City of Oranges

by Adam LeBor

  In Morocco anti-Jewish riots erupted in the summer of 1948, and forty-four Jews were killed. The Moroccan Jews also needed ‘rescuing’, Israel decided, although this was highly debatable. In fact Israel itself was in greater need. The state existed, the Palestinians had gone, their land and houses had been appropriated, but the Jews were not coming. The substantial and prosperous communities of the United States, France and Britain, apart from a minority of idealists, stayed at home. The Jews of the Soviet Union were not able to depart. The answer, Ben-Gurion and the other Israeli leaders believed, was to bring over the Jews of the Arab states. There were rumours – never wholly proven – that the Israelis themselves fomented anti-Semitism to persuade the Jews in Arab countries to leave, launching whispering campaigns and rumours like those that had so unsettled the Palestinians in 1948. There were even claims that the Mossad had bombed synagogues in Baghdad.2 True or not, the Moroccan Jews began to leave in their thousands. Much of the educated, multilingual elite went to France or Canada. The rest came to Israel.

  As a fluent Arabic speaker, Shlomo was a natural choice for Israel’s operations in Morocco. He and Mary were well established in Casablanca before organisations such as the Jewish Agency arrived. ‘I had to organise a bank, all sorts of things. The aim was to make it easier once the Jewish Agency arrived. I travelled across north Africa, to Algeria, Tunis and Morocco. It was all secret.’ Until 1956, when Morocco became independent, Jews were allowed to emigrate from Morocco. The difficulty was moving their funds out of the country; international funds transfers in the 1950s were complicated and slow. Money could not be sent directly to Israel, so Shlomo set up a system of promissory notes. The immigrant deposited his money with Shlomo, and it was then transferred to a bank in Paris, less a commission of two per cent. From there the money was sent to a bank in Switzerland, and then on to Israel.

  Shlomo explains: ‘It demands a lot of trust for somebody to give you everything he has. I had to be a nice fellow, very pleasant, with no enemies.’ Inevitably, things sometimes went wrong in this complicated chain of transactions that relied so heavily on honesty. ‘Sometimes there were cases where Jews took money. I had to come and investigate what had happened. There were others who had money and could not get it out at all.’ Shlomo’s work was not without risk. Officially he was a businessman involved in property and banking. But he was breaking the law, and he was an agent of a foreign power. If a Moroccan government official suspected anything, he received a ‘present’ in exchange for his silence. The weakest links in the chain were the intermediaries, who handled vast sums of cash. Mary recalls: ‘One morning Shlomo called the middleman and there was no answer. He got worried. He went to the man’s office, and the building was surrounded by policemen. He came straight home and took all the money that we had in cash, enough to make us very rich – and hid it in a cupboard. He said he would go to France to find another way to move the money. But we were young then. I never worried about what would happen if we were caught.’

  In the mid-1950s, as Morocco prepared for independence, Shlomo was given a more hazardous mission. Jews who wanted to leave were finding it increasingly difficult. Ever more obscure bureaucratic obstacles would spring up in their path. Shlomo set up a complicated underground operation to print thousands of fake travel documents, in case Morocco closed its gates completely. He travelled to Gibraltar to set up a transit camp, in preparation for a sudden mass exodus. In 1956, Morocco declared independence and emigration to Israel was banned. It was no longer possible for the Zionist and Israeli organisations to continue their work. Shlomo and Mary relocated to Paris, where he masterminded the distribution of forged passports, which the Jewish emigrants used to get to Gibraltar. In Paris, Mary worked on the Egyptian desk at the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. She soon saw a stream of familiar faces from her days in Cairo.

  The 1956 Suez crisis and subsequent war triggered the final exodus of Egypt’s Jews. In July of that year Nasser nationalised the company that owned the Suez Canal, threatening British and French trade routes to Africa and Asia. Nasser then closed the canal completely to Israeli shipping, and blockaded the Gulf of Aqaba, which controlled access to Israel’s southernmost port of Eilat. Combined with Egyptian sponsorship of repeated raids by fedayeen (Arab guerrillas) into Israeli territory, the blockade was seen by Ben-Gurion as an adequate casus belli. Nasser’s growing links with the Soviet bloc and Communist China were causing alarm in western capitals, enough to prompt a secret agreement between Britain, France and Israel to take military control of the canal. Any lingering ideological sympathy the Ashkenazi Socialist elite had for the Soviet experiment had by now been replaced by the demands of realpolitik, aligning the young state with the West.

