City of Oranges

by Adam LeBor

  There was sadness too. The family patriarch, Shaker Hammami, died in his seventies. Shaker had raised his seven children, and sent them all to school. They too had children, and he had lived to see a houseful of grandchildren. The cycle of the generations continued, but the Hammamis would always be part of Jaffa, he believed, and that was how it should be. After Shaker died, his sons set up two tents by their houses. Several lambs were prepared and cooked, and a banquet laid out. ‘The place was full of people from all walks of life, many of whom I had never seen before. The atmosphere was not sombre, but reflected a quiet celebration of his memory,’ recalls Hasan. Shaker Hammami was laid to rest in a white marble grave, next to his wife, Imm Shaker, in the Muslim cemetery overlooking the sea.

  When the Arab Revolt began in 1936, Shlomo Chelouche was twenty years old, and studying law at London University. He monitored the news from Palestine with growing concern. The riots and violence were getting worse and worse. He was torn between his new home and that of his family. Shlomo loved London, and many of his friends from Tel Aviv and Jerusalem were also studying there. He was an engaging young man, and like his cousin Zaki in Paris, Shlomo did not lack for female company. He was always a popular guest among the Jewish families who invited him for meals on the Sabbath and Jewish holidays. Shlomo lived in a bed and breakfast by Marble Arch and took tea at the Lyons Corner House. He went running in Hyde Park, and on Sunday spoke at Speakers’ Corner, then, as now, a verbal battleground between Zionists and Palestinians. ‘The Arabs talked about Palestine, how we were nasty to them, made life difficult and made them suffer. They proclaimed that everything the Jews said about them was untrue. I listened to this, but I couldn’t stand it. This was their answer to everything that the Arabs were doing to the Jews.’ Eventually, as the violence worsened, Shlomo knew he would have to go home. He explained his plans to his parents, Yaakov and Pearla. They were horrified. ‘I decided to go back on the spur of the moment. I was fed up. It was against their will and they did not give me permission. They told me, “We have given you the best opportunity to better yourself, for a good education, and now you want to throw it all away. Finish your studies,” they pleaded, “and then do what you must.”’

  But Shlomo’s mind was made up. Beneath the jovial exterior, he was a passionate Zionist. Shlomo had joined the Haganah, the Zionist underground military movement, when he was twelve. Then he was a runner between different units, smuggling notes and orders. As a teenage schoolboy he had trained in the use of weapons and studied basic military techniques. If there was going to be a war between the Jews and the Arabs he would do his duty. Shlomo left London and returned to Palestine. His older brother Gabriel found him a day job as a tax collector in Netanya, a settlement on the coast to the north of Tel Aviv. In the evenings and at weekends Shlomo continued his training.

  The Arab attacks were increasingly ferocious. In September 1937 nineteen people were killed in a raid on the Jewish quarter of Tiberias, eleven of the victims children. The massacres presented Ben-Gurion, the de facto leader of the Yishuv, with a dilemma. The Haganah was now working with the British, and if it responded with equivalent force it would be condemned. The Zionists would lose both their moral authority and the support of the British administration. But nor could they do nothing while Jews were dying. Perhaps the answer lay with the hardline Revisionist Zionists. The Revisionists’ leader was Vladimir Jabotinsky, a former Russian journalist and an old rival of Ben-Gurion. Ben-Gurion was inclined to compromise with the Arabs, but Jabotinsky stood for confrontation. Jabotinsky had split off from the mainstream Zionist movement in 1925, in protest at its more moderate policies. The Revisionists demanded the rapid establishment of a Jewish state on both banks of the Jordan, with a Jewish majority and a Jewish army, to be achieved by a campaign of relentless political pressure on Britain. By 1937 the Revisionists had their own military wing, called the Irgun Zvai Leumi, the National Military Organisation. The Irgun rejected the Haganah’s policy of restraint towards the Arabs and believed in pre-emptive strikes. Irgun fighters threw bombs and grenades into crowded Arab shops and markets. They hid by the road and opened fire on Arab vehicles. The Irgun soon had its own martyr when one of its members was hanged for shooting at an Arab bus. The Irgun then carried out the operations the Haganah could not. Many in the Haganah were appalled by their acts and fist fights broke out between the two sides, but other Haganah members silently applauded. Eventually Ben-Gurion set up a Haganah Special Operations Unit. It too carried out revenge attacks against the Arabs. Innocent civilians were killed in these operations and Jewish informers and traitors violently interrogated. The making of a state, both Zionists and Arabs learnt, was a brutal and bloody business.

