City of Oranges

by Adam LeBor

  Fadwa’s heart thumped and her stomach twisted with nerves as the tour bus drove down the dusty, bumpy lane into Jebaliyyeh, now renamed Givat Aliyah. Their house still stood. But it was now a state-run children’s home. Rooms had been added and divided, walls moved and rebuilt, the gardens truncated. The stone corridors now echoed to the sound of Hebrew. Israeli children lined up for meals, and played in what was left of the garden, her family’s garden, where she had once tended her own pink rosebush. Fadwa went inside. An Israeli official, seeing the bus outside, at first believed that she was a tourist and asked her to make a donation to the home. ‘I did not tell him at first that it was my house. And then when he knew, he told me that I was not allowed there. I told him that he was not allowed there, but he had taken my house. It was awful to see this. They took our house from us, they buried it, and I was forced to let them use it.’

  Fadwa returned to Jaffa again in 1970, together with her mother Nafise, and sisters Faizeh and Nahida. It was too traumatic. Nafise’s husband, Ahmad, had died in Baghdad in 1964. In a way, they were returning for him, making the journey home he never could. But the reality of seeing the family villa for the first time since 1948 was more than Nafise could bear, recalls Fadwa. ‘It was very difficult, very emotional for her. She would not get out of the taxi. She just said she did not want to see it.’ Nafise, who passed away in 1988, never returned to Jaffa. Since that first visit in the summer of 1967, Fadwa and her relatives make regular visits to the Hammami villa. ‘After so many years of occupation, most of my family has come here, and their sons and daughters. Three generations have come to see our house. The last time I was there the manager asked me how many of us there were. “You come and you come, and you never finish,” he said to me. I told him, “Yes, we never finish.”’

  Once the Six Day War was over, the pharmacist Fakhri Geday was released from detention. Fakhri had been treated reasonably. He was held in Abu-Kabir, on the southern edge of Jaffa. He was not beaten or abused and, apart from the deprivation of his liberty, he had no complaints. Despite his friendship with Moshe Dayan, Abraham Suchovolsky, Fakhri’s lawyer, had not managed to get him released. But he visited his client every day to check up on him, and brought him meals, Fakhri recalls. ‘I didn’t like the food there. There was no other reason why I didn’t eat it. I was treated with total respect.’ Fakhri was now forty years old. Like most of the Palestinians living in Israel, he was frustrated at the ease with which Israel had swept through the West Bank and the Sinai desert. Contrary to his predictions, his hero, the Egyptian leader Nasser, had not arrived in three days. He had not arrived at all. Shamed and humiliated by the destruction of the Egyptian air force and the capture of Gaza and Sinai, Nasser tried to resign. But when Egyptians took to the streets in massive demonstrations to show their support, and the parliament (which his party controlled) passed a vote of confidence in his leadership, he decided to stay in power.

  Nasser enjoyed the greatest popular support of any modern Arab leader, buttressed by a police state. His charisma stretched from Cairo, over the Sinai desert, along Israel’s coastline, to Jaffa and the pharmacy at number 65 Yefet Street. Even after 1967, Fakhri’s faith in Nasser was unshaken. Fakhri’s belief, that one day he and the Palestinians would be liberated by the Arab armies, lived on: ‘As long as Nasser was still living, there was still hope, although there was also frustration, because everything that happens in the Arab world has an impact here in Israel.’ A good number of Palestinians living inside Israel left after the Six Day War, many of them Christians with family in the West. ‘They had lost hope. Many people left for Canada. I myself believed that now there was no hope for the Arab countries as long as they were governed by tyrants, those rulers who are imposed on the people. This is the first and foremost aspect of the problem.’ In the meantime, Fakhri reopened his green-painted shop and went back to work, dispensing pills and ointments, salves and bandages to his customers, whether they were Christians, Muslims or Jews.

