City of Oranges

by Adam LeBor

  Some time after Oslo, Shlomo Lahat, the former mayor of Tel Aviv-Jaffa, met with Rabin, his former commander in the army, to discuss the peace process. By then Shlomo, like many of Israel’s old warriors, wanted peace with the Palestinians. He was president of the Council for Peace and Security. Its 1,200 members were all high-ranking army officers, from Lt. Colonel to Lt. General, who campaigned for a Palestinian state and Israeli withdrawal from much of the West Bank – subject to Israel maintaining strategic superiority. The Council, together with the rest of the Israeli peace movement, was planning a rally to shore up support for the Rabin government and Oslo. Shlomo recalls: ‘Rabin asked me if I had met Yasser Arafat. I told him that I hadn’t. Rabin told me to take some Council members and organise a meeting with him. Rabin said, “When I tell Arafat that we have twelve hundred retired army officers campaigning for peace – and normally army officers are more extreme – I look in his eyes and I see he does not believe me. He thinks it is propaganda.”’

  Shlomo Lahat and his fellow officers did eventually meet Yasser Arafat. By then what Arafat thought of the peacenik army officers did not matter so much. On 4 November 1995, Yitzhak Rabin was shot dead by Yigal Amir, an Orthodox Israeli Jew, at a peace rally in Tel Aviv. Amir’s express aim was to derail the peace process and prevent the emergence of a Palestinian state, and he succeeded beyond his dreams. Shlomo continued: ‘I organised the rally, this tragedy where Rabin was assassinated. He was a person with real authority. Arafat respected him. He would not do to Rabin what he did to Shimon Peres and Benjamin Netanyahu. Later we went to Arafat’s home in Gaza. We talked about how the terror should stop, and how to make the arrangements for a Palestinian state. I believed that Arafat could be a partner for peace. We shook hands. We trusted him, and we supported the Oslo Agreement. But Arafat was not a partner. He established the Palestinian nation, but he did not care about his people, only about how he will be remembered in the history books.’

  Back in 1980, Arafat had declared in Beirut: ‘When we speak of the Palestinians’ return, we want to say: Acre before Gaza, Beersheba before Hebron. We recognise one thing, namely that the Palestinian flag will fly over Jaffa.’6 The Oslo Accords did not bring that prospect nearer. In fact, they were recognition that Israel’s existence and Israeli rule over Jaffa were now permanent. But Oslo, and its brief interregnum of optimism, did open the door to Jaffa for a new generation of Palestinian returnees. Thousands of exiles and their children moved to the West Bank, and especially to Ramallah, the town just north of Jerusalem that became the de facto capital of the nascent Palestinian state.

  In the summer of 1993, Hasan Hammami returned home to Jaffa for the first time since 1948, together with his sister Fadwa, his wife Barbara and their thirty-three-year-old daughter Rema. Rema had first visited Jaffa in 1987, after graduating from university in the United States. As an American citizen she could travel freely in Israel. She decided to settle in East Jerusalem and took a job teaching at Bir Zeit University, in Ramallah. Although her mother Barbara was English, Rema fully identified as a Palestinian. With her dark eyes, olive skin and thick black hair, she did not look very English. ‘We all think of ourselves as Palestinians. I had wanted to come back to Palestine since I was in my teens. I was never treated as though I was British. I was dark, I had a funny name, kids used to call me “Paki”. I became a born-again Palestinian.’

  The wilful child who disobeyed the nuns at the Schmidt School in Jerusalem back in 1967 was now an articulate spokeswoman for the new generation of Palestinians. In the United States Rema and Hasan had started a Jewish-Arab discussion group with Rabbinical students. In Jerusalem she developed links with Israeli peace groups and activists. ‘I was pro-Oslo. I initially thought we needed some opening or way forward. Oslo in the beginning created a possibility, also for Israelis to face the deep truths about their responsibilities to the Palestinians. But instead of doing the necessary historical accounting, Israel detoured around what happened in 1948. Even worse, the Israelis saw Oslo as the final opportunity for a land grab in the West Bank and Gaza, while burying Palestinian rights to historical redress.’

