City of Oranges

by Adam LeBor

  In the first year of Surda’s existence, the staff and students at Bir Zeit organised three peaceful marches against the checkpoint. Each time, in response, the Israeli authorities made it more restrictive, often blocking the road completely to prevent anyone reaching the university at all. There was little Rema could do about the Israelis’ spite. Initially, when she saw a student being detained by Israeli soldiers, she tried to intervene. But that just made things worse. ‘They became enraged, and would take it out on the students. It was clear, the soldiers’ orders were to teach us that any resistance would backfire. Finally we learnt that if they stop someone you keep walking, for his sake and everyone else’s. That was the worst, because you are already so powerless and they make you feel implicated as well.’ In addition the Israelis opened and closed the checkpoints arbitrarily. Sometimes Rema passed through Qalandiya, but Surda was closed. Or Surda would be closed while she was still at the university, and she would be stuck. ‘That was the worst. We had to try and get back to Ramallah through the hills – twice they fired on us, hundreds of people scrambling through rocky hills just trying to get home.’

  The checkpoint at Surda was eventually removed. But life did not get easier and new restrictions were imposed at Qalandiya, which is now surrounded by the security barrier, or the ‘Apartheid Wall’ as it is dubbed by Palestinians. The barrier has severed tens of thousands of Palestinians from their work places, from the cemeteries where their ancestors are buried, from their fields, their friends, even from their doctors and schools. ‘Passing through Qalandiya is like running a gruesome marathon. You keep going and going, but one day I gave up. I could not wait any more,’ says Rema. ‘I parked my car, walked through and took a taxi on the other side. I stayed the night in Ramallah. When I came back, my car was not there.’ Despite its UN number plates, it had been blown up by the Israeli army. Rema still makes the trek to Bir Zeit. ‘People become very exhausted, and very stubborn. I will never leave Jerusalem. That would mean I have given in. But living like this takes a terrible toll. The standard of teaching at Bir Zeit has declined. We once had students from all over Palestine, now we are a local area university, because nobody can get to classes any more. Watching them build the wall at Qalandiya, you feel like you are watching them build your tomb, and all that is left is for them to put a lid on it.’

  Meanwhile, Rema has found a new way to deal with the stresses of life under Israeli military occupation. With her Ph.D. on the social history of peasant women in Gaza finished, she is studying the ethnography of Israeli checkpoints. There is much to examine: the speed of transit, the attitude of the military, the differing treatment of those waiting, depending on the age and sex of the Israeli soldiers, and so on. ‘It was the only way I could try and turn things around. I didn’t want to be a victim of the checkpoints any more, so I turned them into an object of study. What interests me the most is how the Palestinians here still stay human and make a life, despite the checkpoints and the occupation, which is extraordinary.’ Qalandiya, although painstakingly slow, is comparatively civilised. Israel is sensitive about its international image, and Qalandiya is much more accessible to the foreign press based in Jerusalem. Israeli human rights activists monitoring the behaviour of the army often set up at Qalandiya. ‘Because it is close to Jerusalem the Israelis try and put a better face on it,’ says Rema. ‘When we cross we usually look for the older men, the reservists, rather than the young conscripts. They try to be as humane as they can, in a very inhumane situation. But when the soldiers are not being observed, at checkpoints deeper in the West Bank, it is very different. The women soldiers are the worst, overcompensating for being women. This is not just in Israel, but any women in the military. We always try and avoid them.’

  Palestinians argue that the route of the fence, deep inside the Green Line, is an ill-disguised land grab in preparation for Israel’s new border after any possible peace deal, and that the daily humiliation of simply trying to get to work or school boosts support for the Islamists. Israelis argue that the security fence is a regrettable necessity, which has reduced terror attacks and suicide bombings by about 90 per cent. The fence, they say, can be dismantled when a final peace agreement is signed. For now it protects Israel from the suicide bombers. Their recruitment and support networks are based in the West Bank, as are the dispatchers who send them to their deaths in Israel. One dispatcher, now serving a life sentence in an Israeli prison, has admitted to recruiting potential bombers for Hamas at Bir Zeit University.1

