City of Oranges

by Adam LeBor

  Frank Meisler, too, is a renovator. He arrived in Britain as a schoolboy in 1939, on one of the last Kindertransports from Nazi Germany. After the war, in the 1950s, with his parents dead at Auschwitz and his hometown Danzig renamed Gdansk and occupied by the Soviets, Frank decided to emigrate to Israel. His memories of the young state, with all its nervous insecurity, populated by traumatised Holocaust survivors, portray a very different place from today’s regional and military power. An artist and an architect, Frank spent his Saturdays sketching the Old City. When in the 1960s the decision was taken to renovate Old Jaffa and not demolish it, Frank was one of the first to move into the new ‘Artists’ Quarter’. Yet for all Old Jaffa’s beauty, he knows that something has been lost for ever with the disappearance of its Arab inhabitants.

  It is now barely remembered that many Jewish emigrants from Arab countries and Turkey did not want to come to Israel. The educated elites of those communities relocated to France, Britain or North America. The less well-off Jews were dumped in dismal ‘development towns’ in the middle of the desert by an uncaring and often racist Ashkenazi elite. Israel in the 1950s was not quite the promised land the Jews had longed for. Sami Albo arrived in 1957 at the age of six. In Istanbul his family had lived in a spacious apartment. In Jaffa, three generations shared one and a half rooms in a draughty Arab villa. Perhaps the hardships of his youth helped shape Sami’s outlook today as a community activist. But his main concerns now are no longer Ashkenazi bureaucrats, but the increasing radicalisation and Islamisation of his Arab neighbours.

  Sami Albo could usefully discuss these concerns with Khamis Abulafia, one of the directors of the Abulafia bakery. It was there that my journey into Jaffa’s past and present began. Founded in 1879 and open twenty-four hours a day, Abulafia is an institution. The display cabinets are crowded with breads and delicacies stuffed with cheese or mushrooms, baked with eggs or topped with salty Arab cheese and zataar, a mix of olive oil and hyssop. The Abulafias are Muslim Arabs, but pride themselves on their good relations with their Jewish customers. The bakery even closes for eight days during the Jewish festival of Passover, when it is forbidden to eat leavened bread or cakes.

  ‘They call our bakery the gate of Jaffa. Jaffa is a special model for co-existence between Muslims, Jews and Christians. Our bakery is a meeting point for all three, a special place. We have deep connections and relations with Jewish people,’ explains Khamis. The fifth child of his late parents, Khamis takes his name from the Arabic word for five. He is a friendly, intelligent man in his mid-forties, with shrewd eyes and grey hair – a good choice for the public face of the Abulafia business empire. Khamis studied Hebrew literature at university, and speaks the language fluently. The Abulafias have prospered; the family also owns a restaurant nearby in the restored quarter of Old Jaffa, another bakery in Tel Aviv, and a property company.

  A well-known figure in Jaffa, Khamis often mediates in disputes. The backdrop of the political conflict adds an extra layer of rancour to neighbours’ arguments if one is Jewish and the other Arab. His favourite film is Gandhi, he says, which he has seen more than twenty times. Sitting in the bakery’s office, he recounts several episodes of his one-man peace mission. A friend of his brought a young woman to see him who openly said she hated Arabs. ‘What she knew of Arabs she read in the newspapers, and we only appear in bad news, not good,’ says Khamis. They talked for a while, and the woman said she was having difficulties with her examinations, especially with Biblical Hebrew. ‘We met every day for two weeks, and I coached her. She passed, with 88 per cent. Now she is one of my best friends and she is sorry that she judged us like that.’

  One day in Tel Aviv, near the bus station, a young woman asked Khamis for help. ‘She was about sixteen, and she said that three guys were bothering her. I told her to come with me, and told them to leave her, that she was my daughter. They apologised. She was from Beersheba, in the south. I took her to sit down, brought her a drink and some pizza, and said nobody would disturb her while I was with her. After a while she asked me if I was an Arab. I told her yes, and she didn’t want to believe me. I asked her why, and she said, “Because Arabs are always bothering us, even killing us.” For me this was a golden opportunity. I said, “Those who were bothering you were Jewish. That doesn’t mean all Jews are potential rapists. Maybe you met or saw bad Arabs. Now you met a good one.”’ The girl asked Khamis for his telephone number. The next day her father telephoned to thank him, and invited him to visit the family.

