City of Oranges

by Adam LeBor

  More than 700,000 Palestinians left, and about 120,000 stayed. Precisely how many were intentionally expelled and how many fled – perhaps unnecessarily – will never be known.11 The causes of the Palestinian exodus varied at different stages of the war, and in different areas. Few conflicts have been examined in as much detail as the events in Israel/Palestine in spring and summer of 1948. Almost sixty years later, the question as to whether the Palestinians fled voluntarily or were expelled has crucial contemporary relevance to solving the conflict. Many Israelis argue that if the Palestinians left voluntarily, they have no right to return. But Palestinians claim that they were indeed forced out, and do have the right to go home. Several peace plans in recent years have foundered on this central issue.

  In Haifa, 70,000 departed despite the pleas of the Jewish mayor for them to stay. 95,000 fled from Jaffa, but many perhaps could have stayed had they, as Amin Andraus asked, shown greater endurance. It is important to note that thousands had left from both ports months before serious fighting began in the spring of 1948 on both sides. Israeli historians such as Benny Morris and Tom Segev have done valuable work to disentangle the myths that have grown up around 1948. Arab archives still remain closed, but the underlying reasons for the Palestinian exodus are universal. Conflicts produce refugees. As the Palestinian political scientist Ibrahim Abu-Lughod notes: ‘That bicommunal wars inevitably produce victims is obvious… as in all such wars, some people were dislocated as a result.’12

  The key question was, would they be allowed home? The Israeli response was: not to Israel, and especially not to Jaffa. The Israeli government formed a Transfer Committee to prevent the return of the refugees, and to settle new Jewish olim (immigrants) in their abandoned houses, starting in Haifa and Jaffa. The few Arabs who remained were to be relocated from their homes, to make room for the Jews. Yitzhak Chisik, the military governor of Jaffa, resigned on 25 July, no longer able to protect Jaffa’s remaining Arabs and their property from looters and vandals.13 Under the new relocation plan, Jaffa was to be divided into Zones A, B and C. All Arab inhabitants of Jaffa were to be relocated to Zone A, and/or Zone B if hostilities resumed. Both were surrounded by a wire fence, and the Arab population would not be allowed to enter or leave without a special permit. Zone C was to be evacuated immediately. On 20 August, Amin Andraus and the Emergency Committee submitted a detailed memorandum of protest to Meir Laniado, Chisik’s successor. The relocating plan repeatedly violated the 13 May surrender agreement. It violated clause eight, that Arab refugees would be allowed home after security checks; clause five, that remaining Arab inhabitants would be allowed to return home; and clause six, which stated that Jaffa’s male population would not be interned. The plan violated the Geneva Convention, which the Haganah commander had pledged to observe; breached international law, and split Jaffa into two parts, one Jewish and one Arab, to be divided by a wire fence.

  The Arab quarter was a ghetto in all but name. ‘They surrounded us with barbed wire. There were three gates in the wire and we were only allowed to go out if we wanted to work in the orange groves, and we had to get a permit from those people we were working for,’ recalls Ismail Abou-Shehade. For Ismail and his father Hussein, the Arab leaders like Amin Andraus, who negotiated with the Israelis, were turncoats. ‘Those people, whose names I don’t even want to remember, were betrayers who gave Jaffa up to the Jews.’ Ismail left soon after, for Tiberias. The Emergency Committee’s protest memorandum was ignored. When the time came, Israeli soldiers simply threw the Arabs and their furniture out of their homes and even the Emergency Committee was expelled from its offices.

  Still Amin continued on his rounds, like a doctor checking his patients, and Jaffa then needed much attention. ‘My father looked after the water supply, all the things to keep the city going, even the flour for the bakeries,’ says Suad. Amin’s idea of how Jaffa should be run often clashed with the plans of its new masters. His formative years at the tough Schneller School in Jerusalem, where he learnt to be independent and self-reliant, soon proved useful. ‘When he became too troublesome for the Israelis, and was really interfering with the way they wanted to do things, they put him under house arrest, with a guard. He could only go into the garden. But he was absolutely independent. He had chickens and pigeons. He built an oven where my grandmother baked bread.’