  Israel invaded Sinai at the end of October, quickly capturing Gaza, Rafah and El-Arish. Britain and France deployed aircraft carriers and began bombing to force Egypt to reopen the canal, while paratroops fought house to house with Egyptian forces. Enraged and humiliated by both the West and his most hated enemy, Nasser took out his fury on Egypt’s Jews. A state-sponsored pogrom was unleashed. Community leaders were arrested; Jews were sacked from their workplaces and forbidden to practise their professions; communal properties were expropriated by the state; schools and synagogues were closed down, and businesses and bank accounts taken over. A proclamation was read out in mosques across the country that ‘all Jews are Zionists and enemies of the state’ and would soon be expelled.3 Most Jews living in Egypt were stateless, as Egypt had refused to naturalise them after independence in 1922. Traumatised and impoverished, they relied on the assistance of the Red Cross and other refugee aid agencies. Mary Chelouche’s parents returned to Jerusalem, others left for Canada, Britain, the United States, and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society in Paris. ‘I knew many people that came through our office,’ recalls Mary. ‘They arrived and they saw me, and they said, “Oh, Mary, it’s you!” Of course it was very difficult for my parents when they came back to Israel. But they had their family and their friends, and they knew Hebrew. It was easier for them than for the Moroccan Jews, who came with nothing.’

  The Anglo-French-Israeli attack on Egypt was a military success, but a political disaster. Nasser was saved by both the Soviet Union and the United States. The Soviet leader Khrushchev threatened to intervene on Egypt’s side and even attack the West, with an implied threat of nuclear weapons, if the three countries did not withdraw. The United States was distracted by the Soviet crushing of the 1956 Hungarian revolution, and found it hard to justify its allies’ attack on Egypt while condemning the Soviet onslaught on Budapest. Under pressure from the United States and the United Nations, Britain, France and Israel withdrew and Nasser emerged triumphant. United Nations troops were deployed to keep the peace, one of many missions to be launched over the next decades to clean up after the latest round of the Arab-Israeli conflict.4

  The Egyptian and north African Jews were demographically useful to build up Israel’s numbers, but they were not made welcome once they arrived. The prejudice against them was institutionalised, and it came from the very top. They were described as ‘backward’ and ‘primitive’, and it was assumed that they would not need basic comforts such as hot or even running water unlike their Ashkenazi co-religionists. Ben-Gurion wrote that European Jews had ‘shaped the image of the Jewish people throughout the world’, while Arabic-speaking Jews had played a ‘passive’ role in Jewish history,5 apparently ignorant of the twelfth-century philosopher Moses Maimonides, Judaism’s greatest thinker, who wrote in Arabic. One Israeli journalist opined: ‘The primitiveness of these people is insurmountable. They have almost no education at all, and what is worse is their inability to comprehend anything intellectual. As a rule, they are only slightly more advanced than the Arabs, Negroes or Berbers in their countries. It is certainly even lower than the former Palestinian Arabs.’6

  In Jaffa, the Moroccans were given rooms in the abandoned villas of Ajami. Others were less fortunate and were dumped in the ruins of desert
ed Arab villages, or in wooden huts in the middle of nowhere, and told to start building a settlement. Rabbis were forced to work as labourers, Talmudic scholars became grave-diggers, bankers and businessmen worked as cleaners and porters. ‘There were no rules then, people made it up as they went along,’ says Frank Meisler. ‘If you were European and you had a cousin who came over, you found him a good flat. But an Iraqi would be put in a tent. Nobody said, “wait a minute”…’ Yet from the Zionists’ perspective, it was a miracle that the Arab Jews had been ingathered at all. Looking back, perhaps some mistakes were made, believes Mary Chelouche, but the country needed manpower. Israel had already fought one war, food was rationed, the economy was in a state of near collapse and it was surrounded by enemies pledged to its destruction. ‘You have to realise Israel’s situation then. There were cities, and there were kibbutzim. But you cannot have a country with only these. You could not look after everyone who is complaining that they were mistreated. You had to say to them, “Look, this is it.” The country was very socialist then.’

