City of Oranges

by Adam LeBor

  Worse still, from the Arabs’ perspective, was the November 1917 letter from Arthur Balfour, the British foreign secretary, to British Zionist leader Lord Rothschild: ‘His Majesty’s government views with favour the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and political rights of existing non-Jewish communities or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.’ Not only would there be no independent Arab state, but Palestine was to be handed over to the Jews. The anger caused by the Balfour declaration only intensified with the passage of time.

  It is ironic that the violence in Jaffa started as a clash not between Jews and Arabs, but between rival groups of Jewish leftists – the Communists and the mainstream socialist Labour Party. Both planned to hold marches in Tel Aviv on May Day. Although much of the Zionist movement was strongly left-wing, and sympathetic to Soviet Russia, it was a national, not international, liberation movement. The left-wing Zionists aimed to build a Jewish workers’ state. For the Communists such ideas were anathema, and they aimed to unite Jewish and Arab workers. At a time of increasing national polarisation, the Communists remained a marginal grouping on the Palestinian political spectrum.

  Despite the lack of interest in a Soviet-style Palestine, and a police warning that they had no permit to march, about sixty Communists set off from Jaffa to Tel Aviv. As soon as they ran into the Labour Party demonstration a giant brawl erupted. The British Palestine Police chased the Communists back to Jaffa. When Jaffa’s Arabs saw the fighting between the rival groups of left-wing Jews, they wrongly believed themselves to be under attack and began to fight against the Jews. But whatever the immediate cause of this second round of violence, it was merely a trigger for the Palestinians to vent their anger over far deeper, long-term historical grievances. The struggle for control of Palestine, fury over Jewish immigration, the rivalry between Jaffa and Tel Aviv – the decades of pent-up resentment quickly exploded. The Arabs gathered guns, staves and clubs and attacked the Jews. The police fired into the air to disperse the mobs. The Arabs believed the Jews were shooting at them. Arab marauders broke into Jewish homes, many armed with guns and clubs. They swiftly killed the families inside, and when the Jews lay dead, Arab women came and looted their belongings. In Ajami a mob attacked a hostel housing Jewish immigrants. Bombs exploded and shots were fired. Arab police arrived and joined in the frenzy. The rioters smashed their way into the hostel. One man was beaten to death with wooden boards. Another was pulled to the ground, stomped on and hit with iron rods. In many places Arabs hid their Jewish friends and neighbours from the rioting mob. Despite having ruled Palestine for almost four years, the British authorities had not yet managed to take proper control, and in fact they never would. Jaffa itself had just ten trained police officers.

  The Jewish response was swift and violent, as vigilante groups armed with guns and staves took revenge. Ibrahim Khalil el-Asmar was a baker who worked in Manshiyyeh, the northernmost quarter of Jaffa that bordered Tel Aviv. The bakery was downstairs, the family flat above. As the fighting spread, Ibrahim locked himself into the shop and stayed indoors. At about three o’clock in the afternoon he heard a huge commotion, and when he looked through the window the streets outside were crowded with rampaging Jews, beating Arabs and breaking into shops and homes. Ibrahim shut the window and hid upstairs. Soon afterwards a gang of Russian Jews smashed the door down and came into the bakery. The Jews were carrying heavy sticks, and one was armed with a revolver. The gunman pointed his pistol at Ibrahim, while the others beat him with sticks. Ibrahim protested, in Yiddish, the Jewish-German dialect spoken by Ashkenazi Jews. ‘I was a man always at work, I have not been out, I have not done anything,’ he proclaimed. It worked. The Jews stopped beating him. They put the broken door back on its hinges. One of the gang advised him to stay in ‘and do not go out’.

