City of Oranges

by Adam LeBor

  The ground-breaking research of the ‘New Israeli Historians’ such as Tom Segev and Benny Morris, which began to be published in the late 1980s, deconstructed many of the founding myths of Israel. It became clear that the Palestinians had not all fled voluntarily in 1948, but that a substantial number had been ethnically cleansed in military operations carefully recorded by the officers who commanded them. Zionist fighters, like their Arab foes, had also carried out atrocities. The patterns of warfare in Israel/Palestine in 1948 – and its human cost – differed little from most conflicts fought to seize territory. It also became clear that the arrival of the Jews from Arab countries had not been a universally ‘miraculous’ in-gathering, but had often caused the immigrants considerable distress. Ironically, it was Israel’s own liberal policy – allowing researchers access to government and some military archives – that helped provide the intellectual underpinning for the new narrative on the reality of the Nakba in 1948, and the fate and future of the Palestinians and Israel. The students expelled by Aharon Chelouche were strident and aggressive, disrupting the running of the university. The new Palestinian-Israeli history, and the examination of Jaffa’s own turbulent past, would be built on reasoned argument and provocative, intelligent debate.

  20

  Seaside Urban Sprawl

  1960s–1980s

  Within a few years a real new city will be erected in the area that witnessed the events of the Independence War.

  Yehoshua Rabinowitz, vice-mayor of Tel

  Aviv in the 1960s, on plans to redevelop

  the ruined quarter of Manshiyyeh1

  Frank Meisler eventually finished renovating his Arab house. The family loved living in the heart of the Old City, overlooking the sea. Just as Teddy Kollek, the mayor of Jerusalem, had planned, Old Jaffa had been saved from the wrecker’s ball and transformed into an artists’ quarter. The yellow sandstone buildings had been carefully restored, their bricks scraped and polished. The narrow alleys and crooked lanes were now home to painters, sculptors and jewellers, advertising their wares with ornate iron signs lit by pretty art deco lamps. Even the paving stones had been cleaned and shined. The prostitutes and drug dealers were gone and the brothels had been turned into shops crowded with tourists buying knick-knacks and works of art, before enjoying a leisurely lunch at one of the seafront restaurants.

  Frank had given up architecture and was now a full-time sculptor, producing stylish, intricate metal sculptures and statues in his neighbouring workshop. Frank’s recollections of Danzig had helped to sustain him mentally as a refugee in wartime London, and inspired his first attempts at draughtsmanship. In Jaffa, too, pre-war Danzig would prove creatively fruitful. Frank’s hometown, his parents, and the whole world in which he grew up were gone. In a sense, his twin metiers of sculpture and architecture, even restoring his Arab house, were an attempt to fill that gap. The Hasidic Rabbis and musicians of eastern Europe had vanished in the Holocaust, but their joie de vivre at least was immortalised in the burnished metal of Frank’s art. ‘I felt that I was bringing things from my childhood into existence, recreating them in a new and sophisticated way, that I was getting the inspiration from somewhere,’ says Frank. His art from the heart flourished, and he received commissions from the Israeli government and Jewish organisations. Israeli diplomats took one of his sculptures to Camp David, when Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat made peace, and his rendition of Jerusalem was presented to Margaret Thatcher.

  But Frank, like many of Old Jaffa’s more perceptive inhabitants, knew that something was missing there too, lost for ever in the renovation. Lost, if the truth be told, in 1948. Like an elderly actress wearing too much make-up, Old Jaffa deceived only at a distance. ‘We called Old Jaffa “chocolate Jaffa”, because only the rest of the city was the real Jaffa,’ recalls Michal Meisler, Frank’s eldest daughter. Born in 1969, Michal was one of a handful of children to grow up in Old Jaffa. It was an idyllic childhood, commuting between two worlds: the bohemian mix of artists and Arab fishermen, and nearby Tel Aviv. Frank and his wife Batya toyed with the idea of sending Michal either to Tabeetha, the Scottish mission school, or St Joseph’s College. In the end they chose a school in Tel Aviv. At the age of six Michal walked for fifteen minutes to Clock Tower Square, where she took a bus to the capital. Now a mother herself, with striking features and short-cropped hair, Michal admits she would not allow her young children to travel alone on public transport. But those were more innocent days. ‘Then it was safe, although people thought my parents were very brave for allowing me to do that. I had two lives, each very different. School in Tel Aviv and home here in Jaffa. It made me quite different from my friends. I was more independent and more self-confident.’