  * * *

  Not far from Yefet Street, at the Albo household, the atmosphere was very different. Like all Jewish Israelis, the Albos were celebrating. Yaakov Albo, the former shoe-shop owner from Istanbul who had not wanted to come to Israel, had returned to Jaffa after his reconnaissance mission to Turkey. He stayed in Israel and established himself as a fruit seller, setting off every morning at dawn to the market to load up his tricycle, and then riding north to Tel Aviv. With its expansion to the south blocked by Jaffa, Tel Aviv had spread up the coast. The emergence of an Israeli middle class had generated new quarters such as Ramat Aviv and Ramat Hasharon, made of houses with gardens, rather than Bauhaus-era apartment blocks. Jaffa’s residents disparagingly referred to their neighbours in Tel Aviv as sfonim, or northerners. The word carried the suggestion of being rich and spoilt, of living in a bourgeois bubble, compared to the gritty reality of Jaffa with its mixed Jewish and Arab populations.

  But the sfonim had money and what they paid for Yaakov Albo’s fruit kept the family warm and fed. In the mid-1960s, Yaakov bought a small van and set himself up in the removals business. It was an ill-timed move, for soon afterwards Israel was hit by an economic depression. Once again, Yaakov planned to leave, explains his son Sami. ‘He had another idea then, to go to Canada. Many people were emigrating at that time. I was fourteen and at school in 1966. But I didn’t bother studying any more because I knew I was going to Canada.’ Then everything changed after the victories of 1967. Finally, after twenty years of equivocation, Yaakov felt he really had come home. There was no more talk of Canada. ‘My father became a real Zionist. He was very proud to be an Israeli.’

  Jaffa then was a good place to grow up. Socially and economically, the relationship between Arabs and Jews in Jaffa during the 1950s and 1960s was in some ways reminiscent of the era before 1948. The two communities lived side by side, but separately. Their lives intersected in commerce and business, but deep friendships were rare. Jews took their prescriptions to Fakhri Geday’s pharmacy, Arabs bought their coffee and spices at Yoram Aharoni’s shop Tiv. But there was a profound political difference between the Jaffa of the 1940s and that of the 1960s. Jaffa’s Arabs were now a minority in a Jewish state. Apart from activists such as Fakhri Geday, Jaffa’s Arab population was usually peaceful and quiescent. For most, politics was too troublesome, and would attract the attention of Shin Bet. Sami recalls: ‘At first, in the 1950s, Jews and Arabs physically lived together, in the same Arab houses. The children played in the same backyards. They were separate, but correct with each other and nobody did anything to harm the other. The Arabs were weak and quiet. They were frightened to say they had families outside the country and they also wanted to come back. In those days when I was a child, the Jews lived here, on this side of Yefet Street, and the Arabs lived there, in Ajami. We sometimes went to Ajami, but there was nothing for us to do there.’

  By the 1960s most of the post-1948 Jewish immigrants had left Jaffa for Bat Yam and other modern towns further down the coast, or for Tel Aviv itself. The old villas of Ajami had new tenants once more: Arab families who moved to Jaffa from Galilee or nearby Arab villages. Sami recalls: ‘The first Jews to leave Jaffa were the ones who had lived in Ajami. They understood that they could not raise their children there. I myself did not have any Arab friends. Arab neighbours, yes, with a very good relationship. But friends, never. A friend means you play together, you hang out together. This kind of friendship I did not have.’ Sami watched some of the Palestinians who returned to Jaffa after 1967, as they retraced their family history. He was not concerned: ‘I looked on it as a fact. They lived here before and now they wanted to see their houses. Some people I know were a bit frightened in the beginning, but the Arab people just wanted to see how the place was arranged now. They were treated as guests, and invited in. There was nothing to worry about. I knew that nobody could kick us out.’

  Opening the road from the West Bank to Jaffa would have more far-reaching consequences than poignant and nostalgic visits
to former family homes. Both Palestinian communities had been isolated from each other, and had been differently moulded by two decades under Israeli and Jordanian rule. The encounters between the two were sometimes painful. Many Israeli Arabs were angry at the Palestinians who had fled in 1948. They believed that by staying in Palestine – even though it was now called Israel – and by fighting for their rights, they were the real guardians of the Palestinian cause. In turn, the West Bankers sometimes regarded the Israeli Arabs as near traitors for taking Israeli citizenship and learning Hebrew. After 1967 a complex and symbiotic relationship began, shaped by a rising nationalist consciousness and the steady growth of radical Islam on both sides of the border. Eventually, the two communities would sufficiently entwine in that the violence of the Intifada, the uprising against Israeli rule on the West Bank, would trigger a similar outbreak across the streets of Jaffa.

