Crossing Cultures

On a journalistic quest, I once visited Jaffa looking for the childhood home of Sabri al-Banna — a k a Abu Nidal, the most infamous of Palestinian terrorists. Stymied in my search, I stopped into Fakhri Gedays pharmacy. The aging proprietor had grown up in Jaffa before 1948, when most Arab residents of the Bride of Palestine fled during the Jewish conquest. Geday politely gave me directions to the old al-Banna mansion, now an Israeli military courthouse. It was a diorama of displacement.

By Adam LeBor.

Illustrated. 424 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. Paper, $14.95.

Reading Adam LeBors City of Oranges, I once again met Fakhri Geday, along with much displacement. LeBor writes Jaffas past as a sprawling family saga. At its center are a half-dozen or so clans, Jewish and Arab, whose lives intertwine from the 19th century till today, as the Mediterranean port flowers and then is torn apart by conflict.

The Gedays, a Christian Arab family in Jaffa for generations, are one thread in the chronicle. Unlike other wealthy Arabs, Fakhris father, Youssef, refused to sell land to the Jews who poured into British-ruled Palestine. Unlike his neighbors, he also rejected panic and flight when Menachem Begins right-wing Irgun underground overran Jaffa in April and May 1948.

Young Fakhri, then a pharmacy student in Beirut, prowled the Lebanese port as boatloads of Jaffas disinherited arrived. Eventually, he learned his parents had stayed put, and he was allowed to go home under an Israeli family unification program. But in the 1950s, the Israeli government expropriated his familys land for the new Jewish town of Bat Yam. It didnt help that Youssef Geday shouted in court that Abu-Khaled — as the Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser was nicknamed — would come and give him back his holdings. Fakhri shared his fathers faith in Nasser. When war broke out in 1967, the pharmacist looked forward to Egyptian troops entering Jaffa and neighboring Tel Aviv. As an old man, he defiantly tells LeBor, This is our country and I dont believe that God promised it to anyone else.

Thats one side of the Jaffa story. Another is that of the Chelouche clan, among the first Jews in modern Jaffa, who arrived from Algeria in 1838. For LeBor, the Arabic-speaking Chelouches embody a lost era when Muslims, Christians and Jews lived together, did business and attended one anothers weddings. That era ended in 1921, when tension between Arab nationalists and Zionists erupted into riots in Jaffa. By then, the Chelouches had helped found Tel Aviv. The riots sparked an exodus by many of Jaffas Jews to the new city.

After 1948, a Chelouche was briefly the military governor of Jaffa. The town was annexed to Tel Aviv and settled by Jewish immigrants. Exiled Jaffa Palestinians like the Hammami family — who reached Beirut, then scattered across the globe — polished memories of their lost home. One member of that clan, Said Hammami, was the P.L.O. ambassador to London in 1973, when he published a pioneering article calling for a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, alongside Israel. For that heresy, he was murdered — by a gunman sent by Abu Nidal.

City of Oranges is an engaging, well-constructed book, even if its characters are more colorful than complex. But LeBor shows chutzpah in claiming that his is the first account focused primarily on the human story in the Israeli-Arab conflict. His own sources include Tom Segevs more penetrating and poetic One Palestine, Complete. And Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierres classic chronicle of the 1948 war, O Jerusalem!, is superbly woven out of the personal stories of those who fought.

LeBors actual innovation is viewing the conflict from Jaffa rather than Jerusalem. Jaffa and its sister, Tel Aviv, are secular cities, devoted to commerce, more enamored of beaches and nightlife than of sanctity. They do not awe visitors, but many a Westerner feels more at home in them.

The shift from Jerusalem to Jaffa is also political. Collins and Lapierre portrayed Arabs sympathetically, but Jerusalem lent itself to a pro-Israeli narrative: The city symbolized Jews ancient connection to the country; the siege of Jewish Jerusalem stood for Israels success against Arab force; and ethnic cleansing swept Jews as well as Arabs from their homes.

LeBor, in turn, describes Jews sympathetically, but Jaffa suits his pro-Palestinian telling: In his account, ancient Arab Jaffa accepted Middle Eastern Jews. But modern Zionism imposed the colony of Tel Aviv, an out-of-place European city whose residents eventually conquered Jaffa, displaced most of its Palestinians and constrained the rest to minority status. This story of the colonial Jew and displaced Palestinian fits current fashion — particularly in Britain, where this book first appeared — and is no less fragmentary than the other.

LeBor describes Jaffas past as idyllic. His vision of the future includes the de-Zionization of Israel, intermarriage between Jews and Palestinians, and a fading of nationalism. Its a picture of a comfortable, gentrified Middle East. But it underestimates how deeply both Jews and Palestinians experience nationality as intrinsic to identity. The Palestinian diplomat Said Hammami, murdered by his fellow Jaffa exile, was more realistic, and more daring.

Gershom Gorenberg is the author of The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977.

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