The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean
Page 70
The underlying cause of tension was the arrival from across the Mediterranean of shiploads of Jewish immigrants. Towards the end of 1919 the Russian ship Ruslan arrived in Jaffa from Odessa with 670 passengers. Even if these Ashkenazi migrants were not changing the inner character of old Jaffa, because they went to live in Tel Aviv or the Palestinian hinterland, the balance between Jaffa and Tel Aviv was shifting perceptibly and rapidly. In 1923 Tel Aviv already contained 20,000 inhabitants, almost all Jews. After that, it began to overtake Jaffa proper: a year later, Tel Aviv contained 46,000 inhabitants, 150,000 in 1930, and in 1948, the year of Israel’s creation, 244,000. Gradually it became emancipated from the municipality of Jaffa, enjoying internal autonomy from 1921, absorbing the other Jewish quarters on the edge of Jaffa, such as Neve Tzedek, and becoming a separate municipality in 1934.34 One early development within Tel Aviv was the foundation of a school, the Herzliya Gymnasium, whose imposing modern building (now, unbelievably, swept away and replaced by a hideous tower block) functioned as an important cultural centre.35 On the other hand, this drew Jewish children away from the mixed schools in Jaffa, often operated by nuns, where Jews, Christians and Muslims had been educated side by side.
One of the most important developments was the creation of a harbour. The port of Jaffa serviced Tel Aviv until the outbreak of a new and even more serious round of violence in 1936. Then, amid Arab boycotts of Jewish shops and Jewish boycotts of Arab ones, the town council petitioned the British authorities for permission to establish a port in the north of their growing city. The Jewish leader David Ben Gurion stated: ‘I want a Jewish sea. The sea is a continuation of Palestine.’ The impact of the rival port was quickly felt in Jaffa: in 1935 Jaffa imported goods worth £7.7 million, which fell the following year to £3.2 million, with Tel Aviv catering for £602,000; but by 1939 Jaffa was importing goods worth only £1.3 million, and Tel Aviv had expanded to £4.1 million. Since Arab labour was not available during the crisis of 1936, the port was staffed from Salonika, the city that was famous for its Jewish stevedores.36 A series of Levant Fairs also brought wealth to Tel Aviv, beginning modestly in 1924, but expanding to a point where, in 1932, 831 foreign companies exhibited their products. The vision that was being promoted was one of Tel Aviv as the new crossroads between the Mediterranean and the Middle East, and (proving that this might yet be possible) the fairs attracted displays from Syria, Egypt and the newly created kingdom of Transjordan.37
This growth was accompanied by the emergence of Tel Aviv as a real city, even while its boundaries with Jaffa remained indistinct and the subject of bickering. The building of the city was a mixture of uncoordinated private enterprise and a certain amount of central planning – enough to create a broad tree-lined avenue named after the Rothschilds (in the hope of greater financial support than was received). In the 1930s, a master-plan was devised by the Scottish architect Geddes, who sought to tie the city more firmly to its long seafront. In the core of the city striking Bauhaus buildings expressed the wish of its wealthier inhabitants to be seen as the carriers of modern western culture; the ‘White City’ they built was considered remarkable enough to earn UNESCO World Heritage status in 2003. Other expressions of the search for a western, European identity could be found in the Habima Theatre and in the literary, artistic and musical culture of the city. Similar trends were taking place in Alexandria, Salonika and Beirut, as well as in Jaffa; what was different here, as observers often remarked, was that Tel Aviv seemed at times to have more in common with eastern European cities such as Odessa and Vienna than with Mediterranean ones such as Naples and Marseilles.
The puzzlement of the Jaffans at the behaviour of their Jewish neighbours, even in less tense times, can be seen in a cartoon from the Arabic newspaper Falastin, of 1936 (opposite). An Anglican archbishop stands in a pulpit admonishing a corpulent John Bull, who has ended up with two wives, the first a demure Palestinian Arab whose face and hair are exposed, but who wears traditional Palestinian dress and carries a cage containing a dove; the second is a long-legged Jewish pioneer in very short shorts and a tight blouse, smoking a cigarette. John Bull explains that the pressure of the Great War led him to marry twice, and the archbishop insists he must divorce his Jewish wife. The political message is clear, but so is the mixture of fascination and unease at the manners of the new Jewish settlers.38 The casual familiarity between Jew and Arab in the days when the Chelouches had established Neve Tzedek had vanished. Those who built Tel Aviv had come to insist too hard on the difference between what they proposed to create and what they left behind in Jaffa. The mere modernizers who founded Neve Tzedek had been swamped by immigrants for whom the ways of the East were entirely alien. Such changes grew naturally out of the pressures placed on Tel Aviv by the thousands of newcomers who were escaping from persecution in central and eastern Europe. At the same time, several Zionist leaders vaunted the advantages of creating a Jewish city – the first all-Jewish city, they averred, for 1,900 years. Ironically, just as this happened, the waves of persecution within Europe reached a new and unprecedented intensity, devastating the eastern European cities where Jews constituted a near or real majority. One of those cities was Salonika.