  Eventually the Israelis realised what Amin already knew. They needed him to keep Jaffa functioning. ‘After a while nothing worked in Jaffa without him. The Israelis started asking him questions about how to sort things out. He said he could not do anything if he was under house arrest,’ explains Suad. ‘So they allowed him out, but with a guard, who enjoyed my grandmother’s cooking.’ One day Amin paid a call at a tiny fishermen’s café. ‘He sat with them while they explained their problems. He sat and sat, and the guard was getting annoyed, saying, “Mr Andraus, it is already lunchtime.” My father said he just wanted to sit a while longer. The guard said he did not know what interest he had talking to these simple people, but my father said, no, they were his friends. Out of devilment he stretched it out a bit, and in the end the guard could not take it any more. He said, “Mr Andraus, I want you to tell me one thing, who is the prisoner, you or me?”’

  Amin’s doughty defence of Jaffa brought him more trouble. On 25 October 1948 he wrote to the Jaffa Security Office to say that seven armed men dressed in khaki had broken into his yard, and towed away his maroon Humber Sedan on a truck (registration number 2351), accompanied by a motorcycle (registration number 161N). ‘My Jewish neighbours intervened and asked them in Hebrew if they had any written order to take the car. They refused to show such an order, and threatened them with their arms.’14

  The war marooned the pharmacy student Fakhri Geday in Lebanon, unable to return home, or communicate with his family. He spent many days at Beirut’s port in late April and early May 1948, watching the boats disgorge thousands of Palestinian refugees, looking for his family. The poorer refugees had gone to Gaza but the middle classes preferred Beirut. Fakhri was twenty-one years old. He did not know if his family was alive or dead. ‘Before the war started I had a letter from my father asking me to find a house for them in Beirut until the fighting was over. Then I got another one that my mother and my sister refused to leave, and the whole family planned to hide in the French hospital if there were massacres. That was the last I heard. It was very stressful to know nothing, a very difficult time. I looked for my family, and I asked the people coming in if they knew about them.’

  One man told Fakhri that his father had left Jaffa. Then the Damianis, who owned the soap factory in Old Jaffa, arrived. ‘Your father is still in Jaffa, because your mother refused to leave,’ Mrs Damiani told Fakhri. ‘She urged me not to leave. But my husband insisted.’ Only a year later, in the summer of 1949, did Fakhri receive a letter from his father Youssef, via the International Red Cross. He and the rest of the family were alive. The pharmacy on the Gaza Road, now renamed Yefet Street, still stood. The house was still theirs. Fakhri finished his studies and applied for a permit to return to Jaffa, under Israel’s family reunification law that allowed a few Palestinians to go home.

  11

  Sofia-by-the-Sea

  Autumn 1948

  Bulgarian became the language of the streets, and shop signs appeared in Bulgarian almost overnight. Bulgarian branches of the major political parties were set up, and a newspaper Far (lighthouse) was published daily in Bulgarian.

  Ethnologist Guy Haskell on the

  Bulgarian immigration to Jaffa1

  One morning in the autumn of 1948, Julia Chelouche awoke feeling disturbed. She dreamt that her husband David got up from his bed, kissed her, and then died. David was not well. He was fifty-eight, suffered from severe diabetes and had recently had a heart attack. Julia’s dreams were powerful portents. Decades earlier she had dreamt that Yaakov Chelouche had placed a necklace of jewels around her neck, and soon after she had married his nephew, David. ‘I was seized by panic. I went into
David’s room, and he was sleeping. The nurse sat in an armchair, covered with a blanket, dozing,’ Julia wrote in her memoir. ‘The symbol of my dream was: when I kiss my husband, he will die.’

  Julia and her husband still lived in Haifa. The family had all survived the 1948 war. Haifa, like Jaffa and Tel Aviv, saw heavy fighting in the border neighbourhoods between Arab and Jewish quarters. Julia’s neighbours’ son, Moshe, had been killed by a sniper on his way to work. ‘That day, fifteen boys were buried. The crying could be heard from afar,’ wrote Julia of his funeral.

  During the war Julia’s own son Aharon had been a student in New York. Her daughter Edith had returned from school in Beirut, and was now a communications officer in the army. Unknown to Edith, her brother Aharon had showed her picture to an American friend called Ben Krygier, who was heading for Israel. Ben and Edith met, and quickly fell in love and married soon after. Some time after her dream Julia did kiss her husband and shortly before dawn on 16 October, David Chelouche, grandson of the great patriarch Aharon, died. Hundreds attended his funeral. The family sat shiva, the Jewish mourning ritual, for a week, and all of Haifa, it seemed, came to pay their respects.

