City of Oranges

by Adam LeBor

  There is no artistic censorship in Israel, and nobody tells Igal what kind of play to produce with the public money he receives. But sometimes there are political pressures. When an Israeli poet dedicated his reading to those who died in Jenin after the Israeli army incursion in April 2002, Igal was telephoned by an unhappy municipal official.5 ‘He said I was not allowed to hold political events, as the theatre belongs to the city. But I said we were having an artistic performance, but also a political one. It’s all part of the argument. We can do this in our shows, because we do political theatre.’ Theatre can also highlight the many parallels of Israeli and Palestinian history: of exile and return, displacement and yearning for a lost homeland, whether it is Jaffa before the Nakba, or multicultural Cairo before Nasser’s expulsions.

  The play Longing incorporates a mix of both Israeli and Palestinian personal narratives. It aims to confront the greatest psychological taboo of both peoples: that any recognition of each other’s losses is a kind of surrender in the endless battle for memory as well as territory. Igal explains: ‘In Longing, each actor tells his or her story. The audience sees that you can talk about your memories, and longing for your past. Because of the Holocaust mentality here, every time an Israeli sees a story about Palestinians who had to leave in 1948, they think it means all the Jews have to go back to Europe. Israel should declare that our independence is the Palestinians’ catastrophe, then we can start to solve the problem. But it does not mean that three million Palestinians will come home and all the Jews have to leave.’

  Khamis Abulafia says that he feels as though he is trapped between two competing narratives, Palestinian and Israeli. Yet even among those Jews who live in Ajami for idealistic reasons, who are committed to co-existence with their Arab neighbours, such as the community activist Behira Buchbinder, there is a sense that there is often less of a dialogue between Jews and Arabs than two self-contained narratives of national and personal history, and that each passes the other by, without even meeting. Behira’s experiences in the 1948 war, when she fought at the battle for Kibbutz Ramat Yochanan, near Haifa, still haunt her, yet she has never spoken of them with her Arab friends. The kibbutz’s defenders had no radios or means of communicating between different units, so Behira was deployed as a runner. The previous year one of her teachers had told her that when Israel declared its independence, within a couple of months nobody would be left alive. When the fighting began she feared he would be right.

  ‘The Arabs began to shoot at the kibbutz at dawn, trying to capture it. I was seventeen years old and I saw the battle with my own eyes. We were all very young. The runners were the only soldiers that the Arabs could see. We ran, they shot at us. We ran, they shot at us. A platoon of Jewish soldiers arrived, and planned to attack the Arabs. We saw through our binoculars that some of them were heading straight into an Arab ambush, but we could not communicate with them. They were all killed.’ Behira lost a brother and a step-brother in the 1948 war. Many years later she sat talking with her friend and neighbour Abu Nasser. He recounted what happened in his home village in 1948, how he was there with his uncle, when the Israeli soldiers conquered it. In fact Behira had already heard this story, but from the other side. ‘I already knew how the Palmach attacked the place from behind, and how the fighting went. Two of my friends were killed there. Abu Nasser was really a good friend of mine, but I never told him that, how it looked from my side. I don’t really know why, I didn’t know how he would feel. I never told Arab friends about the people in my family who were killed in 1948. Arabs hate to feel guilty. It would have made them uncomfortable and I did not want that. It was more important for me to have good personal relationships with my neighbours. We weren’t at the stage where I could tell them my personal history.’

  Behira’s arguments are a mirror image of those advanced by the Tel Aviv history student Sami Abou-Shehade. Despite all the dialogue, it sometimes seems nobody is listening. Behira says: ‘We are anonymous to the Arabs. This even happens with my friends sometimes. They talk to me, and blame everybody for what has happened to them, but they never think about who they’re talking to, about who I am, that I also went through these things. When the Arabs start to tell their stories and they get really emotional, sometimes it makes me angry. If it’s something personal, it’s all right, but they always tell the story from one side. Sometimes it evolves into this general idea of all the Arabs just sitting there and being slaughtered by the Jews. I would like to start living together in simple co-existence, everyone being themselves, without the politics attached. We have to understand the past, not ignore it, but we also have to let it go.’

