Peeling away Jaffa’s skin to reveal its many segments

City of Oranges

Head of Zeus, £25

Reviewed by David J Goldberg

AREVIEWER SHOULD always declare any special interest, so I am happy to acknowledge that I played a small part in the genesis of Adam LeBor’s book, first published in 2006 and now revised and updated.

Adam’s parents were congregants of mine. When he told me of his idea to write about Jaffa through the eyes of its residents, I put him in touch with an old friend, the sculptor Frank Meisler.

Frank used to live with his family in an exquisitely renovated Arab house close to the port, its cool elegance barely marred by frequent whiffs of sewage. He plays a prominent part in the narrative, alongside half-a-dozen other Arab and Jewish families with deep roots in the city.

So I am prejudiced in favour of the book, but sufficiently objective, I hope, to have found it irresistibly engaging when it first appeared and equally readable a decade later, although LeBor’s Afterword is tinged with the poignancy of deaths among the dramatis personae and the fading hope that Jaffa might become a paradigm of Israeli-Palestinian coexistence.

The normative Zionist narrative is that Arab Jaffa was and is the dingy sibling of clean, bustling, Bauhaus-inspired Tel Aviv. Historically, the opposite was true.

Jaffa was “The Bride of the Sea”, made prosperous by its port and its famous oranges. Landlocked Palestinians from the West Bank would flock to its beaches, picturesque amenities and sophisticated entertainments.

Tel Aviv, on the other hand, was founded in 1904 on the sand dunes along the coast from Jaffa by Jewish settlers wanting to escape from their cosmopolitan Arab neighbour.

In time, the residents of Jewish Tel Aviv equalled, then outgrew, Jaffa’s Arab population.

An important strategic objective of the 1948 War of Independence was to remove the threat posed by a large Arab presence so close to the heart of the new state.

In the perennial argument, were the

Arabs forcibly “encouraged” to leave, or did they depart voluntarily, hoping to return after the Jews were defeated?

Adam LeBor: balanced Whichever it was, Jaffa was allowed to moulder after the war, its Arab population pared down, while Tel Aviv thrived and expanded. Successive Labour municipal administrations did little to rejuvenate Jaffa. It took a shrewd Likud mayor, Shlomo Lahat, to encourage investment and upgrade public services. Under his leadership, the restoration of ancient Jaffa began.

Frank Meisler was one of the early pioneers to move there, drawn by the classical beauty of its Byzantine architecture. Where he opened a gallery and bought his house, others soon followed.

Nowadays, Jaffa is a gentrified postcard resort. Tourist buses disgorge visitors on Clock Tower Square to wander through the narrow alleyways of health-food shops and artisan craft boutiques.

The families that remember the old days have mixed feelings about Jaffa’s transformation into a must-see attraction.

LeBor deftly interweaves their life stories within the wider context of Middle East politics. He is judiciously balanced in his conclusions, as befits an experienced foreign correspondent. His book grows even more relevant with time.

David J. Goldberg is Emeritus Rabbi of the Liberal Jewish Synagogue

Normative Zionist narrative is of dingy Jaffa, clean Tel Aviv