  Arab nationalists circulated leaflets in a ‘hearts and minds’ campaign to win over the British soldiers, calling on them not to sacrifice their lives for Jewish interests: ‘… how politicians cheaply sell your blood for Jewish money, thus depriving mothers and wives from their children and husbands, without attaining anything to England or to themselves,’ one leaflet proclaimed.2 The soldiers on patrol, and a good proportion of their officers, may have sympathised, but much of the Mandate political leadership was firmly pro-Zionist. Britain declared martial law and introduced a severe security regime. The Arab Higher Committee was disbanded, all political parties were banned, and several Palestinian leaders were deported to the Seychelles. ‘Palestine has become a prison and a detention centre,’ proclaimed one headline in Falastin. The Mufti of Jerusalem fled to Beirut. British officers revived the old Turkish practice of bastinado, beating of the soles of the feet. Arab suspects also had water forced down their noses, or were made to stand under icy showers. Thousand of Arabs were held in detention, in camps with harsh regimes. Sometimes prisoners died after being forced to sit in the hot sun for hours without water. British troops raided villages, and rounded up the men before laying waste to their houses and humiliating the women. Homes were wrecked, winter food supplies destroyed, furniture smashed.

  In 1938 tragedy struck the Chelouche family. Gabriel Chelouche was killed on the road to Jerusalem. He was travelling by taxi when Arab gunmen opened fire on the vehicle from an olive grove. The car was hit and Gabriel was shot dead. Both Arab and Jewish papers carried obituaries, mourning the loss of a talented young man, an engineer and a gifted violinist. Shlomo, his parents and his sisters were devastated. Jaffa’s Arab dignitaries came to pay their respects to the family, as custom demanded. When the mourning period was over, Gabriel’s room in the family house on Rothschild Boulevard was leased to the Haganah’s military intelligence department. They were made welcome, and each day Pearla brought them tea and cakes. There were no more camel caravans from Hajj Ibrahim Samarra and the two families lost contact.

  The violence brutalised all three sides, Arab, British and Jewish. One evening Amin Andraus was working late in his office at the car showroom near the German colony, when he looked out of the window. ‘He saw a prisoner with his hands handcuffed behind his back, being led by a British policeman. Then the policeman shot the prisoner dead,’ recalls Amin’s daughter Suad, who still lives in Amin’s house together with her sisters, Wedad and Leila. ‘The news reports the next morning said a prisoner was shot trying to escape. But being the man he was, my father went to the police to report what he saw. He said that the prisoner was not trying to escape, he had been handcuffed, and then he was shot from the back, and he had seen it happen.’

  There was no common ground between the Jews and the Arabs, and it became increasingly clear to the British that the Mandate was unworkable. The Peel Commission, set up after the 1936 unrest, proposed that Jewish immigration be frozen at 12,000 per year for five years. Palestine would be divided into three zones: an Arab state, a Jewish state, and a neutral territory which would stretch from Jaffa to Jerusalem. Most Palestinians rejected the plan. A minority were prepared to accept, but backed down under pressure from the Mufti of Jerusalem. The Zionists were divided: Britain was now conceding the i
nevitability of a Jewish state, but the area offered to the Jews was so very small. Buried in the small print of the Peel Commission report was an ominous principle. Several thousand Arabs living in the Jewish area would be ‘transferred’ to the Arab one. If necessary, the transfer would be compulsory. The Peel Commission cited the population exchanges between Greece and Turkey in 1923. It was an ill-omened comparison – there, hundreds of thousands of people had been forced to uproot from the homes where their families had lived for centuries, in scenes of great chaos and brutality.

  Eventually the Zionists decided to reject the Peel Commission’s proposed borders for the Jewish area, but agreed to partition. The Woodhead Commission was then despatched to Palestine to work out the practicalities of the Peel Commission’s proposals. It concluded that they were unworkable and instead it proposed two new sets of boundaries for the two statelets known as Plan B and Plan C, both of which reduced the Jewish area. Events descended into farce. Some members of the Woodhead Commission favoured Plan B, others Plan C. Partition, the British government eventually decided, was impracticable. Meanwhile, the fighting continued.