IV
It has already been seen how Salonika found itself caught up in the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire; it even found itself on the front line from 1915 onwards, when British and French troops arrived, in the hope (soon abandoned) of supporting Serbian armies fighting against Austria; the allies bedded down in Salonika and its surroundings, an area the British called ‘the Birdcage’. The allied presence had unsettling political results: Britain and France deepened an existing schism in Greek politics when they gave their support to Venizelos against the king of Greece – Venizelos came to Salonika in 1916, and fighting broke out between royalists and Venizelists, while the allies seized some of the ships of the Royal Hellenic Navy.39 Then, after the fire of 1917 and the end of the war, Salonika attracted the attention of the Greek and Turkish governments because it retained such a large Muslim population: in July 1923 there were about 18,000 Muslims still in Salonika. A million Christians arrived in Greece from Turkey, refugees from the warfare that destroyed Smyrna, followed by those who were expelled under the terms of the population exchange agreed at Lausanne; 92,000 of these would settle in Salonika. The city and the surrounding countryside were denuded of Muslims, while the Christians from Asia Minor were settled in the vacant houses and lands of the Turks, or in areas rebuilt after the fire. Ironically, the Salonikans found that many Anatolian refugees spoke Turkish; their badge of identity was the Greek Church, not the Greek language, and their customs were almost indistinguishable from those of the Turkish Muslims among whom they had lived for as much as 900 years.40
There were still 70,000 Jews in Salonika. The Greek government encouraged their Hellenization, notably through the teaching of Greek in schools. Sometimes this led to tensions, as when the government, challenging what were seen as ‘narrow religious conceptions’, removed the provision that Jewish shops could close on Saturdays but open on Sundays.41 And yet the Day of Atonement was made a general public holiday in Salonika, and everyone understood that the economic stability of the city depended on Greeks and Jews working together. There was some Jewish emigration to France, Italy and the United States; in Haifa and Tel Aviv, Jewish dockworkers were valued. But the overall sense was that, despite massive political changes, there was no threat. If anything, threats had receded now that the borders between Greece, Turkey, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia had been defined.
It became clear how mistaken this view was during the Second World War, after the Germans occupied the city in April 1941. There were occasional outrages such as the seizure of valuable Jewish manuscripts and artefacts, but for nearly two years restrictions on the Jews were less stringent than elsewhere in Hitler’s empire. This was partly because the economy of the city was near collapse, with severe food shortages, and the Germans were unwilling to disrupt what commercial activity ther
e was.42 The Nazis treated the Spanish-speaking Sephardim no differently from the Ashkenazim of central and eastern Europe. Once the Nazis had decided to act, they did so quickly and efficiently – behind these acts lay the malign hand of Adolf Eichmann. In February 1943 the Jews were confined in ghettoes. Tales that they would be deported to Cracow to work in rubber factories were disseminated; and on 15 March the first train packed with victims departed for Poland. By August the city was almost entirely Judenrein, to cite contemporary German usage. Within a matter of weeks 43,850 Salonikan Jews were put to death, most gassed immediately on arrival in Auschwitz and elsewhere.43 The Italian consul saved some, and individual Greeks, including clerics, often did what they could; the Spanish authorities were sometimes willing to help those they saw as fellow-Spaniards of very long standing. Even so, in Greece the Nazis succeeded in wiping out 85 per cent of the Jewish community.
