by Adam LeBor
Old Jaffa was reserved for artists, but there were no restrictions on buying property in Ajami, so a second wave of Israelis moved in. Economics and geography played a role: the dilapidated Arab villas were cheap and plentiful – most Israeli Jews wanted to live in modern apartments. Jaffa was adjacent to Tel Aviv, and it overlooked the sea. But more than this, the newcomers were idealistic and wanted to live in a mixed community.
Behira Buchbinder was born in Palestine in 1930, and moved to Jaffa in the early 1970s, together with her husband Benjamin. After a kibbutz in the Negev desert and the southern city of Beersheba, Jaffa was a treat. Unusually for that time, Behira bought her house from its original Arab owners rather than the custodian of state property. ‘When I came to Jaffa I did not think of the Arabs here as a political problem. I just thought, they lost, we won, but we are living together. We were very happy to have this house. We had nothing when we arrived, just a table and some old beds the Jewish Agency gave us.’ She and Benjamin still live in the spacious Ajami villa with arched windows, high ceilings and stone floors. ‘I looked around when we arrived and thought, who would be my friend? We never thought then that someone is an Arab, another is a Jew, he is from Morocco or she is from Poland, we just lived together. Our relationships were good. The children played together in the street, there were no cars. It was natural. My son’s best friend was an Arab, and most people thought like me.’ Many of Jaffa’s Jews still do, and Behira is active in community politics, supporting joint Jewish-Arab projects, and trying to preserve Jaffa’s Ottoman and Arab architecture.
Ali Goughti also grew up in Ajami and is headmaster of Jaffa’s Hassan Araffe School. Born in 1959, Ali almost became a professional footballer, before reluctantly choosing education. He is a perceptive observer, and now defines himself as an Arab Palestinian who is an Israeli citizen, but the nuances of identity did not seem so critical during his Jaffa childhood, which he looks back on with nostalgia. ‘We did not have the anxieties and the conflicts that children feel now. People were nicer, the doors were always open. I could go into any family house, to eat or play, whether they were Christians, Muslims or Jews. Now everyone asks why things have changed. It is to do with education, the environment in the street, trust between people, respect for elders, traditions and the many good things we had here in our city. Today people trust each other much less, the families are apart, and the father has less authority over his family and his children.’ Yet even in the 1960s and 1970s there were unspoken limits to co-existence. Romantic relationships between young Arabs and Jews were rare and frowned upon. There was a sense, even among those who lived side by side in Jaffa, that it was too soon for intermarriage, which would cross boundaries – religious as well as ethnic – that should not yet be breached.
By the late 1980s Michal Meisler was growing into a vivacious and attractive young woman. A few minutes’ walk away, in Old Jaffa, she stayed friends with Yosi. ‘Sometimes we went to pubs, I got a bit drunk and he brought me home and put me on the doorstep. He was a good person, a kind-hearted drug dealer. My parents knew all about it. They thought I was having a great adventure.’ Michal and Yosi’s friendship was unique. Yosi did not even kiss her hallo on her cheek when they met. ‘He did not take me into his world. Our friendship stayed in his car, or the cafés we went to. He never did business while I was with him.’
When Michal left home, she lost touch with Yosi until one day she picked up a newspaper. ‘I read that an Arab man had been stabbed in Jaffa. I recognised his name. The paper said he was in hospital. I went to visit him and he was connected up to lots of tubes with two bodyguards watching him. He was very embarrassed that I should see him like that.’ Yosi recovered, and went to prison. Although they parted on good terms, he and Michal did not meet again for many years. But just as with the Chelouche and Samarra families, the turbulent politics of the Middle East would eventually intrude on their friendship.
21
Going Home to The Sea
Early 1990s
For so many of the exiles, their lives stopped in 1948. Their sense of whatever could be beautiful ended once they left Jaffa.
Rema Hammami, daughter of Hasan Hammami
The Labour Party never regained the almost continual hegemony it had enjoyed between 1948 and Likud’s victory in 1977. Menachem Begin had triumphed again in the 1981 elections, forming a Likud-led coalition government with the National Religious Party, with a slim majority of seven seats in the Knesset. Israel remained split in two, between the leftists, prepared to reach an accommodation with the Palestinians, and the right-wingers who believed the West Bank was an inalienable part of the Jewish state. The bitter domestic fallout from the 1982 invasion of Lebanon only accentuated the division. Ironically, the inconclusive results of the September 1984 elections, when Labour won forty-four seats and Likud forty-one, produced a National-Unity government that shared power. The veteran Labour politician Shimon Peres served first as prime minister, followed in 1986 by Yitzhak Shamir, the former Stern Group commander. The two certainly agreed on one thing: the National-Unity government, like its predecessors, refused point-blank to deal with Yasser Arafat, or to countenance an independent Palestinian state.