  A month later, Julia travelled to Tel Aviv for the synagogue service to mark the thirty days since David’s death. Her beloved grandmother Mazal, now ninety-one, had promised to meet her there, and return with her to Haifa for several months. Julia and Mazal were very close, as her mother had died young. The night before Julia left for Tel Aviv, she dreamt of Mazal. Julia asked her why she had come now, a day early. ‘My daughter, I came to see you,’ said Mazal. When Julia arrived in Tel Aviv her brothers-in-law, Marco and Zaki, sat down with her and gently broke the news. Mazal had died the day before. ‘I burst out crying. My grandmother, whom I loved like a mother,’ wrote Julia. ‘That’s when I understood my dream: her soul came to me and she was already in her grave.’ And so the cycle of the generations continued, for Edith gave birth to a daughter, Irit, whom Julia adored. She felt like ‘half a person’ without David, she wrote, but still ‘took pleasure from my granddaughter… she was a good girl and very pretty.’

  Around this time, Shabat Aharoni, father of Yoram, opened his shop Tiv (quality) at 6 Nagib Bustros Street. The street had once been the commercial heartland of Jaffa. After 1948, it was a dead zone. The shops were silent and shuttered, their owners and customers now eking out a living in the refugee camps of Gaza and Lebanon, or building new lives in Cairo and Amman. Shabat had obtained the premises through the state company that processed abandoned Arab property. Of this there was plenty, and Bustros Street soon echoed to two new languages: the sing-song medieval Spanish of Ladino (the old dialect spoken by Sephardic Jews), and the Slavic consonants of Bulgarian.

  Tiv sold spices and coffee, although initially Shabat knew little about either. ‘My father knew about paprika, but that was all. He bought a coffee machine, and two hundred kilos of coffee a month and started to sell it,’ says Yoram. By now Yoram and his wife Rina had renounced their explosives, and were raising their family. They lived in a small flat in the centre of Tel Aviv. Their first son, Dov, was born in 1949, and their second, Ofer, three years later. Yoram worked with his father. They built up the business steadily, without a great fuss, for that was the Bulgarian way. At first they sold mainly coffee, paprika and black pepper, the spices used in Bulgarian dishes, a synthesis of Spanish, Balkan and Turkish cooking. Shabat taught Yoram about coffee, and how to blend it. The Bulgarians took theirs with roasted ground chicory, the Arabs with fragrant cardamom. Each wave of new immigrants sought new spices and coffees.

  Tiv soon became renowned across the coastal plain. It was a Jaffa institution. ‘We searched for the best quality coffee, the highest grade of spices. There are ways to tell the quality of pepper, you have to see the way it is cleaned. Spices can be adulterated, cut with something else. Black pepper is cut with burnt bread crumbs. Cumin can be padded out with other powders. I knew all the tricks. We only sold the best,’ says Yoram. ‘We developed the shop slowly. Each time a customer came and asked for a certain kind of spice or coffee, we would find a supplier and would buy it. Every group of Jews had their own preferences. Jews from Tripoli, for example, roasted their coffee at home then brought it in to us to grind finely.’

  Shabat was a kind-hearted man. Many of his Jewish customers were homesick and disorientated. They didn’t speak Hebrew properly. Arrogant Ashkenazi officials bossed them about. They had no family contacts among the bureaucracy. Shabat always had time for a chat, and a few kind words. He was a fine role model. Shabat had arrived in Jaffa with his family, and two shoe-shine brushes, and was now running a successful shop. With its familiar smells of spices and coffee, Tiv was almost a home from home for the new arrivals, says Yoram. ‘When my father passed away, people told me that when they first came to Israel and they had nothing, he would give them spices to cook with for the holidays. He told them to pay him when they had some money. They could cook the food that they were used to, and drink their own type of coffee. My father helped people start their new lives in Israel, and that was very important for him.’

