by Adam LeBor
On the other side of the front lines, in newly-captured East Jerusalem, Fadwa Hammami, now Fadwa Hasna, was neither proud nor triumphant. Fadwa had moved to Jerusalem from Beirut in 1958, after marrying Suleiman Hasna. Suleiman was the scion of an old Jerusalem family, and could trace his ancestry back to the time of the prophet Muhammad. Suleiman was thirty-seven, seventeen years older than Fadwa, when they married. He was a well-established figure in the city, a senior manager at the electricity company. Fadwa and Suleiman lived in a spacious Arab stone house in the suburb of Shuafat, on the road north towards Ramallah. ‘I was very happy to move to Jerusalem, because it meant I was going back to Palestine. Everyone in the family was excited. Jerusalem then was better than now, cleaner and more prosperous. We had a very active life. Tourism was flourishing. Everyone came here from all over the Arab world to pray in the Al-Aqsa Mosque.’11
Before 1967 Jerusalem, like Berlin, was a divided city. The eastern half, including the Old City and the holy sites, was in Jordan. The western half was in Israel. Tourists and pilgrims were allowed to cross from one side to the other, but the border was closed to Israelis and most Arabs. ‘At Christmas time we saw the Christian Palestinian pilgrims who were allowed to visit the holy places as they came across from West Jerusalem. They told us how miserable it was in Israel, that it was not flourishing, and it was very difficult for Arabs to live in Israel,’ says Fadwa. In some ways Jerusalem seemed rather provincial compared to life in Beirut. The Lebanese capital was known as the Paris of the Middle East, a vibrant and cosmopolitan city, filled with foreigners from all over the world. But Suleiman and his friends worked hard to build up Jerusalem. They founded the Ambassador Hotel, a shopping centre and a cinema.
Fadwa also had her nieces nearby. Hasan and Barbara Hammami sent Fawzia and Rema to school in Jerusalem, to the Schmidt Girls’ College, the best girls’ boarding school in the Middle East. Rema was a lively, wilful child, and frequently got into trouble with the nuns. Shortly before the war began, Fadwa telephoned the school to check on her nieces. ‘Rema told me there were plans to take them to Amman. They asked me about the road and I told them it was not safe.’ One of the teachers said Fadwa could come and shelter in the school basement, but she wanted to stay at home with her family. When the war broke out, it all seemed horribly familiar to Fadwa. ‘The same story as 1948 repeated itself, but this time with children and my husband. The signs are always the same, even now. They told the foreigners to leave, and then we knew that it was a serious business. We didn’t have guns to defend ourselves. The Israelis started bombarding on Monday. My husband was at work and I was at home. Two of my children came home from school and told me the war had started. I didn’t know. So I turned on the radio and there it was, we were at war.’
Fadwa telephoned Suleiman at the electricity company. He tried to reassure her that nothing would happen. He was wrong. The Jordanians and Israelis fought artillery duels along the front line, in some places just a few yards apart. The shelling was intense. At dawn on Tuesday Jordanian tanks took up position outside Fadwa’s house and opened fire on the Israeli positions. That day Suleiman stayed at home. The house was crowded with friends whose own homes were too near or on the front line. ‘The Jordanians did not last long. I know from relatives who lived near Herod’s Gate in the Old City that the Israelis had captured the Post Office by dawn on Tuesday,’ says Fadwa. ‘The shelling was incredibly loud. All the windows were broken, but luckily we were not injured. I put mattresses against the windows, the three children under the bed and we lay flat on the ground. I was afraid because the Jordanian tanks were on our doorstep. Because if a plane hits the tanks, the tanks explode. And if they miss the tanks they hit the houses.’
Fadwa went outside to see what could be done. ‘I asked the man who was on the tank, “Are you going to stay here for a long time?” and he said he was. I asked him why, and he said, “We are fighting for Jordan and you are considered Jordanian.” I told him if he was staying I was leaving. I would leave him the house, because I did not want to die. I thought we should go to Ramallah where it might be safer, and where I have family.’ When the tank commander radioed for instructions and somebody answered him in Hebrew, it was clear that the battle was over.
