City of Oranges

by Adam LeBor

  In theory, Israel granted full civil rights to its remaining Arab citizens. They, like all Israelis, could vote, attend university and become members of the Knesset, where they could even represent non-Zionist parties, such as the Communists.3 Arabic was declared an official language, together with Hebrew and English. There were no separate park benches or washrooms, such as in apartheid South Africa. The Israeli declaration of independence promised to ensure social and political equality for all its citizens, regardless of their religion, race or sex. The reality was very different, however. The daily lives of both the Palestinians within Israel and, to a lesser extent, the north African and Arab-Jewish immigrants were testimony to the institutionalised discrimination of Labour Party rule.

  The ‘Israeli Arabs’, as remaining Palestinians were known, were regarded by state security agencies as little better than a potential fifth column and they were treated as such. And with reason, for few, if any, felt loyalty to the Jewish state. Israel’s very raison d’être demanded the negation of Palestinian nationhood. It was a democracy, but one with a built-in Jewish majority, and Israel described itself as a Jewish state. Arabs were citizens, but without all the freedoms enjoyed by the Jews. Jaffa, like all areas with a substantial Palestinian minority, was brought under military rule. Most Palestinians could not travel without permission and were subjected to serious restrictions. When the Jaffa mechanic Ismail Abou-Shehade left for Tiberias, he lived and worked there illegally. Each time he was caught, he was arrested and fined.4

  Israeli promises of full civil rights for its Arab minority did not prevent several expulsions even after the cessation of hostilities. Senior politicians discussed ‘transferring’ the Palestinians. Many Palestinians who might have proved loyal citizens of the new state were never given the option.5 Once they had left, hundreds of villages were demolished or absorbed by the Jewish settlements, the kibbutzim often proving particularly rapacious devourers of Arab land. A new Israeli national map was drawn up with Biblical Hebrew place names replacing Arabic ones. This was more than a question of cartography or nomenclature – it was a political act, with two main purposes: to establish a link between the toponomy of the new Israel and the Hebrew states of the Biblical era, and to erase the very idea of a Palestinian community with its own history and roots in the land.

  Ironically, Jaffa’s citrus groves survived the war, but not the peace. Israeli farmers had little interest in the crop. Citrus trees demanded large quantities of water and the proper maintenance of irrigation machinery, all of which was very labour intensive. The citrus groves were also a permanent reminder of the Palestinian society that had been destroyed. Many trees were pulled up, and the land handed over for housing developments. Israel had no monopoly on destroying the homes of the vanquished in the 1948 war. After the Old City of Jerusalem fell that year to the Jordanian army, its Jewish inhabitants were evacuated, much of the historic Jewish quarter was demolished and dozens of ancient synagogues were destroyed.

  * * *

  Renaming is itself an act of conquest. Jaffa was merely renamed Yafo in Hebrew, a minor difference of pronunciation from the Arabic Yafa. But the Arab names of its streets and lanes were replaced by numbers, before being named after Jewish heroes and Rabbis. Nagib Bustros Street, site of Tiv, became Raziel Street, in honour of David Raziel, the Irgun commander killed in Iraq during the Second World War. King George Boulevard was renamed Jerusalem Boulevard. Ajami’s name survived, but Jebaliyyeh, where Amin Andraus and Ahmad Hammami had built their houses, was renamed Givat Aliyah, ‘Hill of Aliyah’ (immigration to Israel). Israel was not unique in this process. Throughout history conquerors have erased their predecessors’ heritage and culture. Under Ottoman rule Salonica was a dazzling mosaic of Greeks and Turks, Sephardic Jews, Slavs and Albanians, renowned for its mosques, synagogues and dervish tombs. Even the shoe-shine boys spoke half a dozen languages, from Greek to Ladino. After Salonica passed to Greek control its Muslim population was expelled in 1923, in exchange for the return of Greeks living in Turkey. The population exchange was swift and brutal, the Hellenisation of the city no less so. The Greek authorities demolished Salonica’s mosques and all but eradicated its centuries-old Islamic heritage. Twenty years later forty-five thousand of Salonica’s Jews were deported to Auschwitz. The Jewish quarter which dated back centuries no longer exists, and in the postwar years a university campus was constructed on the old Jewish cemetery. Salonica is now a pleasant, unremarkable modern Greek metropolis, whose Islamic and Jewish heritage lives on only in the memory of elderly survivors.6