  Either way, the daily humiliation at the checkpoints as Palestinians try to go about their daily business is ‘a breeding ground for hatred, and harms an innocent population in an inhumane manner’, says one influential Israeli. In December 2004 he visited thirteen checkpoints together with activists from B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights group. He formed a ‘very harsh impression’, as he wrote in Haaretz newspaper.2 Palestinians arrive at one checkpoint by car and must cross to the next one on foot, sometimes walking for several kilometres. Few humanitarian exceptions are made, if any. ‘At one checkpoint we met four mothers with eight blind children aged between four and five who were walking to Nablus for medical treatment. It was a hair-raising sight to see the little blind children marching along, led by the women.’ The Israeli soldiers cannot speak Arabic, they do not converse with the Palestinians and they do not smile. The human connection is ‘expressed mainly in the giving of orders’. In addition, the checkpoints probably do not even work to prevent terrorist attacks, as ‘every checkpoint can be bypassed’. These are the words of the retired general Shlomo Lahat, former mayor of Tel Aviv-Jaffa.

  As an American citizen, Rema’s father Hasan Hammami can return to Israel and Jaffa whenever he likes. But his US passport brings problems as well as a measure of security. His name rings the first alarm. His place of birth, written in his passport, the second: Palestine. Then comes the barrage of questions which he answers wearily but politely, before his passport is stamped and he is waved through security. Hasan is going home, but to a country that does not really exist. The scraps of territory on the West Bank under Palestinian control are an almost-state, with a flag, a government, a people and a history, but this is not yet a nation in control of its own destiny. Hasan’s Palestine is a land of memory as much as reality, kept alive by its Diaspora scattered across the globe, the details of life before its destruction carefully recorded in books and memoirs, websites and internet forums. By any standard, he has achieved much. He rebuilt his life in exile. He supported his family in their homes across the world. He and Barbara raised three fine daughters, Rema, Fawzia and Haifa. Hasan is a proud grandfather, active in inter-faith and community work in Punta Gorda, Florida. He and Barbara do not lack for material comforts. They have a lovely home, and they even had a yacht, before it was destroyed by Hurricane Charlie. Yet part of Hassan remains – and always will remain – a fifteen-year-old boy with a winning smile, frightened but determined, helping his parents, brothers and sisters scramble onto the boat at Jaffa’s port in April 1948; a boy staring at the ochre sandstone buildings and Jaffa’s seashore as they faded into a distant place, and time.

  ‘Why do I not feel fulfilled?’ he asks. ‘Is it because I feel as an outsider? Or because of my people’s poor image? Maybe I am an over-achiever and will never be fulfilled. But I know why. I have lost my home, but not my roots in Jaffa. I have lost my nation, but not my national cause. I have lost my nearness to my brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts and uncles, but not my deep family roots. All the money in the world, creature comforts, luxury holidays, respect and love from friends and neighbours can never replace this. The weight of the Diaspora has been insidious, invisible but heavy. We missed most of the weddings of my brothers and sisters, the birth of their children. We never saw my nieces and nephews grow up, graduate, get married, have babies themselves. But worse, I realised that Fawzia, Rema and Haifa have grown up without these same roots. I tried to justify in my own mind that they were “citizens of the world”
, which has positive connotations, but in reality no practical meaning. Exile is the common burden of both peoples, Arabs and Jews, which they need to unburden themselves of.’ Yet Hasan looks not just back at the past, but also to a better future. The answer, he says, is for both Jew and Arab to share the land. ‘As equals in a free society which builds on the best of both, and replaces their fears with hope and dreams.’

  Hasan’s idealism is heartening, but neither the century of conflict nor the chronology of recent diplomacy between Israel and the Palestinians makes for optimistic reading. The 1993 Oslo Accords, the 2000 Camp David offer, the Road Map – none has achieved a genuine peace or brought the Palestinians meaningful statehood. Perhaps the time has come to focus not on politics, but on the connection between people, and to build a new future from the bottom up, one also rooted in the past. On the wall of Shlomo and Mary Chelouche’s home in Tel Aviv is a painting of Hajj Ibrahim Samarra, the Arab man who, as a lost boy in Jaffa over a century ago, was helped by the great patriarch Aharon Chelouche and who in turn rescued the Chelouche family in the First World War. Perhaps Jaffa could yet be the laboratory for a new Israel, even a new Middle East, where Arab and Jew, Israeli and Palestinian, learn not necessarily to love another, but at least to live alongside each other in peace. A place where Ofer Aharoni is welcomed by his Muslim neighbours as he renovates his apartment; where Sami Albo can even enjoy the call to prayer of the muezzin and where Khamis Abulafia’s sons may flourish at school in Tel Aviv. Where the Andraus sisters are able to discuss everything, even politics, with their Jewish friends; where the ghosts of Old Jaffa in Frank Meisler’s house can be laid to rest, and the Hammamis can finally come home to their house by the sea. Cynics on all sides may dismiss this as naive fantasy. It is, after all, barely two generations since the genocide of the Holocaust and the exile of the Nakba, the formative experiences in both peoples’ recent history.

