City of Oranges: Arabs and Jews in Jaffa
Adam LeBor Bloomsbury, 357pp, £18.99
ISBN 0747573662
Arriving in Tel Aviv on my first visit to Israel last year, I was instantly reminded of Beirut in its pre-1975 heyday. Moving to Jaffa later the same day, I thought I had wandered into one of the Palestinian refugee camps that surround the Lebanese capital. Jaffa seemed to have suffered the fate of its original inhabitants, most of whom were driven out during the 1948 war. Cowering in the shadow of ever-expanding Tel Aviv, it seemed a living symbol of this reversal of fortune.
As Adam LeBor shows in City of Oranges, for the first half of the 20th century Tel Aviv was an upstart Jewish suburb of Jaffa, which was considered the capi- tal of Palestine. Thanks to its English, French, Italian and Arabic schools, its sports clubs, cinemas, newspapers, coffee houses and influential radio station, Jaffa was the model of a lively Mediterranean city, buzzing with intellectual life. LeBor charts its rise - and decline - from Ottoman rule to the present day. Though Jews, Christians and Muslims had previously cohabited in peace, if not total harmony, the Balfour Declaration of 1917 turned Jaffa into a nationalist battleground. In May 1921 it witnessed one of the earliest clashes between Jews and Arabs, in which 55 people were killed.
The 1948 war was the real turning point, however: after that, only 4,100 Arabs remained in the city (from an original population of between 70,000 and 80,000), the rest becoming refugees in neighbouring countries. Jaffa resigned itself to being a small and largely derelict town with a two-thirds Jewish population. Miraculously, the Old City was saved from demoli- tion and today provides a picture-book reminder of Jaffa's glorious past.
LeBor intersperses conventional historical narrative with accounts of individual Jewish, Christian and Muslim families that lived, or are still living, in the city. Such stories, which are excluded from most formal narratives and press reports, provide a unique insight into the tangled lives of Jaffa's residents. These are tales not simply of individual suffering, but of mutual solidarity triumphing over nationalist loyalties. Amine Andraus was a Christian who refused to leave Jaffa in 1948. Instead he worked to protect the interests of all of its people, enduring humiliation from the victorious Israelis and suspicion from his fellow Arabs, who regarded him as a collaborator. The friendship between the Jewish Chelouches and the Arab Sammarras ran across generations, the two families frequently coming to each other's aid in times of need.
City of Oranges is one of only a few histories that attempt to incorporate the opposed narratives of ordinary Palestinians and Israelis. As such, it could have been a ground-breaking work. Too often, however, LeBor lapses into unfocused general narrative. Despite the book's title, there are sections in which Jaffa seems no more relevant than any other Palestinian city. There are some glaring errors: the Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani was not from Jaffa but from Acre. And LeBor's metaphors can be excessive: "Like Trotsky after Stalin's triumph, Jaffa's Arabs were airbrushed out of history."
Most disappointing of all is that whole pages read as if they have been lifted wholesale from Ehud Barak and Bin-yamin Netanyahu's public pronouncements. Israeli violence is largely justifiable; the huge damage inflicted on the Palestinians is the fault of their leaders; Yasser Arafat ends up as the villain. LeBor seems to be one of those who still believe the myth of the "generous offer" of Camp David in 2000, which, it was claimed, Arafat irresponsibly rejected. All of which shows that gathering together individual memories is not enough on its own to produce an unbiased history of Palestine/Israel.
Samir el-Youssef's forthcoming novel, The Illusion of Return, is published by Halban
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