  18

  War, Once More

  Early 1970s

  You are twenty years old and you see so many people get killed, and so many bodies from the other side as well. You see terrible things. Some people lost their minds.

  Ofer Aharoni, on his experience in

  the 1973 Yom Kippur War

  In January 1972 Amin Andraus died of lung cancer. He was seventy-four years old, a heavy smoker all his life. In his later years there was little Amin enjoyed more than sitting in his garden, cigarette in hand, discussing politics and world events with his many friends, both Arabs and Jews. His 1930s home, perched at the end of Kedem Street, was a frontier post in both place and time. It was one of the last houses in Jaffa, towards ever-expanding Bat Yam to the south. It was also a kind of time capsule, a micro-universe where the lost world of pre-1948 Jaffa lived on – a place of grace, courtesy and intelligent conversation. Amin’s visitors ranged from poor Arab fishermen, seeking his help and advice, to senior Israeli officials, who wanted to talk politics, and sought Amin’s opinions on Arab issues.

  Even after 1948 – perhaps especially after 1948, when almost every Arab notable had fled – the Andraus name still had a powerful resonance. ‘Our home was very much a meeting place for all sorts of people from many walks of life,’ says his daughter Suad. ‘He was very charismatic and knew how to tell a good story. At home there were discussions from history to politics to different cultures.’ In the first years of Israel’s independence, General Yitzhak Sadeh was a frequent visitor. Sadeh seemed an unlikely friend. A former champion wrestler, Sadeh was the founder of the Palmach, the elite strike force of the Haganah, and had initiated the concept of pre-emptive strikes that shaped much of Israeli military doctrine. Sadeh left military service in 1949 and became a writer. Like all writers, he loved to talk about books, says Amin’s son Salim. ‘Politically they had completely opposite views, but intellectually they had a lot in common. Sadeh wrote books, and my father loved to read.’

  Amin never remarried, although he would not have found it difficult to find a new bride, says Suad. ‘Life would have been much easier for him if he had remarried. He was good looking, and he was a great personality. I am sure he would have been able to find someone if he had wanted. But people lived differently then, with a different philosophy. He married once, and then he stayed a widower.’ Amin’s philosophy was to live ethically, and help when he could. Amin had a complex, ambiguous relationship with Israel. He was a law-abiding citizen of a state he had not wanted to see born. Yet he was a realist and he accepted the reality of Israel’s existence. Its legal system had not served him well, but when Israeli officials asked him to mediate in complex disputes involving Israeli Arabs, to help settle them out of court, he agreed. When Salim was accepted at an American university in the 1950s, Israel’s exchange control laws prevented Amin from exporting enough money out of the country to support him. Other Israelis simply sent the funds out illegally, but Amin would never countenance lawbreaking.

  Punctuality, too, was crucial, recalls Salim: ‘My father was very strict about keeping appointments. If I told him I would come back at 9 p.m., and I came back at five past nine, that was a bad mistake. He kept his appointments to the minute and he kept his word. He was very upset when people did not keep their word, especially the agreement that Jaffa would be an “open city”.’ Sunday lunches were always announced by the sounding of a small gong, which always caused much merriment among visitors. Amin is still remembered with affection and gratitude in Jaffa. Suad says: ‘He inspired confidence in people. The Jaffa folk came to ask his advice, help to find jobs or settle disputes and he never let them down. He spent his later years very much at home. He read, and worked in the garden. Whenever he went to town people would stop him for a chat. The older people love to tell us that they remember him. The young ones also say that they have heard of him, and how he helped their parents sort out a problem, or wrote a letter to some authority on their behalf. My father always lived by his principles, even when they caused him problems.’