  Hasan’s family odyssey began in East Jerusalem, where he stayed with Fadwa and her husband Suleiman. The old stone buildings were as beautiful as ever, but life under occupation was filled with petty difficulties, humiliation and harassment. ‘We experienced the euphoria of Oslo, which seemed to herald a new beginning, and we saw the excitement of both resident and returning Palestinians as they built new homes and businesses. But the harsh reality belied this. New settlements were still being built. This was Israel’s instinctive destiny, whatever any Israeli leader or peacemaker said in public. And the military checkpoints everywhere made life very difficult. When Fadwa needed to go to the butcher’s shop, she had to drive three kilometres, wait at a checkpoint while the young Israeli soldiers checked her identity, drive another hundred metres, and then go through the same humiliating experience again to get home.’

  The road to Jaffa at least was open. Hasan had lived in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Britain, Belgium, and had eventually settled in the United States. Now, finally, he was going home. The reality of the dream was more affecting than he had anticipated: ‘I was not prepared for either the emotional or the spiritual experience of seeing my Jaffa for the first time in forty-five years. I did not recognise the town’s entrance when we drove in, because so many of the small family homes and orange groves had been replaced by modern apartment blocks.’ It was Jaffa and yet not Jaffa, a strange hybrid of the town that lived on in Hasan’s memory, from before the Nakba, and the concrete reality that he saw in front of him. The Hammamis drove past the jeweller’s shop where his mother Nafise had a ring made for him when he was ten, engraved with his initials – HAH – in English, copies of which Hasan and Barbara exchanged in later years. As Jaffa sped by Hasan began to call out the names of the landmarks of his boyhood, whether or not they still existed. Here were the sites of the old Ottoman Bank, the Halaby pharmacy, Abou Laban’s shop, and Barclays Bank, all gone now. But despite the depredations of war, the damage done to Ajami and the destruction of Manshiyyeh, much of Hasan’s Jaffa had survived, albeit in varying states of disrepair. Here were the remains of the New Seray, still not rebuilt, the kishle, the Ottoman prison, the kebab restaurants by the side of Abou Nabout’s Great Mosque, and of course the Clock Tower itself, symbol of the city.

  The Hammamis did not stop, but headed south to Jebaliyyeh. Hasan looked around in joy and wonder still, proclaiming the scenes of his youth: the Souk el-Balabseh (textile market), site of his grandfather Ahmad Shaker Hammami’s shop; Sabanegh’s, the commercial artist and sign-writer’s store; the Ad-Difaa newspaper building, where Hasan and his friends trained in first aid in 1947 as war approached; the French Hospital; the Tabeetha Mission School; Hasan’s own alma mater, St Joseph’s College, where he had studied English, French and Arabic and played an Abbasid prince in the school play; the homes of family friends, long gone; the former Falastin newspaper building; the English hospital, the Latin school and the Bawarshi pharmacy.

  For Hasan, these proclamations were an act of affirmation. Yes, Jaffa’s Palestinians had fled under a rain of mortar bombs. Yes, Jaffa was now a run-down outer fringe of Tel Aviv, and yes, the complex, intricate society of pre-Nakba Jaffa was lost for good. But the Bride of Palestine, beautiful and serene, lived on, both in Hasan’s memory and in the minds of legions of Jaffan exiles, and that too was a kind of reality, one that could never be taken away. ‘The list of names and places flew by like a kaleidoscope in front of my eyes. Recognition and memory all blended into one. I was reciting the names of the places so quickly that Barbara, Rema and Fadwa were worried that I was getting too stressed. After so many years away, and so many denials by the Israelis that we had ever existed, this was a declaration; that these were my roots, deep in a city which once had three daily newspapers, cinemas, schools, sports and social clubs, hospitals, mosques and churches.’