  I ask Khamis how much effect his one-man campaign can have. He smiles wryly. ‘I don’t want to sound like Don Quixote. But these are small contributions to make the world a better and more pleasant place. I believe a journey of 1,000 miles starts with a single step. I support the Jewish people’s right to live here, but they have to understand, and to believe, that I also have that same right.’ I nod my agreement. This is our first meeting, but during the many weeks I spent in Jaffa I would talk with Khamis several times. For now, he is still sounding me out. The legend of Jaffa as a ‘special model for co-existence’, where Jews and Arabs live together in peace and mutual respect, is a bland, safe starting point. Like the shiny, renovated alleys of Old Jaffa, it has a superficial appeal. Our later discussions would be more serious, even provocative. For Khamis and I both know that Jaffa’s reality, its present and its past, is far more complex than either the tourist myth or the media coverage would lead us to believe.

  Part One

  1

  A Battered Bride

  1921

  The fundamental cause of the Jaffa riots and the subsequent acts of violence was a feeling among the Arabs of discontent with, and hostility to, the Jews.

  Summary of the findings of the Haycraft

  Commission into the 1921 Jaffa riots1

  In Jaffa, in the spring of 1921, a young Jewish woman called Julia Bohbout was planning her wedding. Julia was twenty-one, dark-haired and vivacious with lively eyes, a popular girl who made friends easily. She was fluent in Arabic and French, played the piano, and was gifted at needlework. Julia danced the waltz and even a daring new import from South America, the tango. The Bohbout family lived on Nagib Bustros Street, the heart of Jaffa’s commercial centre that drew shoppers from across the Levant. The shop windows displayed the latest European fashions and household goods, while neighbouring cafés were crowded with customers drinking coffee, smoking, and eating ice cream. Spacious Italianate apartments were built above the shops and overlooked the street. The flats had stone floors, high ceilings to let the sea breeze flow through, arched windows and long balconies decorated with fine ironwork.

  Julia had just returned from a two-month trip to Cairo to see her relatives, and prepare her trousseau. Her fiancé was David Chelouche, who was considered quite a catch. David was ten years older, tall and pleasant looking with dark eyes, but good looks were secondary to the fact that the Chelouche family was one of the most respected dynasties in Jaffa, if not in all Palestine. The Chelouches were leaders of Jaffa’s Jewish community, and they had helped found neighbouring Tel Aviv. Like the Bohbouts, they were Sephardim from north Africa, Jews who could trace their ancestry back to the expulsion from Spain in 1492, known in Hebrew as sepharad. At home, the Chelouches and Bohbouts usually spoke Arabic, not Hebrew. Jaffa’s Sephardic families were linked together by marriage, blood and business. David’s uncles owned a thriving shop on Nagib Bustros Street that sold building materials and beautifully patterned tiles. The Chelouche brothers’ pipes, bricks and ironwork were designed for modern European-style homes, but the brightly coloured symmetrical patterns on the tiles were rooted in the Orient. Jaffa’s profitable commercial life was testimony to the web of social and business links that still bound together Arab and Jew.

  Jerusalem was Palestine’s religious capital, but Jaffa was its cultural and commercial centre. With its English, French, Italian and Arab language schools, artists and writers, three newspapers and many printing houses, the city was proud of its vigor
ous intellectual life. The Near East radio station broadcast from Jaffa and much of the Palestinian political elite came from the city. Its cinemas offered romance and adventure films from Cairo as well as the latest Hollywood releases. Its sports clubs produced boxers such as Al-Dasuqi, the national champion, who triumphed across the Levant, and also two soccer teams, one Muslim and one Christian. The city was scented by its orange groves, the fruit of which was famed across the world for its quality. Jaffa’s mosques, synagogues and churches dated back centuries.

  Jaffa in the 1920s was an integral part of the Middle East: taxis left for Beirut and Damascus, a day or so away by car; trains departed for Haifa and Jerusalem, Gaza and Cairo, and even Khartoum; ships left Jaffa for Europe, taking away oranges, and bringing back Jewish immigrants. The sea at Jaffa was too shallow for ocean-going boats to lay anchor. Ships moored offshore, while a fleet of pilot boats set out to bring the cargo and passengers ashore, as they had done for centuries. Like medieval pilgrims before them, the Jewish immigrants were carried on the backs of Arab porters through the waves and onto dry land, there to be assailed by a wall of heat, dust, and Jaffa’s own smell of oranges, mixed with black tobacco, cardamom-scented coffee and sweat.