  Amin’s friend Yitzhak Sadeh once published a collection of articles under the pen name ‘The Wanderer’. For centuries the themes of exile, dispersal and a longing for a lost homeland had shaped Jewish literature and liturgy. After 1948 the Palestinians, not the Jews, were wanderers, and the same themes shaped the Palestinian literary renaissance. In poems and short stories, and novels and plays by authors such as Ghassan Kanafani, Jaffa often served as a metaphor for Palestine. Kanafani was born in 1936, and was a pupil at the St Joseph’s College in Jaffa, where Fakhri Geday and Hasan Hammami had studied. Even at an early age, Kanafani showed a talent for imagination and flights of fancy, and he would construct elaborate games of make-believe. But in 1948, there was no flight from tragic reality. Kanafani and his family left Jaffa for Lebanon. He eventually studied in Syria and worked as a teacher in Kuwait, before moving to Beirut. The monks at St Joseph’s had taught Kanafani well. He was a skilled and prolific writer, whose oeuvre ranged from historical studies to a detective novel. Most of Kanafani’s work examined the Palestinian experience and the trauma of the Nakba and its aftermath. In the Land of the Sad Oranges, Jaffa’s oranges serve as a metaphor for the loss of Palestine as the family arrives at the Lebanese border:

  The women emerged from amid the luggage, stepped down and went over to an orange vendor sitting by the wayside. As the women walked back with the oranges, the sound of their sobs reached us. Only then did oranges seem to me something dear, that each of these big, clean fruits was something to be cherished. Your father alighted from beside the driver, took an orange, gazed at it silently, then began to weep like a helpless child…1

  Kanafani’s work is reminiscent of Joseph Roth’s, the early twentieth-century Jewish writer: it too is an elegy for a lost world. For Roth, it was the vanished Austro-Hungarian Empire: for Kanafani, Palestine before the Nakba. But whether in Palestine in 1948, or in Germany after the First World War, the end of empire spawns the same misery and chaos. Roth’s description of refugees in 1920s Europe could just as well represent the Palestinian refugee camps: ‘I can picture the women arguing among themselves, over a child or a cooking pot, say. Poor people come to blows over such things. The children are fair-haired and slightly dirty. They don’t have any nice toys. Their world consists of a courtyard, a dozen bits of gravel, and one another. The one another is the best bit.’2

  Kanafani’s first novel, Men in the Sun, published in 1963, was the story of three Palestinians, each representing a different generation, who perish trying to escape to Kuwait in a water truck. ‘We are here, we are dying, let us out, let us be free,’ the refugees proclaim. Kanafani’s seminal work, Return to Haifa, recounts the return of a Palestinian family to their home in Haifa after 1967 and their encounter with the Jewish family then living there. It was a ground-breaking work that portrayed the Israelis as refugees themselves, and humanised them. Kanafani’s journalism and wide-ranging literary oeuvre soon placed him in the limelight. He edited al-Hadaf, the magazine of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and was appointed its spokesman. La
ter, the PFLP would carry out some of the most murderous and spectacular terrorist attacks of the early 1970s.

  The end of the Six Day War had brought no peace. Shamed and humiliated by their defeat, the Arab states announced the policies known as the ‘Three Nos’ at a conference in Khartoum in August 1967: no peace, no negotiations, no recognition. ‘No recognition’ at least, was reciprocated. Prime Minister Golda Meir said: ‘It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.’3

  In 1969 fighting erupted again between Israel and Egypt, along the Suez Canal. The War of Attrition, as it was known, lasted until August 1970 when a truce was signed. It was a temporary respite. Israel and Egypt, indeed all the Arab states, had unfinished business. The following month Nasser died, and was succeeded by his vice-president, Anwar Sadat. The stage was set for the next full-scale conflict. But the fighting by the Suez Canal was not the only military threat to Israel. By 1970 the Palestine Liberation Organisation was dominated by Fatah, and its leader Yasser Arafat had been appointed PLO chairman. The military struggle continued in the world’s airport lounges, along their runways and in the aeroplanes themselves. The Palestinians launched a wave of terror attacks, with hijackings, bombings and shootings. In May 1972, PFLP-trained Japanese terrorists killed twenty-seven and wounded seventy-one when they opened fire at Lydda airport in Israel. Six weeks later, Ghassan Kanafani was killed, together with his seventeen-year-old niece, when a bomb blew up his car in Beirut.