  The next day three British soldiers arrived, accompanied by two Jews and two Jewish policemen. They smashed the door down again and beat Ibrahim with their rifle butts. The soldiers went upstairs and brought down Ibrahim’s father, son, wife and daughter. They demanded that the women appear without their veils, a great dishonour for Muslims; the women begged to be allowed to veil themselves. The British group stayed downstairs guarding Ibrahim and his family, while the others searched the house, looking for weapons or stolen property. Nothing was found. Ibrahim and his family were taken to a British military post and held under arrest. Eventually they were released and found refuge at the home of a relative, where they stayed for two weeks. When Ibrahim returned home, some of his furniture had been stolen, together with thirty-six British pounds.2

  The British declared martial law, but by then it was too late. Violence spread throughout central Palestine. The final death toll was 95: 47 Jews and 48 Arabs; 140 Jews and 73 Arabs wounded. When the rioting finally came to an end, Julia ventured outside and picked a path through the debris of the looting: smashed glass, half-destroyed goods and ripped fabrics. Her father’s shop was completely destroyed, she recorded: ‘The Arabs had stolen everything, the mahogany desk was broken and the drawer was open, the money stolen … Father returned and became sick with grief over his property which had disappeared in a moment.’ Josef Bohbout had a heart attack when he saw his shop.

  The Jaffa riots were not planned, but for the Jews, they were reminiscent of the Tsarist pogroms, a bitter confirmation of the fears that for centuries had shaped their collective subconscious. The violence triggered a massive and permanent exodus of many Jews from Jaffa to Tel Aviv, and was a powerful blow to any hopes that Palestine could be shared between the two peoples. For the Arabs, the riots proved that the settlers were ready to kill to achieve their eventual aim of appropriating Palestine. The Arab leadership condemned the violence, and petitioned Britain for independence and democracy. It achieved nothing. Herbert, Samuel, the British High Commissioner for Palestine, told the Zionist leader Nahum Sokolow that Palestine was now at war.

  2

  Tel Aviv is Born

  1920s

  It grew in hectic jumps according to each new wave of immigration – an inland tide of asphalt and concrete advancing over the dunes.

  Arthur Koestler on Tel Aviv in the 1920s1

  What Jaffa needed after the riots, decided Herbert Samuel, was a celebration. Something non-political, to bring together Jews, Christians and Muslims. Avraham Haim Chelouche’s preparations were well underway for the marriage of his son David to Julia Bohbout. The date was set for 16 October 1921. The Chelouches cultivated good relations with the British authorities, just as their predecessors had with the Ottoman Empire. An ancestral sixth sense, and more particularly an astute business sense, demanded no less. More than thirty years earlier, after David’s grandfather Aharon Chelouche had moved to Jaffa’s new Jewish quarter of Neve Tsedek, his carriage had overturned in a wadi, a dried-up riverbed. The kaymakam, concerned for Aharon’s wellbeing – and his own financial health – had an iron bridge built across the wadi for Aharon’s comfort and convenience, and named the Chelouche Bridge after him. Unlike the Ottoman governors, at least the British did not demand constant bribes and ‘gifts’.

  Jaffa’s damaged houses could be repaired, the looted shops restocked. Even broken bones and bruises eventually healed. But both Jews and Arabs knew that a line had been crossed. The dead could not be brought back to life and a wall of fear and suspicion now separated the two communities. Herbert Samuel appointed the Chief Justice for Palestine, Sir Thomas Haycraft, to head a commission of enquiry into the Jaffa riots. ‘Its conclusion was that the racial strife was begun by the Arabs, and rapidly developed into a conflict of great violence between Arabs and Jews, in which the Arab majority, who were generally the aggressors, inflicted most of the casualties.’2 Even so, the report claimed, the Zionist leadership needed to do much more to deal with the Arabs’ concerns. However emollie
nt the recommendations of the Hay-craft Commission, the deep-rooted cause of the 1921 violence was simple: the conflict between two peoples who both claimed ownership of a narrow strip of land on the coast of the Levant – Jewish Zionists and Palestinian Arab nationalists.

  The idea of the return to Israel, or spiritual Zionism, is an integral part of Judaism. Every Passover festival is marked by the phrase ‘Next year in Jerusalem’. Small, often impoverished Jewish communities had survived across Palestine since the Roman exile in the first century AD. But most Jews lived in the Levant, north Africa, Europe and Russia. ‘Next year in Jerusalem’ was more a spiritual wish than a real prospect. Jaffa’s own ancient Jewish community seems to have faded away by the early nineteenth century, until the arrival of a new wave of Jewish immigrants in the 1830s. The rise of political Zionism, and of one man in particular, changed Jewish history for ever.

