City of Oranges: Arabs and Jews in Jaffa - Softcover

Lebor, Adam

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0747586020 ISBN 13: 9780747586029

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2007

Synopsis

Jaffa - famed for its orange groves - was for centuries a city of traders, merchants, teachers and administrators, home to Muslims, Christians and Jews alike. That is, until the founding of the state of Israel, which was simultaneously a moment of jubilation for the Jews and a disaster - the Naqba - for the 100,000 Arabs who fled Jaffa in 1948. Through the stories of six families - three Arab and three Jewish - Adam LeBor delicately illuminates the complexity of modern Israel, going beyond the media stereotypes and political rhetoric to tell a moving human story. From the Christian Arab car-dealer, the Jewish coffee-and-spice merchant and the Arab baker who makes bread for the whole community, to the Jewish schoolgirl who befriends an Arab drug dealer, these people strive to make a life in a country born of conflict.

About this title

Review:

`Manages to tell each of their stories without condemnation' -- Rebecca Seal, Observer

`Outstanding ... an excellent and courageous book' -- Mark Cocker, Guardian

From the Author:

There are libraries full of books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but City of Oranges is the first non-fiction work to recount the human story of those who have experienced the century-long struggle, from both sides simultaneously.

The narrative is built around six families from the ethnically-mixed city of Jaffa: Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews; Muslim and Christian Arabs. The families are working class and middle class, left wing, right wing and apolitical, in short, human beings in all their complexities and contradictions.

The book is based on many hours of interviews with several generations, their recollections of parents and grandparents, their memoirs, letters and personal archives. This innovative structure, keeping real people to the forefront, brings a vivid immediacy, while the politics, wars and diplomacy provide the necessary backdrop. The focus on Jaffa itself, a millennia-old port that now borders Tel-Aviv, brings a powerful sense of place.

Here are exile and return, destruction and construction, births and funerals - the staging posts of lives both fulfilled and torn apart. The reader sees the same episodes from both sides of the conflict, as the narrative cuts back and forth between the protagonists’ stories. The 1948 Israeli Independence war/Palestinian Naqba (tragedy); the 1967 Six Day War; the 1973 Yom Kippur War, right up to the 2000 Al-Aqsa intifada and its impact on Jaffa are all told through the lives of the families.

We see the Naqba through the experience of a young boy called Hasan Hammami, who together with his family, flees Jaffa in April 1948. But the Palestinian tragedy looks very different on the other side of the front-lines. We witness the exultation of Yoram Aharoni, a Bulgarian Jew and member of the extremist Stern Group, as the state of Israel is declared. But the struggle started in 1948 remains unresolved. In the 1967 Six Day War, Yoram is hunched inside an Israeli tank in the Sinai desert as the shells crash around him. Hasan, now a grown man, exiled in Saudi Arabia, is in anguish over the fate of his daughters at school in Jerusalem. So the book continues, right up to the present day, its vivid storytelling humanising a conflict too often related through politics and diplomacy.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0747586020
• ISBN 13: 9780747586029
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384