  Life was hard in Israel’s early years. The economy barely functioned and food was rationed. The ruling socialist Mapai Party (also known as the Workers’ Party and the Labour Party) was slow, bureaucratic and inefficient. The heavy hand of state control, the need for endless permits demanding the necessary contacts, known as ‘proteksia’ or ‘Vitamin P’, stifled initiative and bred nepotism and corruption. In effect, Mapai ran a one-party state, which was not surprising as its leaders were eastern European socialists. Israelis, especially on the kibbutzim, addressed each other as haver meaning ‘friend’ or ‘comrade’. They wore egalitarian open-neck shirts and sandals. Ties were disapproved of as a bourgeois affectation, even anti-Zionist. Right-wing Jews and the remaining Palestinians had members of the Knesset, the parliament, to represent their interests. But there was little they could achieve. Mapai, together with the Histadrut, the state trade union organisation, controlled the health services, the economy, the state administration, and much of the media.

  Businessmen and capitalists were frowned on, especially those with ambitious ideas, as Ben Krygier, husband of Edith Chelouche, soon discovered. Ben wanted to develop Israel’s tourist business. ‘My husband was a real promoter,’ says Edith. ‘He thought that all the Jews in America would want to visit Israel, but there was no infrastructure, no hotels or proper transport then.’ Ben travelled across the country, trying to make contacts and set up a network for tourists and visitors. ‘But at the time Israel was not ready for private enterprise, so we left Israel in 1951 for New York,’ says Edith. Julia Chelouche, Edith’s mother, soon followed and stayed for seventeen years, before the whole family returned to Israel.

  Israel then had other priorities. It had signed armistice agreements with the Arab states, but these merely afforded a pause in the conflict. Israel was ringed by implacably hostile neighbours who remained committed to its destruction. The country was a strategic nightmare to defend: at one point the border with the West Bank was barely ten miles from the coast. Major cities such as Tel Aviv were well within enemy artillery range. Hostilities could erupt again at any moment. Israel was nervous and insecure, with much of its population traumatised. About one in three were Holocaust survivors. Many had seen their families killed. Six thousand Israelis, one per cent of the population, had been killed in the 1948 war, and many of them were young.

  Israel needed people. From Krakow to Casablanca, Berlin to Benghazi, wave after wave of immigrants poured in. Between May 1948 and the end of 1951, Israel absorbed 684,000 newcomers. Their receptions varied dramatically: Jews from Arab countries were put in tents, while those from Europe were given hotel rooms. The Jews of Bulgaria arrived en masse. They came from all over the country: the capital Sofia, the port of Varna, and Pazardjik, hometown of Yoram Aharoni. By 1949, 45,000 of the 50,000-strong community had relocated to Israel. Many thousands started their new lives in Jaffa
and other coastal towns, filling up the abandoned Arab villas. Socially cohesive, with a strong work ethic and an entrepreneurial spirit, they were a welcome addition. ‘The Bulgarians are very modest and not afraid of working,’ says Yoram Aharoni. ‘They did not make exaggerated demands. They had initiative. They opened small shops, garages, grocery stores, the everyday things that are needed. They worked, and they kept together. Many of them had known each other in Bulgaria.’ The Bulgarian Jews were Sephardim. But their European origins meant that the Ashkenazi elite regarded them as ‘honorary’ Ashkenazis. They formed the Tsadikov Bulgarian choir, and established a library. Jaffa was a little Sofia, crowded with Bulgarian cafés, restaurants and social clubs. For many years, Communist-inclined Bulgarians celebrated 9 September, the day the Red Army entered Bulgaria in 1944, at the Jaffa library with a lecture or poetry reading. Yet there was only one small Bulgarian synagogue. Like many Zionist Jews, the Bulgarians felt that once they were in Israel, there was little need for religious observance.

  Jaffa, like the ports of Haifa and Acre, was unusual in the new Jewish state. Although only a tiny fraction of its Arab population remained, Jews and Arabs still encountered each other on a daily basis, whereas across much of the country, the Arabs had vanished completely. There were no Arab traders selling fruits and vegetables, no Arab workers tilling the fields, no Arab children scampering home from school. The Palestinian exodus left an unsettling vacuum. Many Israelis were astonished at its speed and extent. The aftermath of the Nakba made some Jews uneasy, as they themselves were refugees from Nazi persecution. One soldier wrote: ‘It is amazing, hard to believe. Houses full of possessions, and no life. Shops full, and no buyers. Valuable properties abandoned. Our soldiers roam the alleyways and can’t believe their eyes. Despite the victory, there is a feeling of emptiness.’2