  But as Theodor Herzl once said: ‘If you will it, it is no dream.’

  Afterword

  A few minutes’ walk inland from my favourite seafront bench, past the Ottoman kishle, through Clock Tower Square, not far from Ahmad Hammami’s former fruit and vegetable shop and the Chelouche brothers’ building supplies store, Eyal Ziv sits in his architect’s studio listening to Jaffa’s buildings. Eyal admits he is a man possessed: by the spirit of the city. ‘I don’t know where it comes from, this passion for Jaffa. It’s something beyond me, you cannot hold it, you cannot control it. It tells you to do something and you do it. It sounds crazy but I feel the Clock Tower is talking to me, saying, please restore me. Or the gate to the mosque by the kishle, and the nearby building. They are calling to me to renovate them and I cannot refuse.’

  Nor does he have to, for Eyal, an engaging and enthusiastic man in his early forties, is the architect in charge of Tel Aviv municipality’s renovation programme for Jaffa. Eyal grew up in Old Jaffa, near Frank Meisler, in a house that his father bought in the late 1960s. After university and army service, he returned in 1988 and began work on renovating the flat that is now his studio. It was initially marked for demolition, but after a two-year battle Eyal managed to save the building and its neighbours. Beit Eshel Street is a classic late nineteenth-century Jaffa construct, rows of shops with flats above reached by a steep staircase that turns sharp right. Eyal’s studio is a fine high-ceilinged apartment with patterned floor tiles, tiles, probably manufactured by the Chelouche brothers.

  Together with his former partner, Rali Parto, Eyal completed the renovation of the New Seray building that was destroyed by the Stern Group in January 1948. The Tel Aviv-Jaffa municipality and the Ministry of Tourism have spent four million shekels (£500,000) on the project. The New Seray’s façade, windows, balconies and front pillars have all been reconstructed with rigorous attention to detail. But the long corridors which once housed Jaffa’s municipal offices will not be rebuilt. Instead, Baruch Peppermeister’s neo-Classical masterpiece will eventually be transformed into a cultural and arts centre, which Jaffa currently lacks, together with a public garden. Ron Huldai, mayor of Tel Aviv, set up a group of architects with local connections to work on renovating Jaffa. Several landmark buildings including the Clock Tower itself have been restored. Eyal is now working on Jaffa’s disused train station, where decades ago Julia Chelouche and her husband arrived from Haifa each year, to spend the festival of Passover with their relatives.

  Rebuilding the New Seray, indeed any of Jaffa, is not just a question of architecture and construction techniques. Eyal met resistance when he wanted to restore a small gate between two shops that leads off Clock Tower Square into the courtyard of Abou Nabout’s Great Mosque. Several municipal officials told him that the mosque should pay, as the gate opened onto its property. Eyal disagreed. ‘I told them that we are architects. We don’t deal with religion, we deal with architecture. This is the history of Jaffa, of the city and it doesn’t matter whether it is Arab, Christian or Jewish. Anyway, if they want the tourists to come, and have nice things for them to look at, the tourists don’t care who is the owner of the property.’ Eyal’s arguments worked and he got his budget.

  Restoring relations between Jaffa’s Jews and Arabs remained more complicated than renovating its buildings. In late summer 2005 Jaffa’s Islamic leaders held an angry protest rally after a pig’s head was thrown into the courtyard of the Hasan Bey mosque. Almost a century after it was built, the mosque was still the epicentre of Jaffa’s struggle between Arab and Jew, just as its builder the Turkish governor Jamal Pasha had intended. Shin Bet quickly arrested two Jewish suspects, who said that they had wanted to disrupt the pull-out from the settlements in the Gaza Strip and the northern West Bank by triggering widespread riots. If so, they failed. Jaffa’s Arabs did not riot. Instead they protested peacefully and announced plans to set up guard units at Islamic holy places in Jaffa and the nearby cities of Lod and Ramle.

