by Adam LeBor
Ahmad Hammami, like many other Palestinian merchants, also had Jewish business associates. Commerce cut across national and ideological divisions. But Tel Aviv’s open democratic spirit did not quite extend to Jaffa’s Arabs. They were not barred, or openly discouraged from the cafés and shops. But when Hasan and his friends went for a walk in the city, or to the cinema, they were uneasy. They did not speak Hebrew, and it was instantly apparent that they were not Jews. ‘Tel Aviv was crowded, noisy and buzzed like a beehive. But we Jaffa boys did not feel comfortable there, or welcome,’ says Hasan. The Peel and Woodhead Commissions’ plans to divide Palestine had faded away, but in a sense, partition had already begun.
8
Jaffa Prepares for War
Mid- to Late 1940s
I asked Palestinians about love. They said Palestine has no love… I asked them about their jokes. They said Palestine has no jokes. I cracked some jokes but they did not laugh. Why, Palestine? Laugh and smile. Or at least, return my smile and my laugh to me. I lost them between Jerusalem and Jaffa.
Egyptian journalist on his visit to Palestine
in 1945, published in Falastin1
Hasan Hammami stood in front of the microphone and looked out nervously at the crowd in front of him. His father Ahmad liked to spring surprises on him, it seemed. Once he had tipped him into the sea, to ensure that he could swim. Now, without warning, he had appointed Hasan master of ceremonies for the Hammami municipal election campaign meeting. The Second World War was over and Hasan was thirteen years old. The Hammami house and gardens were full of people, and hundreds more spilled out on to the surrounding streets. A large open-sided tent was set up with a modern public announcement system, and several lambs were slaughtered and cooked. The audience looked back at Hasan expectantly. ‘That was my first political experience. Father asked me to give the welcome speech, and I took up the challenge,’ he recalls. ‘I took a deep breath and said: “I welcome you in the name of the Hammami family, to this meeting for the election of my uncle Adel Hammami to the City Council. Thank you.” When I finished speaking, the applause seemed deafening.’
Palestine’s economy was finally recovering. Imports from Europe were once again appearing in the shops. Ahmad bought a Dutch Phillips bicycle for Hasan and an Italian racing bicycle for his brother Hussein. ‘The bicycle opened up a whole new world of discovery for me. I cycled to school, along the beach, and I found the secret of cycling along the sand. You had to be close enough to the water for the sand to be firm, but not too close or you went into the water and slowed down. And not too far back or you would get stuck in the dry sand.’ Sometimes Hasan headed south to the Jewish town of Bat Yam, past the edge of Jebaliyyeh. ‘Bat Yam was heavily reinforced. It had a brewery that looked like a fort with gun slits. There were small white houses, simple but clean, but the people seemed like they came from another planet. They did not want to talk, even to each other, they were very quiet. It all seemed out of place, there on the sand dunes. The bus from Bat Yam ran through the street next to ours, but it never stopped. The windows were always closed, even in the summer. I was a young boy, but I still felt that there must be a sinister reason for these colonies being built, encircling Jaffa. Later on, I found out that I was right.’
Ahmad was back in the citrus business, and had signed contracts with several growers, including Jewish ones, and Pardes, the Zionist agricultural co-operative movement. He leased citrus groves from Pardes for the export season, or he might exchange the lease on a Jewish-owned grove for an Arab one, if that was more convenient. The question now was how to travel to the remote farms. Ahmad’s fine pre-war Mercedes, requisitioned for the war effort, was still in the hands of the British. He knew it would be a long time, if ever, before he sat behind its wheel again. But Ahmad was a problem solver. If he could drive to Iraq in the middle of the war and bring back thousands of sheep, then he could certainly sort out a car. ‘My father arranged with a friend of his who owned a garage to buy a military surplus jeep. He mounted the frame and seats of an Austin 12 onto the jeep’s chassis. This was cheap, creative and available immediately. And because it was four-wheel drive, Father could drive on remote, unpaved roads to the distant groves.’ Before Ahmad would sign any contract, the leased citrus groves had to be checked and measured. Hasan now accompanied his father on his trips. ‘As I approached adolescence, I remember a gradual change in my relationship with Mother and Father. Mother stopped treating me like a kid, and paid more attention to the younger ones. She asked me to do chores, tidy my desk, care for my younger brothers and sisters, and to “behave more like a man than a child”. Father started gradually involving me in his work.’ Once Ahmad and Hasan arrived at the leased grove Hasan counted the number of horizontal lines of trees, while Ahmad counted vertically. Father and son then met in the middle.
