it.’9 Even its name was a misnomer; Tel Aviv means ‘Hill of Spring’, but the city is almost completely flat. There is hardly any spring and wet, cold winters jump straight to hot, sticky summers.

  In one sense, Tel Aviv’s whole rationale was that it was not Jaffa. It was founded in 1909 by the Ahuzat Bayit society, composed of Jaffa’s Jewish notables including Aharon Chelouche. The society wanted to build another new suburb for the Jewish immigrants from Russia and eastern Europe known as the Second Aliyah.10 After lengthy negotiations with the Ottoman authorities, Ahuzat Bayit bought land for sixty houses on the sand dunes north of Jaffa. The finances were handled by the first Zionist bank, the Anglo-Palestine Company, founded in Jaffa in 1902. Its treasurer was Aharon’s son Yaakov. The houses were built by Yaakov’s brothers, Avraham Haim and Yosef Eliyahu, who owned a construction company. Ahuzat Bayit would become the nucleus of the future Tel Aviv. A photograph showing its members standing on the bare sand dunes, preparing to divide up the land, is an iconic symbol of Zionism. The message is clear: Palestine was an empty desert, truly ‘a land without a people for a people without a land’.

  In fact the first settlers outside old Jaffa were not Jews but American millennarian Christians, led by George Washington Adams, a preacher from Maine. Adams, together with forty-three families, landed in Jaffa in September 1866. The venture quickly collapsed in tragedy and farce. Thirteen died, the crops failed, the supplies ran out, and Adams drank away the funds. He was actually an out-of-work actor, well known for impersonating clergymen. The New York Herald reported that he was ‘seen lying in the streets of Jaffa in a state of the most degrading, beastly drunkenness’. The colonists went home. The German Templars, another Christian sect, had more success. They took over some of the American houses, and founded two new quarters, called Sarona and Walhalla. By 1870 more than one hundred Templars were running a sawmill, olive press, steam-powered mill, hospital and pharmacy. Sarona and Walhalla had attractive European homes, with tidy, tree-lined streets. ‘Their homes are built in an orderly sequence as in all European cities,’ noted one observer. ‘With its broad streets and elegant buildings, a person might forget he was walking in a desolate land and imagine himself in one of the civilised cities of Europe.’11

  In his shop by the port Aharon Chelouche watched the arrival of the Americans and Germans with interest. Aharon had arrived in Palestine in 1838, together with his parents and two sisters. Their journey from Oran, in Algeria, had been marked by tragedy. The boat bringing two of Aharon’s brothers into Haifa harbour had overturned and Yosef and Eliyahu had drowned. His father Avraham had settled in Jaffa and opened a money-changer’s and jeweller’s business. Both father and son looked like Biblical patriarchs. They had full beards, dressed in long striped robes, held in place with wide belts, and wore rectangular hats. Jewellery and money-changing had a profitable synergy. Coins were often composed wholly or partly of silver or gold. Aharon knew precisely how much precious metal each contained, when to melt them down, and when to sell them. He used his profits to buy large tracts of land around Jaffa. The price of a plot was set in the throw of a stone. The buyer would accompany the seller to the site, and hurl the first rock. The two men would then go to the point where it fell, and the buyer would throw the stone again. Aharon quickly became an expert in throwing stones and built up sizeable holdings. The family were rich and respected members of Jaffa’s growing Jewish community. Like many of Jaffa’s prosperous Jews, the Chelouches took foreign citizenship – in their case French – as a means of protection against the mercurial Ottoman authorities. The provisions of the Capitulations, dating back to the sixteenth century, granted special privileges to foreign citizens in Ottoman lands.12

  In the mid-1880s Aharon sold around fourteen dunams (square kilometres) for the construction of Jaffa’s first Jewish quarter, Neve Tsedek. All Ottoman cities were divided into different quarters for each minority: Jaffa already had Armenian, Egyptian, Greek and Maronite areas. But the foundation of Neve Tsedek would later be seen as a political statement: that the Jews were, literally, staking their own claim to the land. Aharon Chelouche also built a new family house on the sand dunes. When it was finally finished he told his wife Sara to prepare the family’s move. But Sara and her daughter-in-law Sarina flatly refused to leave. Neve Tsedek was in the middle of nowhere, they said. There were no shops, and they would have no friends there. It was completely open, and easy to attack. Aharon’s arguments that Jaffa’s Jews would soon follow them were ignored. Weeks went by and the new house began to fill with
sand. Only when other families started measuring up to build houses nearby did the Chelouche women relent. By spring 1887, the ‘women’s rebellion’ was over. The family packed up their worldly goods, and a long caravan stretched over the sand dunes as they trekked to Neve Tsedek.