  At number 6 Raziel Street, the Moroccan influx was good for business. Tiv’s spice range expanded rapidly from black pepper and paprika. The north African Jews used pepper so hot it would make you sweat, says Yoram. ‘The immigrants from Morocco, Tripoli and Tunis used a lot of red pepper. If I used a hundred grams of chili powder in a year, they would use that in a few days. Most people bought sweet paprika and sweet chili in quantities of a hundred grams. They bought them in kilo or half-kilo bags.’ Yoram soon became an expert in the different types of north African cuisine. ‘Each community had their own spice mix for different dishes, and also for their tea, with cinnamon, or with rose petals. The Jews from Tripoli and Morocco cook a lot of meatballs, and their spice mix was called Baharat. It was based on cumin, with plenty of black pepper, ginger and garlic. Some of them also used caraway seeds. The fish spices were the hottest. The Jews from Tripoli made a sauce with cumin, caraway and garlic, and they would buy half a kilo of red pepper at a time.’

  A brisk twenty minutes’ walk from number 6 Raziel, at his pharmacy on Yefet Street, Fakhri Geday had adjusted to the new reality. In 1957, Fakhri was thirty years old. He was now an Israeli, a law-abiding citizen of a state to whose existence he was utterly opposed. ‘I had no special feelings when they gave me my Israeli identity card. I am a person who can accept new facts. I don’t revolt against them. I was dropped in a land with new facts, and I had to accommodate myself to the situation.’ After Fakhri returned in 1950 he wanted to leave Jaffa, to study for his doctorate in France. But his father Youssef wanted him to stay. Fakhri’s mother was sick, and Youssef wanted to retire, so Fakhri took over his father’s shop.

  Fakhri was an ardent Nasserite. The Egyptian leader’s rise to power galvanised Arabs across the Middle East, including many of Israel’s Arab minority. The swashbuckling colonel, they believed, would finally make up for the humiliations the Arabs had suffered at the hands of the West, and would erase the alien, imperialist implant of Israel from the map. They cheered when he nationalised the Suez Canal. Fakhri recalls: ‘We were against Ben-Gurion because he was an occupier. We were all with Nasser. We are still with Nasser. The nationalist Palestinians here consider him a hero. I am a one-hundred-percent Nasserite. He represents the ideals of Palestinian decency, Palestinian nationalism, freeing the Arab lands from foreign occupiers and uniting the Arab world from ocean to ocean.’

  That same year in Istanbul the Albo family were preparing to leave for Israel. Sarah Albo was overjoyed, but her husband Yaakov had severe doubts. Like the Aharonis, the Albo family were Sephardim. They spoke Ladino at home, and lived a comfortable, bourgeois life. Five-year-old Sami and his sister Jenni were taken to school each day by a driver. The family lived in a spacious apartment with a concierge. Yaakov owned two shoe shops together with an Armenian business partner; but when a Muslim mob burnt down one of the shops, Yaakov finally accepted it was time to go. The Albos spent a year at a ma’abara (reception camp) near Haifa when they arrived in 1957. It was a very different world from Istanbul. ‘My father did not want to come to Israel. My mother was the Zionist in the family and she did everything so we could come here. They left everything in Turkey and came here,’ says Sami.

  Now in his early fifties, Sami lives with his wife Rachel, daughter Adi and son Aviv, in a flat just behind Jerusalem Boulevard. He is a determined and articulate man, active in Jaffa’s community politics as a moderate right-winger. Sami is named after his grandfather Shmuel. Shmuel Albo, like many Turkish Jews, also took a Turkish name, Kemal. Unlike Jews in Arab countries, those in Turkey were not subjected to persecution and restrictions after 1948. Kemal Attaturk, the founder of modern Turkey, declared it a secular state, where all would be equal. Under Ottoman rule, Jews had often prospered, rising to high government positions. But during the Second World War Turkey turned on its Jewish community. Although Turkey remained neutral – finally declaring war on the Axis in February 1945 – the Turkish press launched an anti-Semitic campaign, and an extremely punitive capital tax was levied on Jewish businesses. Jews and Christians were rounded up and deported to harsh labour camps. The persecutions were a severe shock, and helped trigger the exodus after 1948.

