City of Oranges

by Adam LeBor

  In the summer of 1962 Hasan Hammami moved to Baghdad, where his father Ahmad had been living since 1953. Hasan was now a married man. He had returned to education in the mid-1950s, enrolling at Nottingham University to study engineering. In the university coffee bar he met a pretty and vivacious young woman called Barbara Paulson. Hasan and Barbara fell in love, and after a year together they decided to get married. Both families were opposed to this, recalls Hasan. ‘They said it would not work, no matter how much we loved each other, because we came from such different backgrounds, cultures, religions and societies.’ Hasan’s brother Hussein even wrote to Barbara in the name of his parents, a letter known as ‘Dear Barbara’ in the family folklore, outlining their fears over the couple’s compatibility. The ‘Dear Barbara’ letter did not work, but almost fifty years on, the marriage is still a successs. After graduating in 1959, Hasan returned to his old employers, Aramco, and he, Barbara and their young daughter Fawzia moved to Dhahran in Saudi Arabia. A second daughter, Rema, was born in 1960. But Aramco had not changed its employment practices, and Hasan’s salary was a mere twenty per cent of that of his American colleagues. Hasan left Aramco for a position with Procter & Gamble, managing a detergent factory. He was posted to Baghdad for his training. ‘There I could renew my relationship with Father. The evenings he spent with us were precious, and he formed a special attachment with his granddaughter Fawzia.’

  Iraq in the early 1960s was an unstable and dangerous place. In 1963, the country’s leader General Abdul Karim Qassim was overthrown in a military coup. The new government included members of the revolutionary Baath Party. Four years earlier a young Baath Party member called Saddam Hussein had tried to assassinate General Qassim, but failed and fled to Egypt, where he then studied law. Saddam returned to Baghdad after the coup, and the days of fear began. ‘The Baath Party began the process of taking over the country. They started to purge anyone opposed to them, especially Communists, anyone who had been to Russia, or even anyone who was suspected of being anti-Baathist,’ recalls Hasan. Baath Party thugs came to the factory, threatened Hasan, and posted signs on the walls: ‘The land belongs to the farmer and the factory to the worker’. Hasan threw them out, but they returned. For several nights Hasan received threatening telephone calls, before discovering that the thugs were concerned that some of the workers might be sacked. Hasan reassured them that nobody would lose their jobs. Special customs permits were quickly issued, impounded goods released and the factory was soon up and running again.

  New problems soon arose. Hasan and Barbara’s passports were confiscated. Barbara was accused of being a spy for Britain, Hasan for Saudi Arabia. The accusations were not serious, but rather primitive attempts at extortion. Still, it was with relief that the family boarded their flight for Amman once the year-long posting was at an end. After a well-deserved holiday of several weeks with Hasan’s sister Faizeh, they moved to Jeddah in Saudi Arabia. Then came dreadful news. That year, 1964, Ahmad Hammami died in Baghdad, where he was then buried. For Hasan this was a hammer blow, dislodging the pain of exile that he had buried deep inside. Hasan had lost his father, and somehow part of his past, his childhood in Jaffa, had passed away with him. He flew to Beirut to console his mother Nafise and his siblings. ‘I was overwhelmed with sorrow about not being there to help my father in his last days, or attend his funeral. The pressure built up inside me so much I thought I would burst, but I could not cry, no matter how sad I was. I cannot ever forget this. It was a milestone in my life in the Diaspora.’

  In Jaffa, life continued as though the Palestinians had never existed. The Hammami family villa, with its gardens, terrace and fruit trees, was confiscated by the Israeli state, and was used as a residential care institution. Like Trotsky after Stalin’s triumph, Jaffa’s Arabs were airbrushed out of history. Joan Comay’s 1962 guidebook gushed:

  An extraordinary medley of languages bubbles up from the pavements, or is scrawled on the stores, and just as extraordinary a variety of national dishes can be sampled in the little neon-lighted cafés and eating places.

  In a single swift leap, the young children have become Israelis. To their parents, they talk the tongue of the country from which the family came, whether it is Yiddish, French, Bulgarian, Arabic or what you will; but in their street games, they scream at each other in Hebrew.3

  Despite such delights, most of the Jewish immigrants from the Balkans left as soon as they could, heading further south down the coast for Bat Yam, or north to Tel Aviv proper. Some complained that the stone villas were too cold in the winter; others said there were ghosts in the Arab houses.