Fadwa went back inside. The Israeli tanks trundled up soon after. ‘I didn’t see them but I heard them talking. My husband and I were sitting on the floor, and the children were under the bed. He knew Hebrew, he could read and write Hebrew. He said, “These are Jews, khalas [it’s over], we are finished.” He thought they would kill him, that they would take the men, and leave the women and children. He told me to take care of the children. We hid our money and our jewellery, I told the children to hide it in their pockets. I thought they would not search them. This was a good idea, because some of our friends who were wearing jewellery when the Israelis came had it taken.’
The Israelis did not kill Suleiman Hasna. They told him to go back to work and get the electricity supply running again. Meanwhile, in Jeddah, Hasan and Barbara were distraught with worry over Fawzia and Rema. Their youngest daughter Haifa had been sent to her grandmother in Nottingham after an outbreak of meningitis in Saudi Arabia; these were frantic and desperate days. Like Amin Andraus, who more than twenty years earlier had arrived at the border village of Tayibe too late to find his children, Hasan had no idea if his daughters were still alive, and no way of finding out. ‘We tried the International Red Cross, the British Embassy, family, friends, the airlines, business colleagues, Procter & Gamble and everything else we could think of, all to no avail,’ says Hasan. Barbara flew to Geneva on the first flight out to see if the Red Cross could help, while Hasan stayed in Jeddah, in case Fawzia and Rema could be brought out through Jordan. This was Hasan’s most wretched time since leaving Jaffa. Once again war threatened his family’s survival. In Jaffa in 1948, and now in Jeddah and Jerusalem in 1967, it seemed there would never be peace for the Hammamis.
As soon as the curfew in Jerusalem was lifted, Fadwa set out to look for Rema and Fawzia. The Schmidt College was on the edge of the Old City, which had been captured by the Israelis in fierce, hand-to-hand fighting. The girls were alive and healthy. Rema ran up to Fadwa as soon as she saw her, wide-eyed with excitement. ‘Auntie,’ she proclaimed, ‘there was a war here!’ After three weeks of agonising waiting, Hasan got a telephone call to say that Fadwa had put Rema and Fawzia in a taxi to the Jordanian border, where they were sent to their aunt Faizeh in Amman, who then put them on a plane to Jeddah. Hasan and Barbara’s relief was indescribable. The traumatic episode forced them both to reconsider the family’s future. Saudi Arabia had given Hasan citizenship and a new start, but the restrictions of life under Islamic rule, especially for women, led them to imagine their family’s future elsewhere. Until now, the demands of Hasan’s career and the children’s schooling had scattered them in different countries, but now Hasan and Barbara decided to return to England, where they could live together in a stable, peaceful environment and rebuild their family.
Fadwa, too, would soon be travelling, although hers was only a short trip. It was a strange twist of history that with all of Palestine conquered, the Jaffan exiles on the West Bank, indeed all Palestinians living in Israel’s newly conquered territories, could now freely cross into Israel proper. Defence Minister Moshe Dayan’s ‘Open Door’ policy even allowed Palestinians to cross into Jordan to trade, and visit relatives. For the first time since 1948, one of Ahmad Hammami’s children could go home to Jaffa.
17
The Ghosts of Old Jaffa
Late 1960s
The Arabs have a case. It’s a very difficult thing. Just as I didn’t understand the gravity of what was happening when I said goodbye to my parents in 1939, I didn’t understand the implications when I arrived in Jaffa.
Frank Meisler
After decades of neglect the two Arab houses that Frank Meisler bought in Old Jaffa were in a parlous state, if not completely ruined. Their ancient walls were crumbling, the roo
fs sagged dangerously, and they had barely any floors. But the views from the window and the terrace were breathtaking. The sea stretched away to the horizon, fleets of fishing boats bobbing on the azure waters. The waves broke over the rocky shore, bleached white in the sun. The sky was a lighter shade of blue, dotted with pale streaks of cloud. Frank’s houses were falling to bits, but they breathed history. Old Jaffa was where generations of medieval pilgrims had stumbled ashore on to the Holy Land after weeks on board ship, and where the first Jewish immigrants in the nineteenth century had stood, dazzled by the sun and disorientated by the clamour and smells of the Levant.