  In Jaffa the British authorities launched an investigation into the death of the prisoner Amin Andraus had seen executed. Some time afterwards, friends of Amin were having a drink at Spinney’s, a bar near Jaffa’s Clock Tower. ‘They overheard some British police plotting to kill my father, so that he would not be able to testify about what he had seen,’ says Suad. ‘They warned him to leave immediately. He packed his things and took his family to the Lebanon where they stayed for about a year. When the investigation came to court my father was the only witness. He came back under protection, in the Archbishop of Jerusalem’s car.’ Amin’s moral integrity was vindicated: the policemen were convicted and sentenced.

  Like Shlomo Chelouche, Yaakov Yosefov avidly followed the news from Palestine. Yaakov was born in 1924 and lived in the small town of Pazardjik, in southern Bulgaria. The Yosefov family, like most Bulgarian Jews, were Sephardim. In contrast to the grand Sephardic families like the Chelouches, most were artisans, tradesmen, and manual workers. They spoke Bulgarian and Ladino, the medieval Judeo-Spanish dialect that their ancestors had brought from Spain. The Yosefov family were richer than most, and lived a comfortable, middle-class life. Yaakov’s father Shabat co-owned a factory that processed paprika and tobacco. Three generations of the Yosefovs lived in one large house with a maid, but there was no electricity or running water.

  Shabat employed five hundred workers, and owned several warehouses. He was a well-known figure in the countryside around Pazardjik, jovial and friendly, but with a sharp eye for the right price. There were different types of tobacco: Bulgarian, Turkish and Greek. The best leaves were the smaller ones, toward the top of the plant. Sorting the leaves demanded skill and expertise; some leaves smelled rich but burnt badly, others were the other way around. Shabat had a Bulgarian business partner, with whom he developed the paprika business, and all the villages around Pazardjik grew peppers for the company. The villagers brought their crop to Shabat’s factory, where the peppers were dried out, de-seeded and ground up. Shabat’s factory processed one hundred tons of paprika a year, and exported it across Europe. The tobacco was harvested in the summer, left to dry for several months and then sold in the winter.

  Partly because of its Ottoman legacy, there was little anti-Semitism in Bulgaria before the 1930s. Like Turkey, the country was a mosaic of different ethnic minorities and religions. Bulgaria’s constitution guaranteed political equality. The Jewish community, about fifty thousand strong, lived in peace. The several hundred Jews in Pazardjik, like almost all their co-religionists, were strongly Zionist. Ben-Gurion and Vladimir Jabotinsky both visited Bulgaria; Shabat had kept a paper napkin signed by Ben-Gurion. Like his sons, Shabat was an ardent Zionist. Young pioneers learnt agriculture on his holdings before going to Palestine. Shabat also took practical steps towards future immigration: he came to Palestine as a tourist in 1933 and bought some land near Latrun, in the centre of the country.

  There were a dozen Zionist organisations in Bulgaria, for youth and women, for sport and philanthropic activities. The Zionists were split between Ben-Gurion’s labour movement and other leftist groups, and Jabotinsky’s Revisionists, whose youth movement was called Betar.3 Yaakov was a member of Maccabee, the labour Zionist youth group. He spent all his free time there with his friends. The Zionists organised summer camps, and social and political events in the evenings. Once a year they organised the Day of the Shekel, when supporters donated money, and the young people paraded down the street. Long before CNN and the internet, news travelled quickly from Tel Aviv to Pazardjik and the Yosefov household. ‘My brother Yosef was in Betar, but I was in Maccabee. There were many discussions in our family when we heard what was happening in Israel in 1936,’ says Yaakov, who now lives north of Tel Aviv with his wife, Rina. White-haired, and still trim, Yaakov has a steady gaze. He weighs his words carefully before he speaks, a man who is used to having to stand by what he says. ‘My brother said that Chaim Weitzman was a traitor, that the left was soft. They just believed in defence when the Arabs attacked. They did not take the initiative, but only reacted. Betar was more active. They said we should take the fight to the Arabs.’