  The Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) formed in East Jerusalem in 1964 was real enough. Its covenant pledged to destroy Israel, and asserted that ‘armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine’. It denied all Jewish historical or religious ties to Palestine/Israel and described Zionism as racist, fanatic, colonialist and expansionist. Israel would, in theory, be replaced by a secular democratic state where Jews, Muslims and Christians would live together in peace. The PLO included various Marxist and quasi-Marxist factions, such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, but the largest and most important grouping was Fatah (Victory). Fatah was led by a former Egyptian army officer and engineering graduate called Muhammad al-Husseini, better known as Yasser Arafat. Arafat claimed to have been born in Jerusalem in 1929, although others said his birthplace was Cairo. Safe in their offices in Arab capitals or refugee camps, the PLO commanders sent a stream of poorly-trained boys to die on suicide missions in Israel, attacking pipelines and grain silos. These cynical acts of theatre were of no military value, but they provided worldwide publicity for the PLO, and increased tension inside Israel. Others hijacked aeroplanes and attacked Jewish targets across the world. But behind the fiery rhetoric about eliminating the ‘Zionist entity’ the organisation was already fracturing. Many PLO leaders, including Arafat, understood that the real struggle for Palestinian statehood would be won or lost through political and diplomatic means.

  Palestinians inside Israel were also finding their voice. The pharmacist Fakhri Geday was a founder member of the Al-Ard (The Land) nationalist movement. Fakhri’s acceptance of Israel’s existence did not mean that he felt any loyalty or attachment to the state. He explains: ‘They don’t have any feelings of attachment to us, so why would I feel attached to Israel? I live in my country, I obey the laws, and I have nothing against them. This is a fact of life and I admit it. But my feelings, my aspirations, my soul is with my people.’ Israel’s Arab minority certainly had more rights than the citizens of the neighbouring Arab states. Most were despotic monarchies or dictatorships, where torture was routine, and where the secret police ruled by fear. Israel was a functioning democracy. Arab politicians were elected to the Knesset, where they could freely, if impotently, oppose government policies, for example on the demolition of the abandoned villages. Amin Andraus was approached several times by Israeli politicians, and encouraged to stand for election on the Labour Party list. Understandably, he preferred to concentrate on raising his children and running his business, rather than join a political system that had appropriated his family’s lands.

  But it was one thing for an Arab politician to work within the accepted Zionist/non-Zionist framework, and quite another to openly espouse the Palestinian nationalist cause. Al-Ard was, or aimed to be, a legal political party. The choice of name was powerfully symbolic, a protest against Israel’s continuing seizures of Arab land. Fakhri wrote to politicians and prominent people abroad such as Bertrand Russell and Arnold Toynbee. Russell wrote back to Fakhri, extolling Al-Ard as the most noble political movement on Palestinian soil for over a century. ‘Al-Ard renewed the idea of nationalism among our people. All the Arabs of Israel were with us, only the Communist Party was opposed,’ says Fakhri. Al-Ard also defined the limits of Israeli democracy. The party was banned from fielding candidates in the 1965 elections to the Knesset. The High Court ruled that Al-Ard was a subversive
party, aiming to ‘damage the existence of the state and its territorial integrity’. Fakhri and his colleagues challenged the ruling, without success. But as Fakhri once wrote to a US senator, quoting a Bedouin proverb, ‘Let the dogs bark, and the caravans will continue’. The banning of Al-Ard was a setback, but the struggle for Palestinian rights within Israel was only just beginning.

  There were some victories. In the following year, 1966, the Military Administration that governed Israel’s Arab minority was abolished. This did not mean that Israeli Arabs enjoyed full legal and political equality. They did not serve in the army and could not work in sectors related to defence, which ruled out much of the economy, and it was almost impossible for an Arab to buy land. Petty day-to-day discrimination was widespread. Israel’s Arabs were still non-Jews in a Jewish state. But under Mapai those who played the system could flourish. Ismail Abou-Shehade, the mechanic who had once hoped to be an Islamic judge, opened a repair shop in Jaffa’s port, and employed two workers to repair boat engines. State subsidies gave Ismail a steady flow of work. The government paid boat owners 50 per cent of the cost of any repairs that were needed. A boat owner would come to Ismail, who had the power to certify if a boat needed repairing. It usually did. The boat owner then collected his subsidy and spent it at Ismail’s repair shop. It was a cosy arrangement and Ismail prospered.