  Theodor Herzl was born in 1860 to a middle-class Jewish family in Budapest. He worked as a journalist and playwright in Vienna, before moving to Paris. French anti-Semitism, and in particular the Dreyfus case – in which a Jewish army officer was falsely accused of spying for Germany, and imprisoned – convinced him that assimilation would never provide the Jews with a secure future. In 1896 Herzl published his manifesto, The Jewish State, the central text of political Zionism.3 Its businesslike tone argued that the ‘Jewish question’ would be solved only with the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. ‘We have sincerely tried everywhere to merge with the national communities in which we live, seeking only to preserve the faith of our fathers. It is not permitted us,’ he wrote. ‘I consider the Jewish question neither a social nor a religious one, even though it sometimes takes these and other forms. It is a national question, and to solve it we must first of all establish it as an international political problem to be discussed and settled by the civilized nations of the world in council.’4

  Zionism was not universally popular among Herzl’s co-religionists. Religious Jews believed that only when the Messiah arrives can the Temple, and the Jewish state, be rebuilt. Anything else is a man-made blasphemy. Assimilated Jews considered themselves citizens of their states first, and Jews second. But Herzl knew the power of words, and that the days of empires, whether Ottoman or Austro-Hungarian, were ending. Serbs and Czechs, Hungarians and Greeks and the Arab nations were all demanding control of their destinies, their writers and poets declaiming the virtues of their oppressed homelands in newly codified languages. The Jews too were a nation, scattered and oppressed, with the right of self-determination. They already had a language – Hebrew, the ancient language of prayer, had been developed into an everyday tongue of commerce, law and love. They had an ancient homeland, Palestine. Statehood, Herzl argued, was the only answer to the strange anomaly of the Jewish people, scattered across the world, but still one nation. From Vienna at least, it all seemed quite straightforward.

  All Herzl needed was a solid constituency among Jewry. If that did not quite yet exist, he would invent it. In August 1897, 250 delegates attended Herzl’s first Zionist congress in Basel. Herzl wrote in his dairy: ‘The fact is – which I conceal from everyone – that I have only an army of schnorrers [scroungers]. I am in command only of youths, beggars and sensation mongers.’ But thanks to Herzl’s dynamism and powers of organisation, the congress was a triumph. When Herzl finally took his place on the podium the delegates clapped and cheered for fifteen minutes before he could speak. Each delegate wore a badge proclaiming: ‘The establishment of a Jewish state is the only possible solution to the Jewish question.’ Herzl wrote: ‘Were I to sum up the Basel Congress in a word – which I shall guard against pronouncing publicly – it would be this. At Basel I founded the Jewish state. If I said this out loud today, I would be answered by universal laughter. Perhaps in five years, and certainly in fifty, everyone will know it.’ Herzl never wavered in his belief: ‘If you will it,’ he wrote, ‘it is no dream.’5

  Herzl’s own journey to Palestine in 1898 was disappointing. ‘Poverty, pain and chaos, all in wonderful colours,’ he wrote of Jaffa. Jerusalem was even more of a disappointment. ‘If Jerusalem is ever ours, and if I were still able to do anything about it, I would begin by cleaning it up. I would clear out everything that is not sacred, set up workers’ houses beyond the city, empty and tear down the filthy rat-holes, burn all the non-sacred ruins, and put the bazaars elsewhere.’ Even the western wall of the Temple did not move him. ‘We have been to the Wailing Wall. Any deep emotion is rendered impossible by the hideous, miserable, scrambling beggary pervading the place.’6

  Herzl and his disciples believed that Palestine’s Arabs would welcome European modernisation. The Zionist slogan, coined by the British writer Israel Zangwill, described Palestine as: ‘A land without a people for a people without a land.’ Reality indicated otherwise. In the late 1880s, Palestine’s population numbered about 600,000 people, of whom perhaps just 25,000 were Jews. In 1896, the year that Herzl published The Jewish State, Jaffa was home to more than 11,000 Muslims, about 3,000 Christians and the same number of Jews. Parts of Palestine’s countryside were indeed barren, and had fallen into decline under Ottoman rule, but the land was certainly not empty. Two Rabbis sent by the Viennese Jewish community to Palestine after the Basel conference cabled back that ‘the bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man’.7