  The port was Michal’s playground. Jaffa no longer accepted ocean-going ships, which now docked at Ashdod or Ashkelon down the coast. But the fishermen still set out every morning at dawn, returning a few hours later with their catch, which they would spread on the quayside, glistening silver in the mid-morning sun, or sell to Old Jaffa’s fish restaurants. ‘I learnt how to walk there, how to ride a bicycle and how to roller-skate. It was lovely and it was safe. Now a little girl could not walk back through the port at night. But Jaffa still had a bad reputation. If I wanted a school friend to come and stay the night, her parents often would not allow it. It took a whole operation to convince them. Everyone thought that “good people” did not go to Jaffa.’ The Arab fishermen were wary of the independent Jewish girl, allowed to play on her own. ‘I was friendly with the Jewish fishermen, but not with the Arabs. They would say hallo, but that was it. Probably I was a bit frightening for them. I was a young Jewish girl, and they may have worried that I would bring them to the attention of the police.’

  In 1974, when Michal was fourteen, there was one Arab man who did not worry about striking up a friendship with her. Michal had often seen him driving his BMW through the port at top speed, as though he were on a race-track. Michal felt protective of the port, and was annoyed at his presumption. With all the confidence of a genuine sabra (a native-born Israeli) she decided to take a stand. One day she knocked on the car window to confront him. ‘I asked him who he was, driving around like a maniac. He asked me who I was. I told him, I was Michal, and this was my port. He said his name was Yosi, which could be Hebrew or Arabic.2 He spoke without an accent. I asked him for a ride and got in.’ The two became friends. Yosi would cruise through Jaffa in his BMW, toot the horn and Michal would jump in. ‘They were rollercoaster rides. He would drive through the narrow streets at high speed, taking turns like crazy. Every now and then we would stop and he would buy me an ice cream. There was no romantic side to this friendship: it was completely platonic. He never took advantage or tried to. I was a kind of jewel he enjoyed wearing around Jaffa, and he was the same for me. He was my rebellious side, and I was his dignified side.’

  Yosi told Michal he bought and sold cucumbers. She did not quite believe him, but it didn’t seem to matter. ‘It was our joke. I asked him how the cucumber business was, and he would say it was going very well.’ Yosi spoke Hebrew flawlessly, but his real name was Youssef. By the time Michal was sixteen she realised that Yosi was indeed a dealer, but not in cucumbers. Jaffa was the centre of Israel’s drug trade. Much of the hashish smoked in Tel Aviv was – and still is – channelled through Jaffa, smuggled from Egypt through the Sinai desert by the Bedouin, or brought south through the Lebanese border. ‘Once I knew what Yosi really did I went and got my identity card, in case I was arrested while I was with him. When I began smoking cigarettes he would tell me off and say what a bad habit it was. I told him what he was doing was much worse. He just said, “What are you talking about?”’ Eventually Michal left Jaffa, to do three years of army service and to study law at university. She wanted to become a criminal lawyer. ‘Yosi could have been my entry ticket to that world. It was the kind of friendship that could have brought me clients. We often joked that I would be a criminal lawyer and would save him.’ But when Yosi was fin
ally arrested, he needed emergency medical care more than legal help.

  With Manshiyyeh gone, the symmetry between Jaffa and Tel Aviv was out of kilter. There was nothing to stop the gargantuan plans of municipal bureaucrats, in thrall to the new wave of property developers: Tel Aviv municipality announced the Manshiyyeh development competition. More than a hundred and fifty architects entered, from thirty-three countries. Like the early years of Bolshevik Russia, Tel Aviv in the 1960s was a tabula rasa on which architects could draw radical modernist fantasies. Great plans were laid to reclaim the sea, and to build islands connected by walkways. International architecture journals portrayed Israel as a major centre of development, open to radical design ideas. Critics’ protests went unheeded.