At the end of 1987 the Palestinians seized the initiative and launched the Intifada. The Intifada – the word means ‘shaking off’ – was not an armed rebellion or a series of terrorist attacks. It was an organised campaign of civil disobedience, strikes and shut-downs within the occupied West Bank. It was an early example of the ‘asymmetrical’ political warfare that over a decade later would be employed in Serbia, Georgia and Ukraine: a kind of political ju-jitsu that turns the enemy’s might against him. Palestinians threw stones and occasionally Molotov cocktails, blocked roads and slashed tyres of army vehicles, but generally they did not use guns. Israel’s tanks and artillery were useless in the kasbahs of Hebron and Nablus. It was the Biblical story of David and Goliath, except this time David was a Palestinian, standing proud and unarmed against the might of the Israeli army.
The Intifada’s roots lay in the century-long struggle between Arab and Jew for Palestine. But it was also ignited by more specific circumstances. After the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 the PLO was a marginalised force, expelled to Tunis, far across the Mediterranean. Mikhail Gorbachev, the Kremlin reformer, had abandoned the Arab cause and was allowing Soviet Jews to leave, often to Israel. Across the West Bank the Israeli state and the settlers appropriated many thousands of acres of Arab land at will, claiming a divine mandate. Once over the Green Line, the 1967 border, the sabras’ self-confidence curdled into a sour arrogance. The settlers, many of whom were not even Israelis, but fanatical American Zionists, enjoyed a culture of near-complete impunity and often used violence against the Palestinians. Ancient olive groves were bulldozed, trees uprooted, and crops destroyed to build air-conditioned villas for Israelis and Jewish immigrants.
There was one set of rules for Israeli Jews, and another for the indigenous Arabs. When Palestinians were forbidden from using or even gaining access to their land, they had no meaningful recourse to the law. Special roads were built for the use of settlers alone, supposedly to protect them from being stoned or shot at. The old idea of ‘transfer’ of the Palestinians was once again discussed in cabinet. Yosef Shapira, of the National Religious Party, proposed offering $20,000 to any Palestinian willing to emigrate.1 But like France in Algeria and Britain in Northern Ireland, Israel discovered that large-scale urban guerrilla warfare is impossible to win. As the Israeli army resorted to increasingly brutal tactics to suppress the riots and demonstrations, breaking bones and sometimes using live ammunition, the Palestinians banked more moral capital around the world. The Intifada changed the international perception of the Palestinians for ever, from cold-blooded terrorists and aeroplane hijackers to oppressed underdogs.
United against the occupation and riding the wave of international sympathy, Palestinian society gained a new degree of cohesion and a sense of self-empowerment d
uring the late 1980s and early 1990s. Some Palestinian leaders understood that the PLO had to make the transition from being a national liberation movement to preparing for statehood and genuine democracy, although Yasser Arafat did not seem to be among them. Israel had allowed a nascent Palestinian civic society to take root on the West Bank and in Gaza: seven universities were founded (there were none before 1967); Palestinians set up local civic committees, trade unions, women’s groups and youth groups, newspapers, and professional associations. In some ways Palestinian society mirrored the organisations of the pre-1948 Yishuv. Despite the sporadic brutality of the occupation, and the petty malevolence of the military administration, Israeli rule was not a reign of terror. Israeli hospitals often treated those unable to receive the right treatment in the West Bank. Much of the time Palestinians still went to work, got married, ran businesses, studied, went shopping, had parties, love affairs, wrote poetry and novels. Every achievement was a kind of victory against the occupiers.2
But with the PLO exiled in Tunisia, the Palestinians were left leaderless. A new political force stepped into the power vacuum: the Islamists of Hamas and Islamic jihad. Hamas ‘courage’ in Arabic, grew out of the Muslim Brotherhood whose members had once thrown acid at women shopping in Jaffa’s market during the 1930s. The spiritual heir of the pre-1948 Mufti of Jerusalem, Hamas was fervently anti-Israel, stridently anti-Semitic and utterly opposed to any negotiated settlement. Calling for jihad, an Islamic war to liberate Palestine, Hamas cited the notorious Tsarist forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, as its ideological inspiration. Its handbills described Jews as ‘brothers of apes, the murderers of prophets’, and ‘the dirtiest and meanest of all races’.3