  Despite the depredations of the First World War, when Jaffa had been bombed, shelled, plagued by locusts, and its Jews deported by the Turks, the ‘Bride of the Sea’ (as it was known) looked better than ever. The heart of the modern city was Clock Tower Square, a long octagonal piazza flanked by rows of shops. Nearby were Jaffa’s famous markets, including the Souk el-Balabseh (textile bazaar) and the Souk el-Attarin (sweets bazaar). The centrepiece was the Clock Tower itself, built by Sultan Abdul Hamid II at the start of the twentieth century, one of more than a hundred across the Ottoman Empire. Tall and unadorned by images of people, in keeping with the precepts of Islam, the clock towers symbolised modernisation. The empire would evolve with the times, its days properly divided into hours and minutes. None of this prevented Abdul Hamid II from being toppled in the Young Turk revolution of 1908, and the Ottoman Empire itself was dismembered in 1917. Now, the old Ottoman kishle (prison) by the sea was home to Britain’s Palestine Police. Palestine was administered by Britain, under a League of Nations mandate to facilitate a Jewish ‘national home’; a mandate that caused fury among its Arabs. In 1920, nine people were killed and more than two hundred wounded when Arab demonstrators attacked Jerusalem’s Jewish quarter. Jaffa’s turn would soon come.

  Jaffa’s heart was the Old City, dating back three millennia, with its winding lanes, and stepped rows of yellow sandstone buildings built on top of each other. It was here that waves of conquerors had stormed ashore: Canaanites and ancient Egyptians; Romans and Hebrew rebels; Greeks and Byzantines; Crusaders and Saracens, Mamlukes and the Ottomans, who took Jaffa in 1517. Peter the apostle had raised Dorcas from the dead in Jaffa, at the house of Simon the Tanner, Christians believed. Nearby, Richard the Lionheart had accepted the surrender of Salah ad-Din or Saladdin, the mighty Kurdish leader. Even Napoleon had briefly taken the city in 1799.

  Down by the port it really did seem as if little had changed since the Biblical era. Hawkers and peddlers sold vegetables and fruits, spices and trinkets. Overloaded donkeys struggled down narrow alleys. Camels strode disdainfully, their riders swaying as the animals negotiated the potholed roads, past women wrapped in the habra (black cloak), their heads veiled and covered. Bedouin traders sipped tiny cups of black coffee, puffing on water-pipes, while small boys fetched humous and pitta bread for their lunch. When it rained the streets filled with sticky mud, but in the dry season they were hot and dusty. Drinking water was drawn from wells; sewage systems were rudimentary at best. It was a miracle that the houses did not simply all tumble into the sea. A miracle, and the legacy of Abou Nabout, the kaymakam (governor) of Jaffa a century earlier. Abou Nabout means ‘father of the camel whip’. He earned his title, and exercised droit de seigneur with any young woman he liked. But Abou Nabout also reinforced the sea walls, constructed new markets and two sibils (public fountains) to dispense clean water and built the Great Mosque, a serene complex of courtyard and prayer space reminiscent of the Al-Azhar mosque in Cairo. When he finally retired he was well provided for – more than two hundred camels transported his riches out of the city.

  Julia’s engagement had begun with a visit by David Chelouche’s father, Avraham Haim, to her father at his textile shop. Josef Bohbout had travelled back and forth for years between Jaffa and Manchester, where he owned a wholesale shop at 14 Albert Square. Despite his repeated entreaties, his wife Esther had refused to accompany him, as she was scared of sea travel. In Manchester Josef not only set up a business, but a whole other family – he had a mistress and two daughters there. But with his health failing, he eventually decided to return to Jaffa for good. It seems neither Josef’s family nor Avraham Haim Chelouche knew anything of his double life.

  Avraham Haim Chelouche explained that he wanted to marry one of his sons, Marco, to Julia. Julia’s father nodded. Few families were offered such an opportunity. Sephardic marriages, like Arab betrothals, were usually arranged; and the bond was based on mutual suitability and social standing. Love and romance would hopefully follow later. Avraham Haim himself had originally been engaged to a young woman called Rina Elbaz. Two weeks before the wedding, Rina fell ill and died. After a month of mourning her father went to see Avraham’s father. He asked if Avraham would like to meet Rina’s sister, Serena. They met and were married soon after. Avraham’s brother, Yosef Eliyahu, had been betrothed at the age of seventeen and been called home from school in Beirut to be married. If a couple were really opposed, a union would not be forced. But the moral pressure was enormous, for the dynasties must continue.