All the while Ahmad was checking the health and size of the trees, so he could estimate each grove’s potential yield, and then make the best bid for the lease. Hasan was glad to help. He was a diligent boy, not as playful as his younger brother Hussein, who was the family joker and story teller, or young Mustafa who was always getting into trouble, skipping off from school to go fishing by the Jami’a al-Bahr, the mosque by the sea, where Hasan and his father prayed, especially on Fridays during school summer holidays. Sometimes Mustafa brought home his catch, the long thin fish dubbed ‘Bolsheviks’ because they started to appear in 1917. As his relationship with his son evolved, Ahmad began to treat Hasan as a protégé, or trainee partner. Just as Yaakov Chelouche had taken his son Shlomo on his rounds, Ahmad brought Hasan along to business meetings. He met Mr Beiruti, who was in the shipping business; the clerks of the Ottoman Bank, by Clock Tower Square, where Ahmad arranged his financial affairs, and Mr Abdel Rahim who printed Ahmad’s letterheads and business forms. Hasan was very proud.
The three Zionist militias, the Labour-Zionist Haganah, the Revisionist-Zionist Irgun and the extremist Stern Group (Lehi), were also drawing closer. Across the Yishuv there was a sense that the end of the war with Nazi Germany, and worldwide horror about the extent of the Holocaust, was building support for the idea of a Jewish state. It was time for even the fractious Zionist leaders to try to unite. Winston Churchill was swept from power in the summer of 1945, and Labour had promised to rescind the 1939 White Paper that restricted Jewish immigration to 75,000. But Ernest Bevin, the Foreign Secretary, announced that immigration would remain fixed at 1,500 permits a month. Bevin was strongly anti-Zionist, and widely condemned across the Yishuv as an anti-Semite. The British blockade of refugee ships continued. The ragged survivors of Nazi camps were once again held behind barbed wire, this time in British-run detention camps. Anti-British feeling surged, not just in Palestine, but across the world.
Pressure grew in the United States to open the gates. President Truman called for 100,000 Jewish refugees to be let into Palestine. In 1945, the Anglo-American Committee of Enquiry was established. Albert Einstein appeared before it, arguing in favour of a Jewish state. The Zionists echoed Truman’s call for the immigrants to be allowed in, and demanded that control over Jewish immigration be handed to them. Meanwhile the Palestinian leadership called for an independent Palestine, and for Jewish immigration to cease. The two sides were as far apart as ever. The Committee’s recommendations, that 100,000 Jews be at once allowed to immigrate were rejected by the British government, and the 1939 White Paper stayed in force.
In response Ben-Gurion and the Haganah leadership changed strategy. The new enemy was Britain. In October 1945, Ben-Gurion cabled instructions from London: ‘We must not confine our reaction in Palestine to immigration and settlement. It is essential to adopt tactics of S. [sabotage] and reprisal. Not individual terror, but retaliation for each and every Jew murdered by the White Paper. The S. action must carry weight and be impressive, and care should be taken, insofar as possible, to avoid casualties…’2
The Haganah’s ‘Hunting Season’ against the Irgun and Lehi was closed, and the United Resistan
ce (UR) was founded. Its leadership was composed of two representatives from the Haganah, and one each from the Irgun and Lehi. This was a triumph for Lehi, which had at most a few hundred members, compared to the thousands in the Irgun and Haganah. On 1 November 1945, the UR sabotaged railway tracks in more than 150 places, blew up patrol boats in Jaffa and Haifa and attacked Lydda railway station. The following month British intelligence headquarters in Jerusalem and Jaffa were destroyed, the latter by Lehi.