A darker triumph of the occupation was the brutalisation of Israeli society. The army and the domestic security service, Shin Bet, utilised techniques honed in southern Lebanon: curfews, beatings, assassinations, mass round-ups and detentions, and violent interrogations that often resulted in injury, sometimes even in death. When two Palestinians who had hijacked a bus in 1984 were turned over to Shin Bet, they were beaten to death. In 1987 an Israeli judicial commission ruled that, while torture was not permitted, Shin Bet could use ‘moderate psychological and physical force’ to extract confessions. In practice such ‘moderate’ techniques included: violent shaking from behind, known as tiltul, tying up suspects under freezing air-conditioners, depriving them of sleep, forcing them to crouch in a frog position, bending them backwards over a chair with their hands and legs shackled, and placing a stinking hood over their heads.4 As Benny Morris notes, the commission’s accompanying appendix, detailing the precise nature of what abuses were permitted, was ‘a document unique in the annals of modern Western judicial history’.5 Officials said such techniques were only used in ‘ticking-bomb’ situations, for example when faced with a terrorist threat, but this claim was contested by Israeli human rights groups. It was not until September 1999 that the Supreme Court finally banned the use of torture in interrogations. In the meantime the soldiers had returned home, stressed and traumatised by the violence and hatred they had encountered during their service in the West Bank and Gaza. Some turned to drugs, or left the country on long trips to India and Asia, to come to terms with what they had seen, or done.
The Intifada helped catalyse a complicated set of intra-Arab emotions: Palestinians in Jaffa and across Israel felt a combination of guilt and pride. Guilt that they were living fairly comfortable lives in comparison to their brethren languishing under Israeli military rule, and pride that they were fighting for the Palestinian cause actually inside Israel itself. After all, they had stayed in 1948. Yet despite their increasing ‘Palestinianisation’, the Intifada did not cross the Green Line, apart from occasional incidents of stones or Molotov cocktails being thrown at Israeli vehicles. There was no widespread civil disobedience in Jaffa. Taxes were paid and the buses still ran up and down Yefet Street. The Abulafia bakery and the Geday pharmacy stayed open. The failure – as the Palestinians in the territories saw it – of Israel’s Arabs to rise up in solidarity caused anger across Gaza and the West Bank. Across the Green Line, many Palestinians still viewed Israel’s Arabs as Zionist lackeys.
Encounters between the two groups were often strained. The schoolteacher Ali Goughti received a guarded welcome on his visits to the occupied territories. ‘For them we were very Israeli. They saw we are organised, we have done well economically. Their situation also influenced us and woke up the Palestinian identity among Arabs in Israel. But we, and Israeli society, also affected them. They learnt a lot from the Israelis, in building and construction, in culture, trading – everything. In the West Bank and Gaza they were dreaming about democracy from the beginning, which is different from any other Arab state. Israel played a big role in that. And they know, they even say, that the Jewish people made a very strong country in fifty years. They learnt the Jewish way of thinking and how to organise.’ As the Intifada intensified, violence eventually spread to Jaffa where Hamas terrorists killed several Israelis in a series of stabbing attacks.
In January 1991, four years into the Intifada, Khamis Abulafia watched in dismay as his television screen filled with Palestinians on the West Bank joyously dancing on their roofs, cheering on Saddam’s Scud missiles as they flew overhead towards Tel Aviv. The Gulf War was well under way as the US-led coalition stormed into Kuwait. Yasser Arafat was one of Saddam Hussein’s strongest supporters, and this support was reciprocated. Saddam sent money to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers, and gave Palestinian refugees in Iraq spacious flats at nominal rents, or sinecures in the state bureaucracy. In return Arafat and the Palestinians were vocal in their solidarity with Saddam. It seemed a line ran from the desert missile launchers in Iraq, across the Middle East, through the West Bank, to the Abulafia bakery on Yefet Street, by Clock Tower Square.