  Neve Tsedek inspired more Jewish quarters, such as Neve Shalom. The new communities soon bordered Manshiyyeh, the northernmost tip of Jaffa. Many had Levantine, not European, houses. Beit Chelouche, ‘Chelouche House’, was typical: a single-storey building with six large rooms around a communal hall. In short, a classical Arab villa, surrounded by high walls with an enclosed courtyard. The houses were built at the back of the courtyard, the toilets at the front. For Ashkenazi Jews from Europe, Neve Tsedek and Neve Shalom were an oriental mess. One indignant visitor recorded: ‘Someone who never saw the filth of those neighbourhoods inhabited solely by our Jewish brethren, someone who never smelled the perfumed odours of those narrow, dark alleyways can have no idea what squalor, mire and filth are.’13

  Despite sharing the same faith, the Ashkenazim and Sephardim were sharply divided. Many European Jews regarded the Sephardim with scorn, as old-fashioned, conservative and ‘oriental’ in their fealty to the Ottoman authorities. They spoke Arabic rather than Hebrew, and were socially conservative, like the Arabs. Women married young and stayed at home, while the men went out to work. Julia Chelouche’s grandmother Mazal had been engaged at the age of eleven, and gave birth to her first child at fifteen. The Sephardim were an organic part of the Middle East. The great Jewish communities of Baghdad, Cairo and Damascus traced their lineage not in centuries, but in millennia, long before the arrival of Islam. In turn the Sephardim viewed the Ashkenazim as ignorant arrivistes, arrogant in their refusal to learn Arabic, with none of the subtle skills needed to survive under Muslim rule. At one stage there were even plans for two separate Jewish councils in Jaffa. Eventually both communities agreed to work together, to build the new settlement of Ahuzat Bayit in 1909.

  Unlike Neve Tsedek, Ahuzat Bayit was thoroughly planned. By-laws governed sanitation, building codes, security and even the size of gardens – three metres wide, facing the street, with a properly maintained fence. Streets would be six metres wide, with two metres of pavement, and there would be four metres between each house. The settlement, soon renamed Tel Aviv, was the very antithesis of chaotic Jaffa. It was also a huge commercial success. Property values soared. In 1913 two rooms in Neve Tsedek might have cost 250 francs (£10) a year, but they cost double that in Tel Aviv. By 1925, Tel Aviv’s population had soared to 34,000. The city was booming. It had schools, shops, Hebrew newspapers, an orchestra, a theatre company and its own buses. An electric power station was built. Avraham Haim and Yosef Eliyahu Chelouche travelled to Marseilles, bought a standard house plan and loaded up the boat with building materials. There would be no more stone-carved Arab villas. The houses they built at 30 and 32 Pines Street were precise copies of French provincial homes, with a European layout. For many Jews the appeal of Tel Aviv was as much to do with comfort as with politics. Water was no longer delivered in leather bags from Abou Nabout’s fountains, but came out of a tap. The houses were European, with a sewage system and gardens where children could play in safety. The streets were clean and there was a sense of municipal order.

  Jaffa also had a European-style quarter, around Nagib Bustros Street, named for the Lebanese businessman who had financed its construction. The buildings were designed for maximum security. The ground-floor shop or commercial property was locked and chained at night. A steep staircase led up from the street door to the living quarters on the first floor. A sharp right turn brought visitors to the front door, using the same security principle as the design of medieval castles and city gates, to prevent a frontal attack. A narrow vertical slit in the first-floor wall gave a view down the staircase. In the early years of Jaffa’s expansion, at the end of the nineteenth century, a guard stood watch with a rifle so any intruders could be shot down on the steps.

  Around this time a man called Alexander Howard lived at number 15 Nagib Bustros Street. His home boasted a magnificent entrance façade, flanked by two columns, and topped with Masonic symbols, an arch and small tabernacle inscribed in Hebrew Shalom al-Yisrael, peace unto Israel. Howard’s real name was Iskander Awad. A Lebanese Christian from Beirut, Awad worked for Thomas Cook, when the travel agent was organising his first tours to the Middle East. He thought that Iskander Awad sounded too Arabic for the British tourists who were beginning to travel to the Levant, so he anglicised his name and persuaded Cook to take him on as a dragoman, a translator and ‘fixer’, who arranges everything from donkeys to clean drinking water. Howard soon managed the whole eastern section of Cook’s tours, which started in London and lasted 105 days, including 30 days in Palestine for the price of £170, ‘first class all the way’. Within a few years it seems Cook and Howard had some kind of falling out. In 1876, Thomas Cook advertised his ‘New and Improved Arrangements’ for his Palestine tours, but there was no mention of Alexander Howard. Howard soon bounced back though. He opened a hotel in Jerusalem opposite the Jaffa Gate, which advertised itself as being able to ‘accommodate 125 world-class travellers’, with ‘hot and cold baths ready at all times’.