Yoram Aharoni had already been at war with Britain for several years. He was now a specialist in explosives and demolition, and he supplied the weapons for Lehi’s attack on the British intelligence headquarters in Jaffa. ‘I did not participate but I brought the grenades and explosives. I handed them to a girl and they blew up the building. When the operation was over everyone returned their weapons, and she gave the unused grenades back to me. I didn’t think anything more of it.’ On the wet, cold night of 25 February 1946, Yoram took a more active role. He was crawling along the ground in the dark towards the perimeter fence of an RAF airbase at Kfar Syrkin, in central Palestine. His squad of nine Lehi fighters was part of a team of thirty. ‘At this time the groups were all working together. The Haganah attacked the railway tracks, the Irgun the airport at Lydda, and we targeted the aircraft at Kfar Syrkin. We cut through the fence, and crawled along the ground until we got to the planes. There was only one guard with a torch and one British armoured vehicle. We waited in the dark until the vehicle went by and ran to the planes. We each had three kilos of explosives with a two-minute fuse.’ Yoram and his comrades jammed the explosives into the space where the undercarriage struts joined the wing. This was one of the most vulnerable spots on the plane, and the explosion would destroy both the landing gear and the wing, almost certainly rendering it irreparable. ‘We lit the fuses and ran back to the fence. We made it out.’ The rapid thumps of the explosions lit up the night sky. ‘We destroyed nine Spitfires. It was a very successful mission.’
Yoram often came to Jaffa to buy weapons and explosives from his Arab contacts, stolen from British army stores. Some Arabs were sympathetic to Lehi, seeing them as useful allies in the battle to get Britain out of Palestine. British soldiers also sold munitions – a kilo of explosives, for example, cost two pounds. Some time after the Kfar Syrkin attack, Yoram met the young woman in Lehi who had returned the unused grenades. Her name was Rina Bloomshtein and she lived on Allenby Street, in central Tel Aviv. The Bloomshtein home was occasionally hit by bullets fired by Arab snipers in Jaffa. Rina was an only child, and her father was a member of the Haganah who, like most of his comrades, detested Lehi. Rina’s father knew nothing of her secret life until he discovered her pasting up Lehi posters on a nearby street. He chased her down the street with a broom, and after a furious row, Rina left home.
Now a new relationship was beginning. Before Yoram had left Bulgaria, his father had given him a ring, and he wore it all the time. Rina was interested in the ring, and asked to see it, so Yoram took it off and put it on her finger. If there were three witnesses, he joked, they would be married. Rina smiled and handed the ring back. ‘When I met her in Tel Aviv, I would say, “Hallo, my wife”, and she always replied, “Hallo, my husband”. I didn’t want to marry her then, it was a joke,’ says Yoram. The Lehi leadership sent Yoram to a Jewish town called Raanana, on the coast north of Jaffa. Yoram had just completed a two-week course in guerrilla warfare, taught by Jewish soldiers who had fought in the British army, some of whom were also Haganah veterans. They taught the use of weapons, combat tactics, mines and explosives, training on deserted sections of the coastline. Yoram was now the Lehi commander for a large region, and as a wanted man, he travelled everywhere under cover. But it was harder to live a clandestine life in sleepy Raanana than in Tel Aviv, for newcomers were noticed in the small town. So Rina was sent to join him, and they posed as a married couple.
Yoram’s cover was that he was a flower seller. It was an inspired legend, as it gave him a reason to travel across Palestine legitimately. ‘I had all the equipment and the seeds but I never sold any flowers. I dressed in simple clothes, like a man from a village, and when I was stopped and questioned, I could show that I really was a flower seller. I would go from place to place, organise actions, or command actions myself, and undertake all the training in weapons and arms.’ Like every clandestine military organisation, Lehi had a hard core of active members, and a wider ring of supporters that provided safe houses, shops and warehouses to store weapons and ammunition. One of these owned a real flower shop in Tel Aviv, and supplied Yoram with enough seeds, bills of sales and other necessities to verify his cover. Rina was a runner, bringing orders from Lehi’s high command. Cooped up together, living in constant danger of discovery, the inevitable eventually happened. ‘After a while we realised that we really did want to get married. Usually there were no marriages, because a man with family ties is trouble for a group like Lehi,’ explains Yoram. His previous girlfriend had been a member of the Haganah. She had not known he was in Lehi and he certainly could not tell her. Yoram asked his commander for permission to marry Rina. It was decided there would be no objection. After all, Yoram and Rina were already pretending to be married. But first, Yoram was ordered to carry out a new mission, a ‘confiscation’, otherwise known as a bank robbery.