The port was just a short walk away. The Mamlukes and the Ottomans had built up Old Jaffa, while its most recent foreign rulers, the British, had destroyed part of it. Israel had done nothing to repair the damage done by the 1936 demolitions, when the British army had blasted a T-shaped path through the quarter. ‘It was destroyed ground. The British had cleared a path so they could drive their armoured cars up and down the middle,’ says Frank. But now, after the victories of 1967, was a time for rebuilding. One morning Frank was overseeing the Arab workers as they began to renovate the living room. In each corner there was a niche. Frank ordered the workers to remove the old plaster. As they chipped away, and the room filled with dust, they began to shout. In one corner behind the old walls were several skeletons, probably of former inhabitants. Frank recalls: ‘The builders became hysterical. They ran away and we did not see them for a week.’ The skeletons were disposed of, and the authorities were decidedly not informed. Once Israel’s bureaucracy lumbered into action, work could be stopped for months. ‘The one thing you don’t ever want to do is tell the antiquities department that you have found something. I am sure that many beautiful mosaics have been ploughed over. If you find one in a field, the department comes in, everything is fenced off and your home is gone.’
Frank had had an easier war than Yoram Aharoni, although he too saw combat. He was first sent to the port of Ashdod, south of Jaffa, where he worked to prepare landing barges for a planned D-Day style invasion of the Gaza Strip, which never happened. From Ashdod he was redeployed to central Israel, where he fought with the Golani Brigade in Latrun, about thirty kilometres west of Jaffa. The village took its name from the nearby Crusader castle, Le Toron des Chevaliers. In 1948 Latrun, which overlooks the old road between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, had been the scene of very heavy fighting. Ariel Sharon had commanded a platoon there and was wounded in battle. When the Israelis captured the area in 1967, Latrun’s fort and monastery were left standing, but not much else. The neighbouring villages of Imwas, Yalu and Beit Nuba were also demolished, and their inhabitants fled to the West Bank.1 ‘Latrun’s fate was decided by politics,’ says Frank. ‘Within twenty minutes the bulldozers came, and a day later you would not have guessed there had been a village there.’
Old Jaffa fared better. Frank had a degree in architecture from Manchester University and a good knowledge of house construction, but Ottoman building techniques were a revelation. ‘I had a very preconceived idea about how to restore a Turkish house, based on my ideas of the Thousand and One Nights. There was a lot to learn. There is no timber here to make the beams for roofs. You have a dome instead. Once the four walls are built a potter makes small wedge-shaped vases. You put the vases on top of the wall, and fill up the whole row. Then you put down the next row on top of the first, and slightly further in. You keep adding more rows until you hit the centre. Then you plaster the whole thing, and you’ve got a dome.’ Understanding the principles of building a dome triggered an epiphany. Suddenly Frank grasped the connection that ran through history, through his new house, back through the millennia. ‘I suddenly realised what my house was made of: it was a Byzantine concept, maybe even Roman. A dome gives you a roof with ventilation, because the vases are hollow. There is good insulation against heat, and it is very light. The technology has not changed since then. The Turks took what the Byzantines did and worked with it. As long as the walls stand, the dome cannot collapse. Until then I knew what I was doing technically. But I didn’t have a sense of its roots, in what it was grounded.’