  For Sarah Albo, Israel was the only insurance against a fresh round of persecutions, but Yaakov was profoundly unhappy there, explains Sami. ‘At the reception camp we lived in a wooden hut. The toilets were a long walk away. It was not like the situation now for immigrants, who are helped with language classes, buying a house and so on. They were difficult times and it was a massive shock for him. He found it hard to manage. My mother was a Zionist, she knew that this is our place, so she could better manage the difficulties.’ Conditions at the camp exacerbated the tensions in an already difficult marriage. The two were cousins, as their mothers were sisters, and Sarah was ten years older than Yaakov. She was better educated than Yaakov, and had finished the Alliance Française school in Istanbul. She spoke French, Spanish, Turkish, some English, and Ladino. Yaakov had worked from an early age, and knew Greek and Armenian.

  Yaakov also brought his mother, Sinyora, to Israel. ‘She was like her son. My father had a lot of money in Istanbul and it was a severe shock for him to live in a hut. My grandmother hardly spoke at all,’ recalls Sami. ‘I did not have a good relationship with her. She used to sit quietly in her corner. She was very strict. I think it was because she did not want to be here. They did not talk about that in front of us, but I can imagine that was the reason.’ After a year, the Albos moved to an Arab house in Jaffa. Sami, his sister, his parents and grandmother lived in one and half rooms in the roof that had once been the laundry space. Sarah took in sewing to help make ends meet. Yaakov struggled, both to earn money and to reconcile himself with his new life. He could not settle and decided to return to Turkey, to assess the situation there. ‘His plan was to see if things were better now, and to convince my mother to go back,’ says Sami. In 1959, Yaakov left Jaffa on his reconnaissance mission to Istanbul. Turkey, he thought, would hopefully have something better to offer than living in a laundry room.

  15

  Saving old Jaffa

  1960s

  In Jaffa the most ardent tourist need not worry about remains of the past, but can simply relax and enjoy the cosmopolitan human scenery of the present.

  Extract from a 1962 Israeli guidebook to Jaffa

  by Joan Comay, with a foreword by Ben-Gurion1

  In May 1960, Jaffa’s old Turkish kishle (prison) received a high-security inmate. The kishle’s usual clients were petty criminals, drug dealers and the prostitutes working Old Jaffa. The new arrival, an Austrian man in late middle age with a narrow face and thinning hair, did not look very dangerous, but he was locked in a small cell, and held under armed guard. Adolf Eichmann, the former head of the Gestapo’s Department for Jewish Affairs, had been kidnapped on the streets of Buenos Aires by Mossad. Nine days later he was dressed as an airline steward, drugged and put on board an El Al jet. His arres
t electrified the world. Few in Jaffa knew of his brief sojourn, but the customers at Tiv, just a few minutes’ walk away, applauded Mossad’s success. ‘Everyone was talking about it. Eichmann’s capture was a very important event for Israel. I was happy that he was caught,’ says Yoram Aharoni.

  Eichmann’s trial began on 11 April 1961. It lasted fourteen weeks, and more than a hundred survivors gave evidence. The transcript of the trial is 6,000 pages long. In a sense, Eichmann was not the only person on trial. There were traumatic scenes when Holocaust survivors screamed abuse at Jewish leaders giving evidence, accusing them of helping the Nazis to save themselves and their families. Hannah Arendt covered the trial for the New Yorker magazine, turning her articles into the seminal work Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Frank Meisler agreed with her summing-up of Eichmann’s legacy. ‘I thought she expressed the terrible lesson of the Eichmann trial well. He was a little clerk with charts and blackboards, engaging the prosecutors in discussions on railways trucks and train schedules.’ The verdict was never in doubt. On the evening of 31 May 1961, Eichmann was hanged in Ramle prison.

  For Ben-Gurion the trial also served a political purpose. Israel had not until then shown much enthusiasm for finding Nazi war criminals. The government was under attack for its rapprochement with Germany, and its acceptance of restitution payments. Social tensions soared as Jews from Arab countries protested over their often dismal living conditions. They had little consciousness of the Holocaust. Despite their fiery rhetoric in 1948, the Arabs had never attempted to exterminate the Jews. At Eichmann’s trial, writes Tom Segev, Ben-Gurion ‘had two goals: one was to remind the countries of the world that the Holocaust obligated them to support the only Jewish state on earth. The second was to impress the lessons of the Holocaust on the people of Israel, especially the young generation’.2 It did. The Holocaust and the threat – real or perceived – of a successful Arab/Islamic onslaught shape the Israeli psyche, and Israeli politics, to this day.