  Yaakov left Maccabee and joined Betar. In Pazardjik, too, Betar prepared to strike back. By the late 1930s the far-right groups in Bulgaria had grown in strength and confidence; pro-Nazi newspapers poured out anti-Semitic propaganda. As the violence worsened, Yaakov and his friends fought back. When the fascists got a Jewish boy on his own and badly beat him up, Yaakov and his friends took an equivalent revenge. But as the tension rose, Yaakov could not concentrate at school and his grades deteriorated. The fascists threw stones at his father’s house, and broke the windows of the Jewish club in Pazardjik. If Yaakov had any doubts, a visit with his classmates to a Bulgarian military camp made his mind up for him. ‘There was an officer lecturing on the machine gun in front of him. He told us that the Bulgarians have two historical enemies, the Turks and the Greeks. “If you are at the front, and you see a Turk, then shoot him in the stomach,” he said. “If you see a Greek, then shoot him in the head. But if you see a Jew, then don’t waste your bullets, and kill him with your knife.” I felt angry, and ashamed.’ Yaakov went home and told his father that he was leaving for Palestine.

  6

  Days of Hunger

  Early 1940s

  We shall fight the war against Hitler as if there was no White Paper, and we shall fight the White Paper as if there was no war.

  David Ben-Gurion on the 1939 British White Paper,

  limiting Jewish immigration to Palestine to

  75,000 over the next five years

  Like Fakhri Geday before him, Hasan Hammami was a pupil at St Joseph’s College. The curriculum was as rigorous as ever, with nine-hour days, and French was the only language permitted. ‘We had to speak French even during the breaks and when we were playing, or the monks would give us the “mark”, meaning the blackboard eraser. We had to hand the mark to the friar at the start of the next class, and take our punishment. It was usually a smack on the palm of our hand, with the flat side of a ruler,’ says Hasan. Regular miscreants were more seriously chastised. ‘Frère Kotska meted out the strongest discipline, with a thin reed, usually on the side of the legs, or on the buttocks. This happened in public, in the classroom. That was a rare event, and the threat of the pain and humiliation was enough to prevent us straying.’

  Hasan was growing into a confident boy, and was developing a taste for public appearances. He starred in a school play, where he played a child prince of the Abbasid dynasty which ruled the Muslim Caliphate until the thirteenth century. Hasan’s character was to be executed after a palace coup. His key line of dialogue was a moment of high drama: ‘Shall I die without seeing my mother!’ he thundered. ‘It was more poetic than gory,’ he says. ‘My parents came to the first night at the school auditorium. They must have been proud, and dress
ed up to the nines.’

  But darker currents were running through Jaffa. The Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamic political movement, had arrived. The Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928, called for a return to a pure Islamic life, based on its strict interpretation of the Quran and the hadith, the sayings of Muhammad. By the late 1930s and early 1940s it was active throughout north Africa, Syria and Palestine. Jaffa’s educated, moderate Muslims like the Hammamis were strongly opposed to the Brotherhood. In those times, the personal became intensely political. ‘It was an important occasion when my mother came to the school play without her head or face being covered. I realised later what a stand my parents, like other enlightened families in Jaffa, were taking,’ says Hasan. ‘The Brotherhood toughs had thrown dirty water over women shopping in the market without their heads covered, and once even battery acid, to try and scare them into submission. The educated men in Jaffa decided this must stop. They took a variety of steps, including going to the market with their wives, and making public statements. The Brotherhood did not get much support.’

  With the end of the Arab Revolt in 1939, Palestine settled down to a period of relative peace. The uprising had been quashed by the British and the Haganah, considerably aided by the factional infighting that bedevilled Palestinian politics. But the Zionists were not rewarded. After the failure of the Peel and Woodhead Commissions, Jewish and Arab leaders were summoned to London, for the St James Conference. It was doomed from the start. The Arabs refused to talk directly to the Jews. The British hosts negotiated with each side separately. The discussions led nowhere. The British issued the 1939 White Paper which stated that Jewish immigration to Palestine would be limited to 75,000 permits over the next five years. Any subsequent increases would require the permission of the Arabs, but it was highly unlikely that this would be granted. The White Paper also stated that it was not British policy that Palestine should become a Jewish state. Rather, within ten years an independent Palestinian state should be established in which Jews and Arabs would share government.