  Julia had her portrait taken and the picture was sent to Paris where Marco and his brother Zaki were studying. Marco wrote back and thanked his father, but explained that he did not want to marry Julia. Avraham wrote then to Zaki, and ordered him home to Jaffa immediately. But Zaki was having the time of his life in Paris. With his romantic eyes and easy charm, Zaki resembled the actor Tyrone Power and he made the most of his looks. The last thing he wanted was to go back to the suffocating demands of a traditional Sephardic family. Zaki was less tactful than his brother. He wrote back, saying he had fallen in love with an actress. When Zaki’s letter reached Jaffa his father was first scandalised, then enraged. An actress! Avraham stormed around the room, waving the letter. His eyes fell on his third son, David. ‘You will marry this girl,’ he instructed his son. ‘Which girl?’ asked David, who did not know what his father was talking about. Once Avraham had calmed down and explained, David did not argue. He had already met Julia at a party and liked her, and anyway he had not so far had much luck with women. He had fallen in love with a young woman called Leah and proposed to her. Leah had refused him, telling him she wanted to marry a doctor. David duly enrolled at medical school in Beirut. The first year went reasonably well, but the second proved difficult. Every time there was a dissection class, and the corpse was opened, David fainted. He gave up and went back to Jaffa. The next time he saw Leah she told him she was married to a doctor.

  David was keen to marry Julia. She was not swept off her feet – another Chelouche would do that – but nevertheless David was a fine young man. He had spent the war in Cairo, working at a bank. He came back to Jaffa by train, with a belt of gold coins hidden under his trousers. He now worked alongside his uncle Yaakov Chelouche at the Anglo-Palestine Company, which financed the Zionist settlements. ‘He was a dark boy, friendly,’ Julia wrote in her memoir The Tree and the Roots, an evocative portrait of a cosmopolitan world, long since vanished. Julia records that before her engagement she had dreamt that she was standing on Nagib Bustros Street, outside the Chelouche Brothers’ construction company’s office. In her dream, Yaakov Chelouche had placed a necklace of jewels around her neck. Now it seemed that her dream had come true, for the necklace symbolised Yaakov Chelouche’s nephew David.

  Fo
r David and Julia these were idyllic days. There were parties, picnics on the beach and trips by horse-drawn buggy to the Eden cinema, the first in Tel Aviv. In that same year, 1920, Aharon, the great patriarch of the Chelouche dynasty and David’s grandfather, died. The family sat shiva, the Jewish mourning ritual, for a week. Every mirror was turned to the wall, while Aharon’s sons sat on low stools. They prayed every evening, and received the stream of visitors of all faiths who offered their condolences. Aharon Chelouche had lived to the age of ninety-three. His death marked the end of an era, not only for the Chelouches, but also for the old Jaffa, where Jews and Arabs lived side by side if not always in harmony, then at least mostly in peace. That world was about to be turned upside down, and would never be righted.

  On 1 May 1921 Julia was alone at home with the maid when she heard the mob outside. She heard hundreds of voices chanting in Arabic, ‘Aleyhum, aleyhum, to them, to them,’ meaning to the Jews. The street was full of Arab men, many of them holding clubs. The Christian-Arab family that lived opposite signalled to Julia to close all the windows and lock the door. She moved quickly. She locked up the house, and waited silently while the mob rampaged outside. She could hear the marauders smashing down the doors of the Jewish shops, the splintering of the wood, the sound of glass breaking, and shouts of delight as piles of clothes, shoes and rolls of cloth were plundered.

  The Arabs’ anger was fuelled both by a sense that their country was being stolen from under them by the Jews, and by a profound feeling of betrayal. During the First World War the Arabs fought with the British against the Turks. Encouraged by T.E. Lawrence, they launched the Arab revolt, believing that once the Ottoman Empire had been defeated, the western powers would grant them independence. But the Arabs were deceived. The real future of the Middle East, at least as the Allies saw it, was set out in 1916 in the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement. The empire would be carved up, and the Arab nations would form either a confederated Arab state, or one single independent state, to be divided into British and French zones of influence. Palestine, apart from Haifa and Acre, would be internationalised, although in the end it came under British rule.