  During the Yugoslav wars of the early 1990s the Bosnian Serbs erased not just Muslim communities, but any physical presence of Islamic culture. In the Ottoman-era city of Banja Luka, for instance, the Muslim population was killed or driven out, and its sixteen ancient mosques were systematically destroyed. Their stones were trucked out to the outskirts of the city, and used to build car parks. The mosque sites were bulldozed flat, for it was not only the reality of Islamic Bosnia that had to be eradicated, but its very memory. But renaming is also a symptom of insecurity. People can flee or be expelled, their homes demolished or appropriated, but still something of their presence lingers. The spirit, perhaps, of the original inhabitants, who carry and pass on their memories to their children, whether in refugee camps or new homes in a far-flung suburbia. An unease underpins modern Israel, just as the ruins of abandoned Arab villages underpin many Israeli settlements. The Israeli writer S. Yizhar, who once sneaked into Nabi Rubeen, wrote: ‘Old tales, so well known we’re sick of them. Abandoned villages? And where aren’t they? What was the name of this place? A few years ago there was a place and it had a name. The place was lost and the name was lost. What was left? At first, a name stripped of a place. Soon enough, that too was erased. No place and no name. May G-d have mercy.’7

  The fate of Salama, five kilometres east of Jaffa, is indicative. Before 1948, Salama was a thriving agricultural and commercial centre, home to 6,670 Muslims and 60 Christians, built around the tomb of a companion of the prophet Muhammad, Salama Abu Hashim. It had two elementary schools, a soccer team, a bus company and five coffee shops, records the Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi.8 Nearby Jewish settlements bought its cereals and citrus fruits, which were also sold in Jaffa. Its inhabitants lived in houses clustered around a courtyard, with a common entrance. Children played in the yard, women did their chores and families gathered for feasts and celebrations. Fighting erupted in December 1947. Haganah units attacked, but were beaten back. The villagers dug defensive ditches and set up checkpoints. Falastin newspaper reported ten attacks on Salama in January 1948. Reinforced by twenty fighters from the Arab Liberation Army, they held out until mid-April, when they ran out of ammunition. Salama fell at the end of April during Operation Chametz, the Haganah’s drive to encircle Jaffa and capture the surrounding villages. When David Ben-Gurion visited Salama he found a single Palestinian: ‘one old blind woman’. Salama no longer exists, and its lands have been absorbed by Tel Aviv. One cemetery is now a park, the other, like the tomb of Salama Abu Hashim, is abandoned and no longer visited.

  The new cartography led to unsettling lacunae, both on the map and in reality. As the Israeli geographer Meron Benvenisti notes, four hundred villages were physically ‘disappeared’, but the roads leading to them, and the green fields around them, remained. At first the destroyed Palestinian villages with visible ruins were classified as iyim, meaning ‘heaps’. By 1959 most of the ‘heaps’ were also erased from the map. The irony was, as Benvenisti points out, that many of the Arabic place names were themselves rooted in Aramaic, the everyday language of the Biblical era that is cognate with both Hebrew and Arabic. So it was the Palestinians who had inadvertently helped to preserve the link between the toponymy of Biblical and modern Israel.

  In 1950, Jaffa ceased to exist. Not physically, but administratively. Jaffa was no longer an independent conurbation. The Bride of Palestine was forced into an arranged marriage with Tel Aviv, a union
officially known as Tel Aviv-Yafo. The Tel Aviv municipality had little or no interest in Jaffa. Manshiyyeh was a pile of rubble, never rebuilt after the fighting in April 1948. The medieval lanes and alleys of Old Jaffa rapidly deteriorated and the city’s heart became a slum, home to prostitutes, junkies and drug dealers. ‘There was no municipal order here then. There were floods in the winter, and a lot of crime,’ says Yoram Aharoni. Jaffa’s absorption into Tel Aviv symbolised the final destruction of Palestinian nationhood within Israel’s borders. Despite this – or perhaps because of it – the city was chaotic. The pre-1948 Arab municipal administration no longer existed and the New Seray had been destroyed. Almost all of Jaffa’s middle class and elite had fled, and were unable to return. Many of the Palestinians inside Israel were poor and ill-educated, frightened of their precarious position in the new Jewish state. Apart from a handful of community leaders such as Amin Andraus, few had the skills to negotiate with their new Israeli masters. A good number were not even from Jaffa, but were internally displaced, having fled the fighting in the nearby villages or Galilee.