That same year, 1946, in Jebaliyyeh, the Hammami children were counting the days until the festival of Nabi Rubeen. Nabi Rubeen took place every summer at a village of the same name, just south of Jaffa. It was built around a shrine where, according to tradition, Rubeen, the firstborn son of Jacob, was buried. Nabi Rubeen was one of the highlights of the year, a cross between a holiday camp and a spiritual and religious folk festival. Cloistered in their homes, Arab women especially counted the days until it began, which gave them at least a week of freedom. ‘Either you take me to Nabi Rubeen, or you divorce me,’ they threatened their husbands, only half-joking. Musicians played, singers crooned popular love songs, poets declaimed their works, Sufi dervishes whirled and magicians entranced their audiences with tricks.
Fadwa Hammami looked forward to Nabi Rubeen even more than her brothers. Born in 1937, Fadwa was a studious little girl, nine years old, quieter and more introspective perhaps than her twin sister Leila. ‘Usually I could only go out with my mother and her sisters. I could not just go to a shop on my own. We visited other families for the religious feasts. So I was always exicited to go to Nabi Rubeen,’ explains Fadwa, who now lives in East Jerusalem, the only one of Ahmad Hammami’s children still living in Israel/Palestine. But her conviviality is underscored by sadness, for the idyllic Jaffa of her childhood, and the richness of Palestinian culture before 1948 have vanished for ever. ‘This was our family holiday, and we enjoyed it very much. If you ask anyone in Palestine about Nabi Rubeen, they would love to have it again, it was so nice. That was the first time I went to the cinema and I saw an Egyptian film. There was a mosque, and temporary shops in small tents. You could buy special things, trinkets, glass bracelets and necklaces.’
A whole holiday complex appeared on the sands: there were streets lined with kebab stalls, cafés, and soft drink and ice-cream parlours. The Hammamis stayed in roomy tents, large, white, double-walled canvas constructs, decorated inside with embroidered verses from the Quran. Ahmad had a fence put up, so that the family could have some privacy. Inside they slept on camp beds, while the floor was covered with rugs and straw mats. There were electric lights, a shower and a toilet. Everybody changed out of their city clothes, which anyway were too hot for the summer, and wore traditional Arab robes. Friends and relatives came to visit from all over Palestine. The whole week was a kind of istiqbal, a chance to forget about politics and the conflict with the Jews. The Israeli writer S. Yizhar sneaked into Nabi Rubeen as a child and was entranced: ‘Ho, not to return, to be and to be in this colourful spinning, which tempts and leads astray and sings, and which is within the distant night, surrounded by white sands and millions of stars.’3
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nbsp; Hasan took a ride on a white Arabian stallion, trotting down to the beach. It was a more successful trip than his last ride, when he had jumped onto the gardener’s horse. Fadwa and her brothers and sisters hiked along the banks of the Al-Auja River, down to the sea. Each time she went the route was slightly different, as the wind blew the sand dunes back and forth. Some days whole hills vanished from one place and reappeared somewhere else. ‘Our food always tasted of sand, and that was the taste, the memory of Nabi Rubeen.’
* * *
Yoram Aharoni’s ‘confiscation’ was set for 25 September 1947. ‘We had someone on the inside who gave us the information that on a specific day a car was moving cash from Barclay’s Bank in central Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The police organised the transport, in a big armoured car with a machine gun on the top. We knew how the loading worked, that there were two lots of banknotes. The bank workers brought the first one out and loaded it into the van, while the police stood guard. Then they went back into the bank with them for the second bundle. We wanted both.’
Yoram and two others were to grab the money, while about twenty more armed Lehi members were positioned in the square, in case things went wrong. Yoram and his comrades dressed in suits on the day of the robbery, like businessmen who had legitimate affairs to attend to at the bank, their weapons hidden beneath their clothes. They took up their positions not far away. They had already had several practice runs, working out the best place to wait before going into action. They chatted amiably, as if they were going to a business meeting. All the time they were watching the bank’s doors. ‘There were three of us: one to take care of the sergeant who went back into the bank, one for the policeman on the roof, and one for the driver. When the bank workers went back inside for the second package we started walking forward. The problem was the timing, to get both packages. We got to the bank and were standing right by the sergeant, but we were too quick, and they had not brought the other package of notes out yet. So we stopped walking and stood there talking. When they brought the second bundle out we ran forward and opened fire on the car. I shot the man on the roof, the sergeant was shot, and I ran towards the driver.’