  But some parts of history should never be let go, argues Jacob Chelouche. Born in 1958 in Paris, while his parents were working for the Jewish Agency, Jacob Chelouche is the son of Shlomo Chelouche and his wife Mary. Thoughtful and quietly spoken, Jacob is intensely aware of his family’s role in the creation of modern Israel, and the powerful resonance of the Chelouche family name. But just as Yoram Aharoni, the former Stern Group member, refused to exploit his old contacts when Yitzhak Shamir came to power, Jacob preferred to make his own way in the world. ‘I have lived most of my life in Tel Aviv, and my roots are in Tel Aviv and Jaffa,’ he explains. ‘I always feel very touched when people say to me, “Oh, you are a Chelouche.” It makes me feel very connected, as a Zionist, to Israel and to Tel Aviv. But I don’t like to emphasise my family name. My wife used to joke about it, and say that I should tell people more, but I prefer not to.’

  Jacob is the great-grandson of the family patriarch, Aharon Chelouche, and the family’s history is inextricably entwined with that of Zionism, the building of Tel Aviv and Israel itself. Jacob’s father Shlomo fought in the 1948 war and spent years in north Africa, organising the emigration of its Jews to Israel. His grandfather Yaakov established the Anglo-Palestine Bank that funded the construction of the first houses in Tel Aviv. Jacob’s great-grandfather Aharon persuaded his wife and daughters to leave Jaffa and move to Beit Chelouche, the house on the sand dunes that were to become the settlement of Neve Tsedek. Much of Neve Tsedek has been renovated, and it is now a fashionable artists’ quarter. Beit Chelouche still stands, together with the trees planted by Aharon Chelouche in its courtyard, but he would find the view from the roof terrace unrecognisable. The sand dunes that once stretched in every direction are long gone although the Chelouche Bridge – built by the kaymakam of Jaffa – still stands. The city founded by Aharon Chelouche and his fellow pioneers is now a crowded modern metropolis, home to more than 360,000 people. Tel Aviv stretches for miles along the coastline, its skyline studded with skyscrapers. It is the epicentre of modern Hebrew culture, home to museums, world-class musicians, an orchestra and choirs, journalists, artists and writers, and two universities. Most Israeli banks and companies have their headquarters here, not far from the Stock Exchange. Tel Aviv’s nightlife rivals that of many European capitals, while its two and a half thousand Bauhaus buildings, including Zaki Chelouche’s masterpieces, have been declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site, hopefully saved for ever from rapacious developers.

  Shlomo Chelouche happily says he could never live anywhere else. This is the state he fought for and to which he dedicated his life, and nowhere better encapsulates that pioneer spirit than the White City, built on the sands. ‘My father is a real Zionist in the true sense of the word. He took part in building the state before, during and after its birth. He fought in the British army, and in the Haganah,’ says Jacob. ‘He developed Israel and brought the Jews from north Africa. These are memorable deeds, he is very proud of them and I am proud of them as well.’ But Israel’s idealistic pioneering spirit has now faded, Jacob admits. ‘When I grew up in Tel Aviv there was a garden in the street. We all played together, there was no traffic and no worries about bombings. I came home from school, ate, played outside and my parents did not worry at all. Kids did not need mobile telephones. Israel today is something between where it was fifty years ago, and, for example,
France today, in the role of the state. Young people still volunteer for the most dangerous army units. I don’t agree with the settlers on the West Bank, but they give up comfortable lives to live in a dangerous area because of their beliefs. There is still a sense of community, which you would not see in the United States.’

  As Israel becomes more Americanised, the traditional family ties around which Jacob’s ancestor Aharon Chelouche built his family life have faded.6 Except among Israeli Arabs, says Jacob. ‘I have Muslim friends and I see that their customs are very much like ours a hundred years ago, in a positive way. Everyone is in contact with each other, and has a close relationship. There is a family structure, they visit each other, and they support each other in a crisis. For kids it is wonderful. They can stay with their uncle one day, their grandfather the next. Everything is near, everyone is warm. It’s something we lack today. I think it helps my Arab friends to endure hardships much better than in the modern society, where everyone is left on their own.’ Sadly, the atomisation of Israeli society is reflected in the Chelouche family’s recent history. As the twentieth century drew to a close, one wing of the family decided to sell off Beit Chelouche. Jacob fought hard to keep the house in family ownership, but he lost his battle. ‘I feel very attached to the house in Neve Tsedek. It was sold against my wishes. I made a serious attempt to buy it, but I had limited means and the price was around two million dollars. Unfortunately, I did not get enough support from the family to let me buy it at a more feasible price. I was very sad that we, with our name and our history, lost such a beautiful part of our heritage. Because so many people shared the inheritance, the return was minimal, just a few thousand dollars.’