The Gulf War was a testing time for Jaffa’s Arabs. The conflict highlighted and exacerbated the contradictions of their lives, as part of the Arab and Palestinian nation, but living as law-abiding citizens in the Jewish state. It was a trial made more difficult by their cousins’ support for the Scud missiles, landing a kilometre or two away. Khamis Abulafia prided himself on his skills as a peacemaker, whether in reconciling rival Arab factions, or calming down angry Israelis who saw all Arabs as potential terrorists. The Abulafia bakery, with its non-stop supply of Arab breads and delicacies, was itself a symbol of co-existence in Jaffa, popular with everyone from Ajami street kids to the yuppies of northern Tel Aviv. When the radical youth took to the streets to demonstrate against Israel, they often demanded that Khamis and his brothers join them. They declined.
‘When there is a demonstration we try not to be involved. We prefer to try and make a reconciliation. We help our people by supporting social and welfare projects. That is more important than confronting the police. I believe in peace, that we should live beside each other. And anyway, it would not be clever to say you hate and you oppose the others, when most of your customers are Jewish,’ says Khamis. Instead he put pen to paper and wrote an article for the popular newspaper Maariv. ‘When I saw the Palestinians applauding Saddam, shouting, “Hit, hit Tel Aviv with missiles”, I wrote that this is a mistake. I said that Saddam is an illusion. Saddam destroyed Iraq. I said, let us deal with reality, and leave emotions behind. Because if you show the Israeli people that you are supporting Saddam, it means you are supporting the man who is declaring morning, noon and night that he wants to destroy the Israeli state. How can you convince these people that you really want peace? At first lots of people criticised me, then afterwards they said I was right.’
For a while, events seemed to be moving Khamis’ way. The end of the Gulf War in 1991, the collapse of Communism, the end of the Cold War and the continuing violence on the West Bank accelerated diplomatic drives to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Behind the fog of tear gas, the rain of stones and bullets, a nascent Palestinian state – or rather, national entity – was beginning to take
shape. Consciousness of this slowly seeped into the Israeli political mainstream. The Israeli left believed the Palestinians should have some kind of viable, sovereign state. But the right would support no more than a Palestinian Bantustan, utterly dominated by Israel, with at most quasi-autonomy on municipal matters. Nevertheless, the new dynamic was diplomatic, not military. In October 1991 the United States and the Soviet Union sponsored a peace conference in Madrid, attended by Israel, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and the Palestinians. The Madrid conference did not bring a final settlement, but the parties were at least talking instead of fighting.
The move towards peace boosted the Israeli left, and Labour returned to power after the June 1992 elections with a government led by Yitzhak Rabin. Rabin, a former chief of staff in the Israeli military, had served before as prime minister, in 1974, after Golda Meir and her government had resigned following the 1973 war. During the Intifada, Rabin had ordered the highly controversial ‘beatings policy’ that authorised Israeli soldiers to break the limbs of Palestinians with riot sticks. But Rabin’s views, like those of many warriors, had mellowed with age. His new government was a coalition of Labour and the more left-wing Meretz, and was supported by the Arab parties and Shas, the Sephardic religious party. It was as close to a mandate for peace as any Israeli leader had ever been granted. Secret negotiations continued behind the scenes between Israel and the PLO, and the process begun at Madrid laid the ground for the more radical Oslo Accords.
On 13 September 1993 the world watched in hope as Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin shook hands with Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn, a scene previously unimaginable. Despite Rabin’s obvious lack of enthusiasm for grasping the hand of Israel’s former greatest enemy, at least it seemed the log jam had been unblocked. Israel recognised the PLO, while the PLO renounced violence and recognised Israel. Under the terms of the Oslo Agreement, the West Bank and Gaza Strip were divided into three zones: A, under full Palestinian control; B, under Palestinian civil and Israeli military control, and C, under full Israeli control. The map became a complicated patchwork of zones and checkpoints. The Oslo Accords were an interim measure, and did not yet provide resolutions for most complex and controversial issues, such as the status of Jerusalem, the return of refugees and the fate of the Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories. The Israeli left rejoiced, as did much of the Palestinian Diaspora, who planned to return home, or at least to the West Bank. But hardliners on both sides rejected Oslo. The Israeli right denounced Rabin as a quisling, and compared his government to the Jewish Councils in the Second World War that had implemented Nazi orders. Palestinian radicals and Islamists said Arafat had sold out his people in a worthless surrender that let Israel keep control of borders and security.