  While Manshiyyeh was being radically ‘developed’, precisely the opposite process – of quaint conservation – was taking place in Old Jaffa. The Manshiyyeh–Old Jaffa nexus highlighted one of Zionism’s inherent paradoxes: the creation of a modern Jewish state peopled by brash, confident, Hebrew-speaking Israelis; a state sometimes scornful of the history of Diaspora Jewry, but which simultaneously sought its legitimacy in that same history, which it carefully preserved. The competition to develop Manshiyyeh was won by an Israeli firm. When a symposium was held on the development plan, the quarter’s rich past was barely discussed. The divide between Jaffa and Tel Aviv grew even wider. As the critic Zvi Elhyani noted: ‘The worn-out disciplinary rhetoric declaring that the plan would “bridge the gap between Tel Aviv and Jaffa” in actual fact perpetuated the alienating barrier and derelict site between the two cities.’3

  Historic Jewish buildings were also destroyed in the drive to modernise Tel Aviv. The Herzliya Gymnasium, where Shlomo Chelouche had gone to school, was the city’s first public building, constructed in 1909, and the first modern Hebrew school. The Gymnasium and neighbouring houses were the heart of old Tel Aviv. They were flattened, replaced by the Shalom Mayer Tower, a neo-brutalist thirty-four-storey rectangular office building that mars the skyline for kilometres. The Bauhaus quarters and Zaki Chelouche’s masterpieces were spared the developers. But the Manshiyyeh development plan spawned an aesthetic wasteland. The beachfront was ruined by an uneven row of high-rise hotels, drab glass towers better suited to Detroit or Düsseldorf than the Mediterranean. A four-lane road filled with traffic ran just yards from the sand, choking the air with exhaust fumes. The land behind the beach was dotted with gaping parking lots and decrepit shacks. In short it was, and is, a balagan, the Hebrew word for ‘mess’.

  Perhaps Ashkenazi Jews and the sea simply did not go together, says Frank Meisler. ‘Tel Aviv is a wasted opportunity. To build properly by the sea, to utilise public spaces properly, you need a tradition of living in that kind of environment. It works best when people know how to live outdoors, like in Seville. Jaffa has a much more organic relationship with its environment. Seville, like Jaffa, was originally Roman, and then Arab. Andalusia mixed two different heritages – Roman and Arab. They both understood how to use light and shade, and the luxury of water and how to exploit it, the purpose of decorating a public space with a fountain. None of that reached Poland and Russia, or anywhere else the Ashkenazi Jews came from to build Tel Aviv. They were business people, entrepreneurs from eastern Europe, and that shaped the city.’

  The contrast was starkest in Ajami. Ajami was unique in Israel – it fused Arab and Ottoman styles with modernist influences that spilled over from neighbouring Tel Aviv. Its villas were palatial and ornate, many incorporating the architectural ornaments manufactured by the Chelouche factory: iron balustrades, patterned floor tiles and window frames. The houses were built of sandstone, then covered with plaster to protect them from the salty air and painted a light pastel colour, often blue or pink. But Ajami had not fared well. After the Balkan and north African Jews left in the 1960s for more modern homes elsewhere in Israel, Israeli Arab economic migrants moved in. Many were poor and could not afford to maintain the villas, which then crumbled and decayed.

  Ajami bordered Old Jaffa, but there was no improvement overspill. On the contrary, the renovation of Old Jaffa only highlighted Ajami’s ramshackle state. By 1983 it was the most run-down neighbourhood in Tel Aviv-Jaffa. Most of the city received about 57 points out of 100 on the town planners’ scale for amenities. Ajami had 4 points. The municipality’s response was to demolish the old villas and rehouse their inhabitants in new modern blocks. Ajami’s residents certainly wanted new roads, a better sewerage system, public transport and street lights. But they also wanted their houses to be restored. Hundreds of beautiful Ottoman houses were demolished, and the rubble was simply dumped on the beach. The municipality then trumpeted a new reconstruction plan for Ajami’s coastline. There would be new hotels, gardens, and a promenade, and Ajami would finally rise from the ruins. It never happened. The hotels were never built. Ajami was doubly scarred: by gaping holes in the streets, and by the piles of smashed bricks and rubble, sarcastically dubbed ‘Tel Jaffa’ (‘Hill of Jaffa’), that ruined the seafront.