  The stone floors laid down by Aharon Chelouche have been polished smooth over the decades. Beit Chelouche is now a museum, with a permanent exhibition on the history and heritage of the Chelouche family. It recently hosted a family reunion. Aharon’s three sons – Yaakov, Yosef Eliyahu and Avraham Haim – had founded a great dynasty with many branches. The title of Julia Chelouche’s memoir, The Tree and the Roots, is most apt. Julia had returned to Israel in 1969, and died there in 1999 at the age of one hundred. ‘We did everything because we have memories of the past kings of Israel, and because of God’s promise to his people. All of history is written in the Torah. I was never afraid of the situation and the wars. I always had hope and was secure in God in the heavens, that the end would be good,’ she wrote in the last pages of her memoir.

  At the reunion there was even a scandal about the family history. Or Aleksandrowicz, a descendant of Yosef Eliyah Chelouche, claimed that the patriarch Aharon had another brother, Yosef, who died in 1865, and that the Chelouches came from Morocco, not Algeria.7 In the Middle East even family histories, it seems, can never be untangled. But perhaps it is here at Beit Chelouche, an Arab house built on a sand dune by a Sephardic Jew from Algeria, and now part of Tel Aviv, that the two competing narratives, Jewish and Arab, can finally intertwine.

  24

  Islam on the March

  Early 2000s

  Blessings for whoever has saved a bullet in order to stick it in a Jew’s head.

  Sheikh Ibrahim Madhi, speaking at the Gaza

  main mosque on 3 August 2001, broadcast

  on Palestine Television

  Parallel with the process of ‘Palestinianisation’ of Jaffa’s Arabs is one of increasing Islamisation. When once a few hundred worshippers would gather at Abou Nabout’s Great Mosque for Friday prayers, now the figure is more like several thousand. The call to prayer is a timeless, poignant summons, a reminder for Muslims that empires rise and fall, that governments and states are temporary, but Allah is eternal. Islam comes from the word salaam, peace, almost identical with the Hebrew shalom. But there is little peace between the faiths, says Ofer Aharoni: ‘After September 11 I think that Arabs here felt under attack and so they became more extreme. I see more and more young women in black. I don’t like it. One day we were at a humous restaurant and there was an Arab couple next to us. They looked like a nice couple. I thought maybe they have a son like ours, perhaps we could communicate. The woman was covered in black. They wrap themselves in this flag, saying we are Islamic. I thought it was a pity.’ Islam itself means ‘submission’ to the will of Allah. It carries a sense of surrender, almost of the dissolution of the self into an all-powerful spiritual force. Its power is never more evident than when watching Muslims at prayer, perhaps especially for Jews, who are used to more chaotic synagogue services. Ofer Aharoni’s children study at a mixed school in Jaffa. When the teachers organised a trip to a mosque, he went as well, his first visit. ‘When the Arab kids started to pray, they all immediately knelt down with their heads on the ground. It was completely quiet. It was something completely new for me. It was an amazing experience. I realised that these people are different.’

  Jaffa’s Muslim Arabs are Israeli citizens, but they are also part of the ummah, the worldwide community of Muslims. In Jaffa – as in Jenin and Gaza – poverty, unemployment, alienation and discrimination are the best recruiting agents for radical Islam. Satellite television and the internet bring news from the Middle East straight to Jaffa, and very little of it is good. Khamis Abulafia explains: ‘To have women with their head, their hair and their face covered is something new in Jaffa. But the people here are part of the Palestinian people. They watch the Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya satellite channels every day. They see what is happening in Iraq and in Palestine. Because the situation has got much worse, people are coming back to religion. They are angry and disappointed with what is happening, and so they return to their roots. They don’t trust their leaders, but they trust God, and they believe he can change things.’