  The increasingly prosperous Arab merchants of Jaffa built villas to the south, in two new areas called Ajami and Jebaliyyeh. The Levantine answer to Tel Aviv was a modern avenue of shops and flats at the bottom of Nagib Bustros, with a line of palm trees in the centre of the road. Built by the kaymakam Hasan Bey, it was named Jamal Pasha Boulevard, for the Turks’ military governor, better known as Jamal the Butcher. Hasan Bey also built a new mosque, with a notably tall minaret, by the beach in Manshiyyeh which had been founded by Egyptian immigrants in the middle of the nineteenth century. It was a maze of shops, bazaars and stately villas that looked out onto the nearby sea shore, home to freed slaves, Africans, Gypsies, Persians, Indians and Baluchis. The mosque, named for him, was not popular. Locals said it was built with forced labour, and paid for with ‘voluntary’ contributions. The Hasan Bey mosque had temporal as well as spiritual purposes: it marked the northernmost edge of Jaffa, and prevented Tel Aviv spreading south. Throughout the following decades, it would be a flashpoint for clashes between Jews and Arabs.

  Yet Manshiyyeh also showed the fluidity of relations between Arabs and Jews and the web of connections between Jaffa and Tel Aviv. Both Jews and Arabs lived in Manshiyyeh, attracted by its cheap housing and markets, central position and long sandy beach. There were slums, but fine Ottoman villas too, with shady verandas that opened onto the seafront. The Jewish Communists had their headquarters there. Many Arab workers commuted from Manshiyyeh to the construction sites of Tel Aviv. Some of the richer, more westernised Jaffa Arabs found Tel Aviv congenial for other reasons. In Jaffa it was impossible to meet single, unchaperoned women, but in Tel Aviv’s liberal atmosphere it was easy, in cafés or even on the beach. The sight of Arab men mixing freely with Jewish women was shocking to some. L. M. Jeune, a Jewish resident of Jaffa, wrote to Meir Dizengoff, the first mayor of Tel Aviv, in June 1922, protesting that not only were ‘Arabs of a very inferior class frequenting the Casino’, but ‘Mixed bathing is drawing the natives to the Bathing Resort, and to my knowledge, three Arabs have bathed there. They will spread the news that they are allowed to mix with the ladies, and there will surely be trouble.’14

  Tel Aviv was also renowned for its brothels, which catered to both Arabs and Jews, straight and gay.15 The bed was one of the only places in Palestine where the national question was not a factor. One Jaffa man active in the Arab underground wrote in his memoirs that, after killing a Mandate policeman, he had his record wiped clean by paying off the British military governor with an expensive meal and a night with two of the most skilled prostitutes at the Akarakhaneh brothel on Dizengoff Street.16 Gay relationships between Arab and Jewish men – and British officials – were not uncommon, notes the historian Mark Levine. Immigrant women from Europe were often though
t dangerously licentious. One report noted: ‘Suddenly we began to see in the different streets of Tel Aviv cars of the wealthy Arabs and Christians arrive in the middle of the evenings, and parked alongside the houses in which lived the new female immigrants, the wild debauchery continued until the wee hours of the night.’17 Jews and Arabs shared more than wild parties. The newspaper Falastin reported that there was a school for pickpockets operating in Tel Aviv, with both Arab and Jewish students.

  Yet despite the pickpockets and parties, tension rose steadily as the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine, grew and strengthened. The word Yishuv is Hebrew for settlement, but its real meaning was ‘state-in-waiting’. The Yishuv had its own education system, banks, trade unions, newspapers and medical services. It was not homogenous, but reflected the differing strands of Zionist thought from right to left. Some sought separation from the Arabs, others accommodation. The Histradrut, the Zionist trade union organisation, even published two newspapers in Arabic to build bridges with Arab workers. Articles praised Tel Aviv as a successful example of modernising the Middle East. But as Joseph Roth had noted, Arabs did not want to be modernised by Jews. If the Arab rioters’ intention was to slow, or halt, the Zionist project, they failed. Jewish settlements became villages, the villages towns, and the towns cities. In May 1921, Tel Aviv gained ‘town council’ status. This anodyne decision had important consequences. A splinter settlement of Jaffa, barely thirteen years old, now had its own law court, fire station and police force. In 1922 six areas of Jaffa were annexed to Tel Aviv, including Neve Tsedek. The Scottish town planner Patrick Geddes, who had revitalised Edinburgh, drew up a comprehensive plan for a modern city. Tel Aviv, it was understood by all, was more than a conurbation. It was the centre of the Hebrew state-in-waiting.