So, after three and a half centuries, old Salonika ceased to exist. Smyrna was the first of the great port cities to succumb. The fall of Smyrna had led to perhaps 100,000 deaths. Salonika experienced the added horror of an industrialized killing machine. The destruction of the port cities of the eastern Mediterranean would continue after the Second World War, though without such staggering loss of life. Each acquired an exclusive identity as a Greek, Turkish, Jewish or Egyptian city. Further west, too, port cities that brought together people of different cultures and religions were in decline. Livorno had entered united Italy long before these events and, as early as the mid-nineteenth century, its elite, identifying (whatever a person’s ancestry) with Italia, looked increasingly towards the professions and non-commercial careers, as the city lost its special privileges and ceded primacy to Genoa and other rivals.44 After the First World War, Trieste was detached from Austria-Hungary and a geographical position that had once been its advantage now became an embarrassment, as the city was boxed in by the new kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, with Austria a small and inconsequential state across the Alps, uncertain of its cultural and political identity. Then, after the Second World War, it became a bone of contention between Italy and Yugoslavia, acquiring the ambiguous status of ‘Free City’ until 1954. Its distinctive cultural identity, or rather plurality of identities, proved unable to survive these political and economic changes.
Jaffa changed more suddenly, even though it had already lost its plural identity as Tel Aviv developed into a separate, non-Arab, city. Over a number of weeks in spring 1948, on the eve of the birth of Israel, tens of thousands of Jaffan Arabs fled by ship or overland, seeking refuge in Gaza, Beirut and elsewhere. The United Nations had designated Jaffa as an exclave of the proposed Arab state that would coexist with a Jewish state in Palestine. Following bombardment by Jewish forces in late April, the population of Jaffa dwindled. The leaders of the Arab community, which had now contracted to only about 5,000, surrendered the city on 13 May, the day before the state of Israel was proclaimed down the road on Rothschild Avenue, Tel Aviv.45 Thereafter, Jaffa became a suburb of Tel Aviv with an Arab minority, in what was almost a reversal of the situation forty years earlier, while those who had left found themselves unable to return. In Alexandria, the final act was delayed until 1956, when the nationalization of the Suez Canal was followed by the expropriation and expulsion of Italians, Jews and others at the orders of Gamal Abdel Nasser. The city reconstituted itself as a massive Muslim Arab city, but its economy nose-dived. Something remains of the old Alexandria, but mainly in the form of cemeteries – of Greeks, Catholics, Jews and Copts. As for the cemeteries of Salonika, the massive Jewish one had already been despoiled, graves and all, by the Nazis. It is now covered by the vast campus of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki: ‘and some there be, which have no memorial’.46
5
Mare Nostrum – Again,
1918–1945
I
While most naval action within the Mediterranean during the First World War took place in the east and in the Adriatic, in waters that lapped the shores of the disintegrating empires of the Ottomans and the Habsburgs, the entire Mediterranean became the setting for rivalry between 1918 and 1939.1 At the centre of the struggle for mastery of the Mediterranean lay the ambitions of Benito Mussolini, after he won control of Italy in 1922. His attitude to the Mediterranean wavered. At some moments he dreamed of an Italian empire that would stretch to ‘the Oceans’ and offer Italy ‘a place in the sun’; he attempted to make this dream real with the invasion of Abyssinia in 1935, which, apart from its sheer difficulty as a military campaign, was a political disaster because it lost him whatever consideration Britain and France had shown for him until then. At other times his focus was on the Mediterranean itself: Italy, he said, is ‘an island which juts into the Mediterranean’, and yet, the Fascist Grand Council ominously agreed, it was an imprisoned island: ‘the bars of this prison are Corsica, Tunisia, Malta and Cyprus. The guards of this prison are Gibraltar and Suez.’2
Italian ambitions had been fed by the peace treaties at the end of the First World War. Not merely did Italy retain the Dodecanese, but the Austrians were pushed back in north-eastern Italy, and Italy acquired much of Italia irredenta, ‘unredeemed Italy’, in the form of Trieste, Istria and, along the Dalmatian coast, Zara (Zadar), which became famous for the excellent cherry brandy produced by the Luxardo family. Fiume (Rijeka) in Istria was seized by the rag-tag private army of the nationalist poet d’Annunzio in 1919, who declared it the seat of the ‘Italian Regency of Carnaro’; despite international opposition, by 1924 Fascist Italy had incorporated it into the fatherland. One strange manifestation, which reveals how important the past was to the Fascist dream, was the creation of institutes to promote the serious study (and italianità, ‘Italianness’) of Corsican, Maltese and Dalmatian history. Anyone who wandered along the great ceremonial avenue carved out alongside the Roman Forum, through the heart of ancient Rome, could admire large maps of the Roman Empire that showed how it had grown from a tiny settlement on