  Nor were the pull-outs from Gaza and the northern West Bank disrupted. Cynics dismissed the evacuation of about nine thousand settlers by the Israeli army as well-produced theatre, its stage directions agreed in advance by both Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and the settlers themselves. Despite much talk of bloody last stands and violent resistance, there was little of either. The army deployed water cannons, and the settlers threw eggs and stones and burnt car tyres. When the soldiers broke through the barricades the settlers used passive resistance before being frogmarched away. There was much shouting and drama, but no real damage was done. Thus was the honour of all satisfied: Sharon could present himself as being forced to carry out a necessary but supposedly deeply painful operation for the national good, so strengthening his position among centrist voters. The settlers could parade their Zionist credentials before being rehoused and banking their compensation of around $200,000 or $300,000 per family. Meanwhile Israel retained control of Gaza’s borders, airspace, water and electricity supplies.

  Yet for all this, there was a sense among both Israelis and Palestinians that a line had been crossed, from which it was impossible to go back. There are no more Israelis in Gaza, and the neat European villas of the settlements of Netzarim and Neve Dekalim have been demolished to make way for high-rise housing to ease Gaza’s overcrowding. The blue and white Israeli flag has been replaced by the red, black, white and green of Palestine. Ariel Sharon’s Likud Party appeared set to split in two over the pull-out. Even the initially unsettling spectacle of Israeli soldiers forcibly removing Jews from synagogues somehow assumed a logic of its own. A precedent has now been set for further evacuations from the Occupied West Bank. Gaza is now an independent Palestinian territory, so much so that several Arab governments have begun to pressure the Palestinian leadership to take back their refugees. Thus Arab unity and solidarity.

  Gaza’s future aside, other less obvious developments could also have profound long-term effects on the future of both Israel and Jaffa. The Palestinian villages of Yalo and Emmaus once stood not far from Latrun, on the road from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Emmaus was
famed for its tradition of hospitality, and according to Christian tradition, Christ spent the night there after his resurrection. Like their neighbouring villages, Emmaus and Yalo were flattened by Israeli army bulldozers after the 1967 victory, and their inhabitants fled, mainly to Ramallah and Jordan. The land is now the site of the Jewish National Fund’s (JNF) Canada Park, a popular weekend picnic spot for Israeli families. The park’s large exhibition, outlining the area’s heritage, fails to record centuries of Palestinian history. Enter Zochrot, an Israeli organisation which keeps alive the memory of demolished Palestinian villages. Zochrot petitioned the High Court for the right to erect plaques commemorating Yalo and Emmaus. The JNF agreed. Finally Israel was beginning to admit that Palestine was not after all, as the writer Israel Zangwill had claimed, ‘A land without a people for a people without a land’.

  Around this time members of the Knesset put forward several amendments to the Hatikvah, the national anthem, to make it – and, by definition, Israel – more inclusive to non-Jews. The first verse of the Hatikvah, which means ‘hope’, speaks of the ‘Jewish soul yearning deep in the heart’ for Zion and Jerusalem. It is a purely Zionist song, in the late nineteenth-century sense of the word, calling for the redemption of the Jewish people through a return to the Holy Land. But more far-sighted Israeli politicians know that in the twenty-first century it is difficult, if not hypocritical, to call for civic loyalty from citizens, especially the substantial Arab community, when they are excluded by the state’s most potent symbols. A parliamentarian from the centre-left secular Shinui Party proposed adding a verse in Arabic, another that the words ‘Jewish soul’ be changed to ‘Israeli soul’. Nor are the calls for change confined to the left – one of the leading figures in the discussions is a senior Likud politician. A few words in the Hatikvah’s lyrics could signpost Israel’s future: a modern, secular democracy governed by politicians, or an obscurantist theocracy ruled by rabbis? Perhaps it is only after Israel has defined the type of state it wishes to be, and has settled its relationship with its Arab minority, that it will be able to make peace with the Palestinians.