The City of Oranges - Adam LeBor

This is neither Guyatt talking to Americans who think they know where Palestine fits into the end of the world, nor Sizer correcting their Dispensational theology – this is a book where the people living in the eye of the storm do the talking. The big causes are in the background – much more the holocaust than wacky American preachers – but centre stage are the citizens of Jaffa, the city of oranges, and their usually sad stories. He has a large cast, helpfully credited at the start in case you get mixed up. He starts us off with a wedding where Jews and Arabs attended, and then we are straight into the 1921 Jaffa riots when Arabs lashed out against Jews after their betrayal at Versailles. The violence never stops. We’re soon onto the birth of Zionism, the extraordinary Theodore Herzl and the slogan – ‘A land without a people for a people without a land’. Another brilliant proposition – but of course it wasn’t true. There were people there. And in the midst of the tit for tat killings, the rumbling of tanks in old and narrow streets, the forced marriage of old Arab Jaffa with new European Tel Aviv, they tell their stories. 

LeBor brilliantly also works in family histories that not only stretch from the 1920’s till today, but also across the racial divide. The one that stands out is that of the Jewish Chelouches with the Arab Samarra family. The relationship began in the late 19th C with an act of kindness when Aharon Chelouche gave some money to a young boy of the Samarra family who had been robbed. After the Second World War the Chelouches family were in dire straights, and help comes from the boy, now a successful business man. He sends camels loaded with food. And more – he gave the Chelouches enough money to pay his debts, start a business – and for years the loaded camels arrived. The friendship was lost as the violence increased in the 1930’s, but we stay with the Chelouche family, and hear much of the Jewish side of the story from them. After the brutal war of 47-48 the great grand son of the kind patriarch who helped the Arab boy, Aharon Chelouche is the military governor of Jaffa. In 1949 the Jewish policy is to expel all Arabs who are not official residents of the new Israel. As the governor, Aharon was the man who could give the all important exception to the thousands who faced deportation. One day his officials failed to turn away a stubborn supplicant who insisted on seeing the top man. When Aharon opened the file he was stunned. It was a Samarra, and after a few questions he knew it was the Samarras who had helped his family so much. He phoned Tel Aviv and made sure the man was allowed to stay. 

This is the brilliance of the book. In the midst of all the brutality, we are never allowed to forget that there are many Jews nor Arabs who have not allowed the demons of tribalism to erase human kindness from their hearts. It would be good reading for Tim LeHaye and John Hagee. They would also find out that the first would be Christian end of the world settlers to the area in the late 19th C were led by an out of work actor, George Washington Adams. He ended up a drunk on the streets of Jaffa.