  Hasan
’s journey back in time continued as they drove through Ajami, past the tennis club; his great-uncle Mohammad Abdel Rahim’s Bauhaus mansion; the beach where his father had taught him to swim and once upended his hasakeh (canoe), toppling Hasan into the sea, and then, finally, the Hammami house. This was the most difficult part of the journey. ‘The house was still there, but it looked different, strange and eerie. The large trees had gone, as had the ornamental pool and the flowerbeds. Fadwa had already told me that the house looked buried. I now understood what she meant. It was painted dark grey and a second floor had been cheaply built on top of the roof. We went inside. I pointed out the bedroom where I was born. Our house was now an old people’s home. I felt no grudge, indeed I felt sorry for many of them, some in advanced stages of dementia. There was an unhealthy smell in the air. I walked through the room that I had shared with my brothers, circled round and looked for the vines which had grown at the back. They were also all gone. I took scores of pictures, of every aspect of the house and garden, the Mediterranean window designs, and wondered at the foresight and clarity of design that my father had shown, back in the 1930s.’

  Revisiting his family home was poignant and painful, but like the recitation of Jaffa’s place names, it too was a vindication, perhaps not just of the Hammami family history, but of all Palestinians. The trees may be ripped out, the ornamental pool filled in and the house painted grey, with new tenants who knew nothing of its history, but this was still the Hammami family home. From there Hasan and his family progressed to the Muslim cemetery, through the Greek Orthodox graveyard. To his surprise Hasan found the cemetery crowded with new graves, with headstones carved in Cyrillic. The recent waves of Russian Jewish immigrants were not that Jewish after all, it seemed. Angered by this – Israel refused to let the Palestinians come home, but found a place for Christian Russians – Hasan was further dismayed by the poor condition of the Muslim cemetery. Many of the graves were dilapidated and falling apart. But the family was happy to find a tomb of clean white marble marking the resting place of Shaker Hammami, the family patriarch, next to the tomb of his wife Umm Shaker. ‘We read a prayer for their souls and their memories. I was overcome by sadness. My father Ahmad Shaker was buried in Baghdad, and my mother Nafise in Amman. For a moment I hoped that I would be buried in Jaffa, next to my grandparents. This was not morbid, more about being reconnected with my family, roots and home.’

  Hasan had travelled back in time, but he also needed a link to the present, says Rema. ‘He was so thrilled that he was physically there, and that so much of Jaffa remained. But by the end of the day, what was really traumatic was that Jaffa remained, but none of the people did, the Jaffans that he had known. His city was standing but the people in it were strangers. There was this massive gap. He was desperate to meet someone who knew him from before 1948, he, Hasan Hammami from Jaffa. He would really only be back in the city if he could be linked to people who were still there.’

  The Hammamis drove down Kedem Street, along the seafront, to the southernmost edge of the city. There was one family Hasan hoped would be at home. They parked the car and he walked up to the gate of a beautiful 1930s-style villa and rang the doorbell. Rema, Fadwa and Barbara were shaking their heads, hopeful but not optimistic. ‘Min? Who is it?’ asked a voice through the entryphone. ‘Hasan Hammami,’ replied Hasan. ‘Hasan? Hasan from next door?’ the voice asked, as though nothing had changed in over forty years. In seconds Suad, Leila and Wedad Andraus ran down the garden path, shouting with delight, and ushered the Hammamis inside.

  They talked for hours, over coffee and lemonade, of their different exiles: the Hammamis of life outside the land, and the Andraus sisters of theirs within Jaffa. Salim, his wife Hillana, and their two children Amin and Robyn came to join the reunion. Rema recalls: ‘They were thrilled to see my father. For him it was a profoundly redemptive moment, one so needed when he came back to face this incredible loss. He could only be saved by that human connection. Israel and the world’s denial of what happened to them, and what was lost, that they never belonged in Jaffa anyway, or weren’t even there, just made the wound harder. If it is never recognised, if it is never dealt with, you cannot heal.’ Hasan’s reunion with the Andraus sisters stirred powerful emotions, says Rema: ‘I could see there were two kinds of pain. My father had the pain of leaving, while they had the pain of staying. Somewhere in his heart he had lost so many things when he was forced out of Jaffa, and then talking to the Andraus sisters, it was exactly the opposite. They had lost so much by staying. They had both lost their community, a whole vibrant world of people and their shared future. My dad and the Andrauses rebuilt their lives, but they could never rebuild that lost world.’