  His business expanded: he bought several fishing boats, and hired new workers. ‘In those days the sea was rich, and the fishermen made a lot of money. The fishermen did not get paid by me, but took part of the catch, around seven or eight per cent. The wholesaler then bought the fish and we divided the money.’ Ismail loved to go fishing himself, and was also on call if a ship ran into trouble. ‘If ships at sea had problems, we went out to help them. There were no cellular phones then,’ he explains. ‘You stopped the boat and fired a red flare if it was during the night, or a smoke bomb during the day. We were called out a lot, once or twice a month. Once they saw the red flare go off, they came to get us. Once a boat did not return. They did not have any flares with them. After twelve hours a spotter plane was sent out, but they did not see anything. So we called the government and they sent out a fighter plane, which found the ship. It had just got lost.’

  The seas around Jaffa were powerful and dangerous. Then, as now, the water could be deadly, recalls Ismail. One friend of his had a leg bitten off by a shark. ‘Once we were sailing between Netanya and Herzliya. They said the sea was fine and we headed north. The wind came up, very strong. We fired out flares but nobody saw them. We had problems but luckily we were near the shore. The boat capsized, but we managed to swim to land.’ But the sea never recovered from attempts to discover oil, says Ismail. ‘The companies looking for oil bombed the sea with tons of dynamite, from ten to two hundred metres down. We, the fishermen, demonstrated and wrote to the government, but nothing happened. They gave us compensation, sixty lire, enough for ten kilos of meat. They said the sea would recover after ten years, and now it is thirty years later and the sea is still not living. You should not play with nature. God made nature and you should not alter these things. If they put me on the television I would tell them, “You burnt the sea.”’

  By now, the mid-1960s, Jaffa had fallen into decay. State funds were being directed towards new towns for immigrants, not old cities that were mainly home to Arabs. Old Jaffa was especially dilapidated, home to brothels, drug dealers and prostitutes working the narrow, dark alleys. Few of the buildings damaged in 1948 had been repaired. Stray dogs scampered across the rubble, picking through the piles of rotting rubbish. Manshiyyeh, the front-line border area between Tel Aviv and Jaffa, was a wasteland. The novelist Max Brod compared its ruins to Pompeii. It was ‘a vast expanse of rubble, reaching almost to the horizon’, he wrote in Unambo: A Novel of the Jewish Arab War:

  The difference is that in Pompeii the mounds of debris have been carefully stacked and tidied, while here in Manshiyyeh, the noman’s-land between Tel Aviv and Jaffa, where battles had raged for weeks on end, no one had yet got round to clearing up. Of some houses half a wall remained, behind which heavy iron beams had collapsed. Other buildings had been razed to the ground, so that an area where this happened to a number of houses looked more like a ground-plan or sketch of a plan than the town itself.4

  Not everyone mourned Manshiyyeh’s destruction. Evelyn Sert, the heroine of Linda Grant’s novel set in 1940s Tel Aviv, When I Lived in Modem Times, is taken to a safe house in Manshiyyeh by Irgun fighters before the 1948 war.

  There are slums in every city but why should there be slums in the newest, most modern city in the world? The car pushed through the peddlers and hawkers and pimps and prostitutes and people with the scars of diseases I did not want to think about. It was raining again and the air smelled of rotting vegetables and shit… what was that place? It was chaos. It was dirt and disorder, squalid and stinking. The white city [Tel Aviv] didn’t touch it. Perhaps it had its own charms but I couldn’t see them.

  Evelyn Sert’s opinions were widely shared. The last houses, still wrecked from the fighting of 1948, were finally demolished in the late 1960s and Manshiyyeh, former home to Jewish Communists, Arab businessmen, refugees and immigrants, was no more. The rubble was bulldozed towards the sea, covered with grass and turned into a park, named for Sir Charles Clore, the British Jewish businessman and philanthropist.5 It is ironic that the only house still standing in Manshiyyeh’s former seafront is now the Irgun museum – commemorating those who first destroyed the quarter in the 1948 fighting – overlooked by the nearby Hasan Bey Mosque, which also survived.