  Despite everything, day to day relations and commercial dealings between Jews and Arabs were often cordial. Not only Jews shopped at Tiv; Arabs also bought their coffee and spices there. ‘We delivered coffee all over Jaffa, to all the factories and workshops. I had many connections with Arabs,’ says Yoram. ‘I was often invited to lunch at their home.’ Such friendships, while often genuine, could not be a relationship of equals. The state exercised complete control – physical, political and economic – over its Arab minority. And over all this lay the shadow of the dreaded Shin Bet, the Israeli internal security service. Arabs could be called in for interrogation at any moment and some were broken men when they were finally released. The guarantee of human rights enshrined in Israeli law did not always apply in Shin Bet’s interrogation rooms. Ismail Abou-Shehade’s illegal sojourn in Tiberias soon came to the attention of the Shin Bet. He was arrested and questioned before being eventually released. ‘They accused me of being a spy for Nasser, and of planting a bomb in Haifa. I never did any of this.’ Yet despite the restrictions, and the shadow of Shin Bet, Ismail was still in Israel. Unlike Fakhri Geday, the pharmacy student stranded in Beirut, or the Hammami family, he did not have to wonder if he would ever see Jaffa again.

  Part Two

  12

  Coming Home to Jaffa

  1949–50

  ‘Your time has gone.’

  Israeli official at the Ministry of Commerce,

  a former customer of Amin Andraus, explaining

  why Amin’s car import permit was so restrictive

  For a long time after the 1948 war Amin Andraus would find bodies washed up on Jaffa’s beaches, or floating in the water by Ajami and Givat Aliyah. They were the bodies of watchmen, employed by the Arab families who had fled in 1948 to look after their villas. Some said the watchmen were killed by burglars who simply wanted to break into the villas. Others saw darker forces at work. Amin had kept his home and re-established his car import business, but life was a perpetual struggle in the new state. Civil servants were often petty tyrants, imposing restrictions and making difficulties at will. Worse, the Israeli state was steadily appropriating Arab holdings and land.

  One Saturday Amin decided to go to check his orange grove, which was south of Jaffa on the way to Ramle. He drove to the site together with one of his workmen. Somehow he no longer had free access to his holdings. ‘Suddenly, out of nowhere, all these people wearing black hats appeared, shouting “Shabbes, Shabbes”,’ recalls Amin’s daughter Suad. ‘Shabbes’ is the Yiddish word for the Sabbath, when it is forbidden for Jews to do any work or drive a car. ‘My father asked them what was going on, and told them this was his orange grove. They said that it was not his any more. They kept shouting “Shabbes”, and would not let him go nearer.’ The situation soon began to turn nasty. The Jews started rocking Amin’s car from side to side. The workman with him grabbed a piece of wood. Amin tried to calm the situation, for the police, he knew, would not be sympathetic if things turned violent.

  Suad continues: ‘My father told them that he was not a Jew, and that he did not know that he was not supposed to drive on a Saturday. But this did not pacify them, and they told him they would burn his car. My father looked around and saw an older, white-bearded man in the crowd, and turned to him. He told him that if they burnt his car, they would be desecrating the Sabbath, and before Moses came down with the ten commandments, they too did not know the laws. So they should have a sign put up at the entrance to their village saying that it is not allowed to drive there on the Sabbath. The older man turned to the others and said, “He is right, he is right.” The atmosphere calmed down and the crowd backed off.’

  In the end the discussion was academic. The state expropriated the land, and now the town of Kfar Chabad stands there. After a legal battle lasting many years, Amin eventually received compensation for his holdings, but only enough to buy a small car, a fraction of what his land had been worth. The episode revealed much about the new state and its relations with its Arab minority. Israeli citizens, both Jews and Arabs, had the right to fight legal battles with the state, and Amin was not harassed or intimidated. The expropriations were all conducted strictly legally as the Knesset simply passed the necessary laws. ‘The judge told my father he was in the right, but not to fight any more,’ recalls Amin’s son Salim. ‘He says he was wasting his money because he was fighting against a government.’