  Hasan would return several times to Israel and Palestine, and to Jaffa, as a consultant with the United Nations. But like many Diaspora Palestinians, he found that his decades of managerial experience and skills, and the ‘can-do ethos’ of the American business world, would soon run into the sands of bureaucracy, indifference and intra-Palestinian power politics.

  22

  Gaza comes to Jaffa

  Late 1990s

  I want to believe that most of the Arabs want to live together with us in peace. But there is a minority, which has a big influence, and is backed by Arab leaders, which does not.

  Sami Albo, Jaffa community activist

  With the Jordanian border open after the 1994 peace treaty, Palestinians living there could travel to Israel. Many Jaffan exiles had settled in Jordan, including Massoud Abulafia, great-uncle of Khamis Abulafia, director of the bakery. But Massoud’s pilgrimage home reopened old wounds, sometimes triggering bitter exchanges, especially over Jaffa’s Nakba. Hanging always in the air, sometimes spoken and at others silent, was the perennial accusation that Jaffa had been betrayed by its inhabitants, that they had abandoned her in her hour of need. Khamis found himself caught between two lives: his own as an Israeli Palestinian, and Massoud’s as an exile. ‘We face two different narratives about 1948, the Arab version and the Israeli one,’ he explains. ‘The question is, which one do we want to live with? I have Israeli nationality, but it is difficult for me to say that I adopt the Israeli story. I am part of the Palestinian people, and it is easier for me to take the Palestinian one, but whether that is really the whole truth or reality, I don’t know.’

  There was tension and resentment on both sides. ‘When Massoud came to visit us, he told the story of 1948 from his point of view. He started to cry. He said, “Here is my apartment, here is the place where my father sat, here is his grave.” I asked him, if he was so sorry, then why did he leave in 1948? He made excuses about a conspiracy among the Arab countries, that they did not do enough to help the Palestinians. My grandmother told him that he did not know what was going on here, that we live in a very difficult situation, that he could not come back five decades later, come back to judge us.’

  Meanwhile, in Florida, Hasan Hammami’s visit to Jaffa had also stirred powerful emotions: of nostalgia and yearning for his childhood, but also of a need to contribute to his people’s future. In 1994 Hasan was sixty-two. He had retired from Procter & Gamble two years earlier, after a successful international career. The company had tried to persuade him to stay and offered him the choice of several well-paid senior posts across the world, but Hasan’s mind was made up. He wanted to spend more time with his family, and use his business and commercial expertise for a good cause. He signed a contract to become a consultant with the United Nations Development Programme. In the spring of 1994, Hasan returned to the Palestinian Territories and Israel, where he spent four weeks consulting with the management board and production team at the new Citrus Processing Company in Gaza. The company had just started up, and manufactured fruit concentrates and juices for export.

  The $12 million plant had been donated by Italy in the heady post-Oslo era. But the dream and the reality of setting up a manufacturing and export venture in Gaza were very different, as Hasan soon discovered. Despite Oslo, Israel stil
l controlled Gaza’s borders. Export shipments were subject to a myriad of commercial and transport restrictions, and much of the fruit rotted before it ever passed the frontier. Another problem was the management of the company itself, which lacked experience. Many directors had been appointed because of their connections rather than ability. Still, with his international business experience, Hasan believed he could get the company running profitably. But there was a third problem. Like many of those who came back in the’ awdah (the return), Hasan was often regarded with suspicion by those who had grown up in Gaza and the West Bank. Despite the many hours spent in meetings with the board, Hasan made little headway. He decided to go straight to the top. Eventually he met with Yasser Arafat.

  Arafat’s achievement was to establish the Palestinian nation, but his government was a disaster, riddled with patronage, cronyism and corruption. Hundreds of millions of dollars of international aid were siphoned off and diverted to accounts abroad. The administration was a shambles.1 Despite the poverty of life in Gaza, where many survived on two dollars a day, the PLO leadership regarded the public purse as a private savings account for themselves and their families. When, in July 1995, Yasser Arafat’s wife Suha gave birth to their daughter Zahwa, she stayed at a £1100-a-night private hospital in Paris. She told reporters: ‘Our child was conceived in Gaza, but sanitary conditions there are terrible. I don’t want to be a hero and risk my baby.’2