  This first husband was the country’s indigenous Arab population. Palestinian society was divided between landowner and peasant, city and village, Muslim, Christian and Jew, religious believers and secular intellectuals. Greeks, Armenians, Egyptians, Italians, Bosnians, Circassians, Africans, even Germans had settled there. The country’s ethnic mosaic was testament to its cosmopolitan vitality. Palestinians too met the requirement for nationhood. They had lived on their land for centuries; they shared a common language and culture and, certainly by the late 1800s, a growing sense of Arab national identity as part of the nahda, or intellectual renaissance. Palestine then was a province of Ottoman Syria. Just as in the Balkans, another part of the Ottoman Empire experiencing a nationalist awakening, intellectuals proposed different solutions to the ‘national question’. The theoreticians in Belgrade and Beirut often mirrored one another’s ideas. A Greater Serbia or a Greater Syria; a federation of Balkan states or a pan-Arab revival; an Orthodox union, or a new Islamic Caliphate. But whatever the Palestinian thinkers’ differences, they agreed on one point: the land was not to be handed to the Jews, but must remain Arab.

  The Austro-Hungarian writer Joseph Roth saw things more clearly than Herzl and Zangwill. The Zionist pioneer, he wrote in The Wandering Jews, ‘brings the Arabs electricity, fountain pens, engineers, machine guns, shallow philosophies and all the other things that come out of England. Of course the Arabs ought to be grateful for those fine new roads. But the instincts of a people close to nature quite rightly rebel against the onslaught of an Anglo-American civilisation, all in the name of national rebirth.’8 Debate still continues as to when a specifically Palestinian nationalism first appeared, but the establishment in 1911 in Jaffa of the newspaper Falastin (Palestine) which addressed its readers as Palestinians, was a defining moment.

  For the middle-class Palestinian, life was comfortable, apart from the political turmoil. Shaker Hammami owned a shop in Jaffa’s Souk el-Balabseh, the clothing and textile market, that supplied the fabric for his own traditional umbaz (long robe) and tailored coat. A handsome patriarch with a carefully trimmed white beard, Shaker was always well dressed and neatly barbered. But he usually had a mischievous glint in his eye, especially when his grandchildren piled into his lap, struggling for pride of place. Shaker had four sons and three daughters. His youngest son, Ahmad, was twenty years old in 1924. Ahmad was well built, with dark hair and brown eyes, and his solidity was rooted in his principles: he was a modern, forward-looking man, interested in business, sports and education, but one proud of his Palestinian heritage. Still unmarried, he had graduated from secondary school and started working in the citrus b
usiness.

  Agriculture was the mainstay of Jaffa’s economy. Its farmers grew figs, peaches, apricots, watermelons, almonds, grapes, vegetables, sugar cane and tobacco. The arrival of steamships had brought prosperity to the city, as Jaffa’s crops could now be exported to Europe. But Jaffa was most famed for its oranges. There were two main varieties: the Shamouti, thick-skinned and seedless with a very high juice yield, and the Baladi, with a thinner skin and seeds, but also very juicy. The orange groves around Jaffa stretched inland for many kilometres, and in the spring the scent of blossom, and in the summer the scent of fruit filled the air. In a good year, over a million and a half crates were exported, each containing up to 150 oranges. Jaffa’s sunny climate, sandy soil, and the care the workers lavished on the citrus groves brought forth a crop famed around the world. The Palestinian farmers were especially skilled in grafting cuttings, to produce the most productive and hardy strains. The larger groves were owned by companies who also bought fruit from other groves at a pre-arranged price before harvesting and export.

  The citrus industry, then, was a natural career choice for a bright young man. But Ahmad knew there was more to life than work. He was also a keen sportsman and an expert ping-pong and billiards player at the Al-Nadi al-Islami, Jaffa’s Islamic club. Jaffa’s social clubs, attached to its mosques and churches, offered something for every generation: children played ping-pong, and adults billiards and backgammon, or they perused the books in the well-stocked libraries. Families sat on the terrace, drinking lemonade and eating ice cream. It was time for Ahmad to start his own family. A particular young woman in her late teens, whom he often saw going home from the Italian nuns’ school, had caught his eye. He could not approach her directly, as it would not have been acceptable for her to talk to an unknown man. Ahmad embarked on a little detective work.