  All the lands formerly owned by the Palestinian refugees who had fled Israel were taken into state ownership. In addition between 1948 and 1990 Israel’s Arab citizens lost almost one million acres.1 Much was given to the Jewish National Fund (JNF), to be held in the name of ‘the Jewish People’. The distinction between the Jewish People and the Israeli state is crucial – Israel’s Arab minority are citizens, but they are not Jewish. Nor are any Palestinians who might return after a future peace deal and ask for the restitution of their former family holdings. In 1955, Moshe Keren, the Arab affairs editor for Haaretz newspaper described the seizures as ‘wholesale robbery in legal guise’.2 The law evolved according to the needs of the state, whose ultimate triumph was always assured.

  Youssef Geday, the pharmacist, had resisted the attempts of the Christian Rock family to persuade him to sell his land before 1948. Youssef owned 1,830 dunams south of Jaffa. Perhaps he should have sold, for the Geday holdings, like those of Amin Andraus, were expropriated in the early 1950s. Like Amin, Youssef fought the case in the Israeli courts. ‘The judge ruled against us,’ recalls Youssef’s son Fakhri. ‘My father jumped up in the court and said, “I don’t want the land. Abu-Khaled will come here and give it back to me.” The judge asked our lawyer who Abu-Khaled was. My father told him, “Gamal Abdel Nasser’ [leader of Egypt]!” Not surprisingly, this did not help Youssef’s case. Nasser was one of Israel’s most strident enemies. Youssef’s land is now the site of several apartment blocks in the town of Bat Yam, just south of Jaffa. ‘My father always said, when the Arabs return one day, we will get our land back. I think, unfortunately, he believed that until the day he died,’ says Fakhri.

  Amin Andraus had more pressing concerns than his orange grove. His son Salim and daughters Leila, Wedad and Suad were still in Jordan, together with his sister Fahima. Active hostilities were over, but Jordan was still technically at war with Israel. The borders were closed, and Israeli policy was to prevent the return of Palestinians. Communication was extremely difficult. There were no telephone or postal services although occasionally smugglers and infiltrators carried letters across. These were empty and lonely days, for both Amin and his children. ‘Christmas, birthdays and school holidays were the worst when we were in Jordan. Somehow my father had correspondence with my aunt Fahima,’ recalls Suad. ‘Once he was meeting Jaffa’s military governor, and someone brought him a letter from my aunt. He realised who it was from, that it had been smuggled in. The governor asked why he didn’t open and read it. He sa
id he would later.’

  During the summer of 1948 Fahima and the children had lived in the Jordanian town of Salt. They shared one room, together with the Bawarshi family, friends of Amin who had also left Jaffa. ‘We missed the comforts of home,’ says Suad. ‘There was no running water. In the evenings we put the mattresses down, and in the mornings picked them up. We had a makeshift table, made from our suitcases. We could only have a bath in the coal house, standing in the basin. You had to be careful not to touch anything, or you were black again.’ The children left Salt in the autumn of 1948 and went to school in the Jordanian capital, Amman, where Salim’s fellow pupils included the future King Hussein. ‘We worried all the time about our father, as there were rumours that he had been killed. But you know how children are, in time you start to forget. We got on with our school, and with our new lives. Later on we had some news through the Red Cross.’

  Using intermediaries and smuggled communications, Amin made plans to sneak his children across the border. It was a nerve-wracking undertaking. Infiltrators were often shot and many areas were mined. On the appointed day, Salim and his sisters travelled from Amman, to the town of Tulkarm. Tulkarm is now in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, but was then still part of Jordan, beside the 1948 armistice line. The nearest town on the other side was the Arab town of Tayibe, one of several which had been ceded by Jordan to Israel after the cessation of hostilities. The border between the two states did not follow any topography or natural barriers – it was drawn up arbitrarily according to the front lines held by both armies when the fighting stopped. For all four children it was a day they would never forget. ‘The mayor of Tayibe had a brother and he was a good friend of my father,’ recalls Wedad. ‘They arranged for us to cross the border illegally. When we got to Tulkarm we gave away all our belongings. The plan was to walk across with our aunt Fahima and a peasant woman, who would show us the way.’