the Palatine Hill to the empire of Trajan, encompassing the entire Mediterranean and lands far beyond. Albania, precariously independent since 1913, also came within Italian sights: the central bank of Albania was based in Rome; its new ruler, King Zog, was desperate for financial and political support from Italy, an issue impatiently resolved with the Italian invasion of Albania in April 1939. Even before then, Italy operated an important submarine base at Saseno, a small island off the Albanian coast. Submarines were seen as the key to future Italian success in the Mediterranean, when the time came to challenge the ascendancy of Great Britain. In 1935 Marshal Badoglio, commander of the Italian armed forces, asserted that Italy would have no need for heavy battleships, but could win command of the sea by more modern means. In fact, the Italian fleet was unimpressive: ‘it lagged in practically every category of naval warfare, being technologically backward, operationally off balance and unimaginatively led’.3
The invasion of Albania and continued repression of rebels in Libya proved that talk of a Mediterranean empire was not mere bluster, however much observers saw Mussolini as a semi-comic figure with his jutting jaw out of which poured grandiose statements about the restoration of the Roman Mare Nostrum. The acquisition of Libya had created a north–south axis across the Mediterranean, and North Africa was to constitute Italy’s ‘fourth shore’. British Malta, commanding the seas between Sicily and the ‘fourth shore’, was therefore more than an inconvenience; it was an obstacle. Mussolini staged a triumphal visit to Tripoli in 1937, celebrating the creation of the first proper road running for 1,000 miles along the Libyan coast, and the rebuilding of parts of the capital as a modern European city.4 Further proof of the Fascist ambition to displace Great Britain, by whatever means, emerged when the Italians extended financial support to the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, a highly disruptive figure who exploited the Arab riots in Palestine in 1936 to increase his political influence as religious leader of the Sunni Muslims in Palestine. Fascist militias – Green Shirts and Blue Shirts (who naturally detested one
another) – were created in Egypt, where, in any case, there were many Black Shirts within the Italian community of Alexandria.5
Then, in 1936, the Italians offered active help to the Falangist forces fighting in Spain under the ruthless, uncharismatic but effective command of General Franco. As well as 50,000 troops, Fascist Italy provided air and sea support and played a major role in the battle for the Balearic islands. Mussolini made no claims to the Spanish mainland, but the islands were a different matter. The Italians landed in Majorca, from where by September 1936 they had chased out the Republicans; they executed about 3,000 Majorcans accused of sympathy for the Communists. Over the next two years the island became a base for savage Italian air raids on major Republican centres such as Valencia and Barcelona. Mussolini would probably have liked to hold on to Majorca, but he had acquired what he wanted: a centre of operations in the western Mediterranean, close enough to Toulon and Oran to serve as a warning to the French fleets based there, although his major obsession remained the British navy. In reality, though, the Italians made their presence felt: the main street of Palma de Mallorca was renamed Via Roma, its entrance adorned with statues of youths on whose shoulders Roman eagles were perched.6 After fifteen centuries, Mare Nostrum once again extended from Italy into Spanish waters.
Great Britain was not sure what it wanted in the Mediterranean. By 1939, only 9 per cent of British imports passed through the Suez Canal, while Malta was not, in fact, a particularly useful supply base, despite its magnificent harbour, since the lack of local resources (beginning with water) meant that it constantly had to be resupplied. It did provide a useful staging-post for aircraft flying the length of the Mediterranean, enabling them to refuel between Gibraltar and Alexandria. Apart from its superb sixteenth-century fortifications, Malta was not well defended. At the start of the war the island was protected by three single-engine biplanes known as Faith, Hope and Charity, carrying light .303 machine-guns.7 Strategically, Malta had the advantage, and disadvantage, of lying only a few minutes by air from Sicily: it was dangerously exposed, but Britain would not give up lightly a position that commanded the sea passages of the central Mediterranean. It was at Alexandria, though, that Britain chose to concentrate its Mediterranean fleet, despite having to use a harbour much inferior to Valletta.8 As for Britain’s other Mediterranean holdings, Cyprus had not been much used as a naval base since it was acquired from the Ottomans, while the bay of Haifa possessed a special strategic value as the terminal of the great oil pipeline from Iraq. Gibraltar was to prove slightly less of a problem in relations with Spain than the British government expected, even after war with Germany broke out: Franco, to Hitler’s disgust, refused to be drawn into the war, partly for fear that Britain would then occupy the Canaries. Hitler denounced Franco for his ingratitude after years of support during the civil war, suggesting that he must have Jewish blood.9 Still, what Britain required was easy access from west to east, particularly towards the Suez Canal.