  The clash between developers and conservationists was not unique to Jaffa. Cities all over the world have to find a balance between preserving their heritage and modernising their infrastructure. Doubtless some of the demolished villas were beyond repair, and no longer safe to live in, but others could have been restored. And why had they been allowed to fall into such a state of decay? Jaffa’s tangled history, its central place in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the sour relations between Ajami’s Arab inhabitants and Israeli officialdom added extra layers of acrimony. The pharmacist Fakhri Geday watched, angry and powerless, as Ajami’s villas were flattened. ‘This policy was intentional. They had an idea in their minds, that the Arabs of Jaffa should go and live in Lydda or other Arab towns. They said this openly, that the Arabs should leave Jaffa. Nobody can deny this, this intentional discrimination against the Arabs.’

  Nobody except perhaps Shlomo Lahat, mayor of Tel Aviv between 1974 and 1993. Born in Berlin in 1927, Shlomo is now retired, and lives in north Tel Aviv. Lahat, nicknamed ‘Cheech’, was a national institution, and still has the brisk no-nonsense manner of the archetypal yekke, the German Jewish immigrants who poured into Tel Aviv during the 1930s. The Lindner family, as they were then called, arrived from Berlin in November 1933. Shlomo’s father Max had owned a textile factory with thirty-two employees and the family lived in an eight-room apartment with a maid. Soon after Hitler came to power, a group of Nazis came to take Max to ‘register at the police station’. He escaped out of the back door. When his wife Rosa discovered he was to be sent to Dachau, she decided that the family had to leave Germany as soon as possible. They re-settled in Rehovot, near Tel Aviv, in a small apartment. There was no maid, Max Lindner drove trucks, and Rosa worked as a cleaner. ‘My parents were not proud, they did not complain, they did not cry and think everybody owed them something. They said we saved our lives, and that’s it.’ The contrast between Shlomo’s memories of his parents and his perception of Jaffa’s Arab population is stark. ‘They are never thankful, they never appreciate anything and they always claim they are neglected. Whenever you do something for them, they never appreciate it, only what was not done. It is a matter of culture, of having an inferiority complex.’

  Ajami was not the only quarter that needed renovating during his office as mayor, he argues: ‘There were many Jewish neighbourhoods in Tel Aviv with problems with their infrastructure, housing and culture. They were my first priority, then I turned to Jaffa. But I was always very concerned with Jaffa. The city’s name is Tel Aviv-Jaffa and when I became mayor I said, Jaffa is an equal name. It is one city, but there is a great difference between Tel Aviv and Jaffa. The Arab population of Jaffa does not try and do things for itself. The state should do more for Jaffa, but the Arab population needs good will, leaders to speak for the population. When you come and ask them something, they answer, but on their own initiative, they do nothing.’ Cheech also launched a drive to save the city’s famed Bauhaus architecture from t
he corroding effect of decades of sea spray and salty air. ‘These buildings are very important. They are beautiful, modern and not obsolete. I believe that Israel should have a western culture, and Bauhaus is part of that.’

  In 1987, the municipality changed its policy towards Ajami. The new emphasis was on restoring and renovating the quarter, in consultation with the local inhabitants. The Ajami Project was launched, part of a nationwide urban renewal campaign funded by private and public money. Planning committees were set up to improve child and youth care, community welfare and housing. Ajami was twinned with the Jewish community of Los Angeles, whose donation of $750,000 – together with government funds – helped pay for a new Arab-Jewish community centre, day clubs for the elderly and job seekers, and a centre for rehabilitating drug users. New education initiatives were launched, especially for Ajami’s youth: at that time only 12 per cent of whom finished secondary school. The physical improvements were less impressive, and just fifty buildings, – three hundred flats – were renovated. Much of the budget was not spent, and the funds were diverted to the run-down Jewish neighbourhood of Hatikvah in Tel Aviv. Some Israeli politicians opposed spending any money at all on Arab areas, but Shlomo Lahat argued that the Arab community of Ajami were also Israeli citizens.