  Next on the list for demolition was Old Jaffa itself, the heart of the ancient city. Old Jaffa had survived almost three millennia of invasion and capture, from the Pharaohs to the British Mandate. But now it seemed it would be Israeli bureaucrats who would deliver the coup de grâce. Israel had already launched a new campaign of demolition in 1966, named ‘Levelling Villages’, to flatten abandoned settlements. Nabi Rubeen, the site of the annual festival, where the Hammamis had spent their summer holidays before 1948, was one of the first to be destroyed. Bulldozers demolished every building, except for the mosque and adjacent shrine. When an Arab member of the Knesset protested, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol replied: ‘Not destroying the abandoned villages would be contrary to the policy of development and revitalisation of wasteland, which every state is obliged to implement.’6

  Luckily for Jaffa, the mayor of Jerusalem, Teddy Kollek, had other ideas. Kollek knew the architect Frank Meisler, and planned to recruit him to save the Old City. Frank’s days of carousing in cafés were over. He was living in Tel Aviv, married to Batya, a distant American relation. ‘Kollek told us that there was a plan to renovate Jaffa, to make it into an artists’ colony. He said he wanted to show us around,’ recalls Frank. Saving Old Jaffa would need a lot of work, and a strong political will. Renovating old Arab houses ran contrary to the political thinking of the day, says Frank. ‘Jaffa then was a tumble-down slum. The city fathers wanted to bulldoze the whole thing. That was the mentality then: everything Arab was horrible and should be demolished and high-rise buildings put up in its place. There were kibbutzim that moved into Arab villages, that destroyed the Arab houses and built corrugated iron shacks. The idea was to get rid of Jaffa, which was seen as an Arab dump, and build high-rise, cheap workers’ housing, like Bat Yam. But then a few people with some aesthetic sense stood up against that, and said it would be a desecration to demolish Old Jaffa.’

  Kollek won. The Tel Aviv municipality agreed that Old Jaffa was to be saved, or rather converted into an artists’ and tourists’ quarter, and a committee was set up to vet potential applicants. Frank Meisler and Batya were accepted. They sold their flat in Tel Aviv and bought two derelict piles in the middle of Old Jaffa. One to live in, and one to convert into a workshop. In 1966 this was considered a daring, if not foolhardy move. Few Jews voluntarily moved to the heart of an Arab quarter, especially one as ramshackle as Old Jaffa, but Frank’s motives,
like most life-changing decisions, were mixed. While he knew the city and liked it, economics also played a role. ‘I had seen villages in southern France where the local people had left for the cities, and artists had moved in and renovated them. So from a property point of view, I thought it wouldn’t be a bad deal. People bought cheaply and renovated, an artists’ colony appeared, the buses started arriving and the tourists came.’

  Israel’s first artists’ colony was sited in the village of Ein Hod, near Haifa. Before 1948, Ein Hod was a Palestinian settlement called Ein Hawd. Its farmers grew olives, carobs and sesame, and produced honey. After 1948 most fled, but a dozen or so stayed on a nearby hill, living in shacks. Tenaciously loyal to their land, they rebuffed Israel’s attempts to disperse them, and were eventually granted Israeli citizenship. They were, however, not allowed to return to their houses. Like many Israeli Arabs they were classified as ‘present absentees’, an Orwellian phrase applied to Palestinians whose property was confiscated under the 1950 Absentee Property Law, but who were present within Israel’s borders, and granted Israeli citizenship. Ein Hawd was Hebraised to Ein Hod. A Romanian artist called Marcel Yanko launched a campaign to ‘save’ Ein Hod. The village mosque was converted into a restaurant and bar modelled after the Café Voltaire in Zurich, birthplace of the Dada movement.

  The abandoned Arab family homes soon had new owners – writers and sculptors who converted them to art galleries and summer homes. Some of the sons of the original Arab owners, who lived in the adjacent shacks, even worked on the restoration of the houses or as day labourers in their former fields, which had been appropriated by Kibbutz Nir Etzion. Many of the artists and writers were leftists, although not quite ‘leftist’ enough to give back the Arab houses to their owners. When a parking lot was built on top of part of Ein Hawd’s cemetery, the surviving villagers asked the artists for permission to fence off the remainder of the cemetery and preserve the graves. It was refused. One of the artists told the Israeli author David Grossman: ‘If you give them a toehold here you are immediately acknowledging thereby that some sort of – I don’t know – injustice took place, and turning them into unfortunates who were uprooted from their land… Their having a hold here would undermine our right to the place and our possession.’7