  Based in Qatar, Al-Jazeera, which launched in 1996, is the Arab world’s first free, uncensored, independent television station. Al-Arabiya, based in Dubai, launched in 2003. Both are serious news channels, viewed across the region, and their reporting of social and political issues, from women’s rights to the role of Islam, is having a profound effect on Arab society, opening up debates previously considered taboo by the state-run media. The channel’s outspoken journalism often angers the United States as much as it does the Arab regimes: Al-Jazeera’s Baghdad bureau was closed by the Iraqi authorities.1 But other Arab satellite television stations simply disseminate hate, not just against Israel, but against all Jews. In October and November 2003 Al-Manar, the influential Hizbollah station based in Lebanon, broadcast Al-Shatat (‘The Diaspora’), a 29-part Syrian television series. Al-Shatat was described in the Syrian press as ‘recording the criminal history of Zionism’, purporting to detail how the Jews have sought to control the world for centuries, via a secret government led by the Rothschild family. Although Syrian state television did not broadcast the series, the credits gave thanks to numerous Syrian state bodies including the ministries of defence and culture and the Damascus police. Bizarrely, the series’ producers claimed Al-Shatat was based on ‘two hundred and fifty sources by Jewish and Israeli authors’, although it was the crudest kind of anti-Semitism, reminiscent of Nazi propaganda. Episode six shows a rabbi directing the punishment of a man who had married a non-Jewish woman: his mouth is forced open with tongs, while molten lead is poured down his throat, his ears are cut off and he is repeatedly stabbed. Episode twenty shows a rabbi directing his congregants to kidnap a Christian boy and bring him to the synagogue, where his throat is slit, and his blood drained to make matzoh, unleavened bread, repeating the ancient blood libel.2

  These kinds of depictions of Jews are routine in the mainstream and government Arab media. The 41-part Egyptian television series Knight without a Horse was shown across the Middle East in 2002, to almost unanimous applause. Knight without a Horse is based on the notorious Tsarist forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which outlines a sinister international Jewish conspiracy to rule the world. The Protocols are published across the Arab world, and accepted by many as fact.3 Other Arab television programmes promote the dark cul
t of the suicide bombers, showing the videos bombers record before their mission. Preachers eulogise suicide bombers as shaheedeen, martyrs for Islam, who will go straight to heaven, there to be welcomed by seventy-two virgins. Bombers’ families are visited by local dignitaries after their death. Children wear mock explosives belts on demonstrations and are encouraged to consider a brief career as a shaheed.

  Every Friday, Palestinian television broadcasts sermons from the main mosque in Gaza. This was the message delivered on 17 August 2001: ‘The body parts of our sons, brothers and children are witnesses, that they will find refuge in heaven. There is no loss for a martyr whose body is torn to pieces and is spread all over, for he is about to meet Allah, Muhammad and the Prophet’s friends.’ Two weeks earlier Palestinian television broadcast Sheikh Ibrahim Madhi, speaking at the same mosque, who told worshippers: ‘I was touched when I heard a lad tell me, “I am fourteen years old. I have four more years, then I will blow myself up among the enemies of Allah, the Jews. I told him, my son, I ask Allah to grant you martyrdom and I ask it for me too, truly, out of obedience to Allah, rushing towards it and not running away.” The Quran is very clear on this, the greatest enemies of the Islamic nation are the Jews, may Allah fight them. We must turn all spears towards the Jews, towards the enemies of Allah, the nation cursed in Allah’s book.’

  One of the most extraordinary programmes was broadcast on 26 September 2004 by Saudi Arabia’s Iqra channel. It featured vox-pop interviews with a presenter asking passers-by if they would be willing to ‘shake hands with a Jew’. Their replies included: ‘No. Because the Jews are eternal enemies. The murderous Jews violate all agreements. I can’t shake hands with someone who I know is full of hatred towards me,’ and ‘No, the Jew is an enemy. How can I shake my enemy’s hand?’ In answer to the question ‘Would you refuse to shake hands with a Jew’, one respondent said, ‘Of course, so I would not have to consider amputating my hand afterwards.’ The programme passed unreported by the world’s media. The likely media reaction to an Israeli television station asking passers-by if they would shake hands with an Arab can only be imagined.4