The floors, as well as the roofs of Old Jaffa, were also a revelation. In the jumble of houses down by the seafront, each built on top of the next, some surfaces served as both. The restoration of the houses was a kind of time travel, as Frank’s builders peeled away the walls and floors constructed centuries earlier. ‘I also restored a house for a rich South African, and we pulled up the floors to put in the heating and lay down Italian tiles. Under the floorboards were rows and rows of ceramic pots. The floor had been built on top of them. The ceramic pots filled all the spaces between the domes of the houses underneath, and were covered with wood. People had walked over those boards, with the pots underneath, for two or three hundred years.’ Frank and the builders often found coins as they worked. Ottoman builders would mix them in with the mortar when they constructed a house, for good luck. The coins were usually engraved with Arabic phrases, praising Allah and his blessings. One afternoon Frank saw a ghost while he was dozing off, a bearded Arab man dressed in baggy Turkish trousers, flying out of the corridor and into the bedroom.
Old Jaffa was also haunted by those of its former residents who were still alive. With the border between the newly occupied West Bank and Israel proper now open, they sometimes came back to see their former homes. Such encounters were painful and poignant. One visit to the South African’s house lingers in Frank’s mind. ‘A man came in and asked me whether he could look around. He was an Arab man, from Ramallah, I think. I brought him in, and showed him what we were doing to the house. He cried.’ But few Israelis were then bothered about the fate of Old Jaffa’s previous inhabitants. Many of the Jews from Arab countries had themselves been expelled, their homes and businesses confiscated. Many Ashkenazim were Holocaust survivors who had lost their families. In Israel, like everywhere else, suffering did not ennoble. It made people hard, suspicious and cynical. One of Frank’s neighbours did check that the property in which he was interested had not been owned by Arab refugees. His conscience was satisfied – the house belonged to the Armenian Church and was leased to the Jaffa Development Corporation. But such cases were the exception, Frank explains. ‘There was no consciousness then of what had happened to the Palestinians, or of their lives in exile. Israel was a new country, an “empty” place. People just accepted it. Maybe because it was a convenient concept, that the Arabs ran away, so it serves them right, and so why bother about them?’
The scruples of Frank’s neighbour and the visitor from Ramallah began to change Frank’s way of thinking. ‘I began to realise that, actually, there was a consideration here. The Arabs have a case. Now when I see the pictures by David Roberts, who painted here in the nineteenth century, of the Arabs who lived in Jaffa then, the men in their baggy trousers and the women in their costumes, I wonder where are they? Today we are far more conscious of these things. I would like to see the situation from the point of view of an intelligent Arab, which I am sure is a totally different picture from the one I have.’
Soon after the fighting stopped in Jerusalem, Israeli soldiers came into Fadwa Hammami’s house in Shuafat, East Jerusalem. It was Fadwa’s great good fortune that she and her family had not left Jerusalem during the war. Those Palestinians who had fled the fighting, or were away on holiday or business, even elsewhere in the West Bank when the war broke out, lost the right to reside in Jerusalem. ‘The Israelis counted us, and gave us identity cards with a number. Nobody should experience the feelings I had, the first time the Israelis came into our home, of humiliation and defeat,’ she says. The identity cards were not passports, and gave no right of travel abroad, nor was Fadwa given Israeli citizenship, which anyway she did not want. But the identity card did allow her to travel freely within Israel. Unlike today, when the West Bank and areas now under Palestinian control are sealed off by a security fence, and a maze of army checkpoints controls access in and out of Israel p
roper, in 1967 the roads were open. She wasted little time in returning to Jaffa. She recalls: ‘I was really happy because I had always wanted to see Jaffa again. I was the first one to see our house again. They always told me that I was the lucky one.’
But the reality of her homecoming was bitter. Fadwa and Suleiman found an East Jerusalem tour company that was taking back other Jaffa exiles who had not seen the city since 1948. The journey stirred powerful and very mixed emotions. Fadwa was going home for the first time in nineteen years to the city of her birth, where she had gone to school, and enjoyed an idyllic childhood in the Hammami villa, always surrounded by her siblings and cousins. The last time she had seen Jaffa was from a boat, as she and her family sailed away into exile, shells exploding in the water around them, their home town wreathed in smoke. Jaffa still stood, but Palestine no longer existed except in her memory. Even the villages that once marked Jaffa’s outskirts had gone, replaced by modern Israeli tower blocks.
