CITY OF GHOSTS | May 12th 2008

Shayan (USA)/Flickr

Adam LeBor returns to Jaffa to make a film for the BBC. He finds plenty of charm but few Arabs in what was once the cultural capital of Palestine ...

I first visited Old Jaffa, the heart of the ancient city, about 20 years ago. I walked down narrow lanes and stepped alleys, all carefully restored and turned into an artists' quarter, crowded with tourists perusing the paintings and jewellery. Our guide related the Israeli version of Jaffa's history: the prophet Jonah vainly fled God from here; the ancient port was taken by the Pharaohs, the Romans, the Hebrews, the Byzantines, the Ottomans, Napoleon, the British, and then finally, in May 1948, by the Israelis. I returned last month to make "Jaffa Stories", a film for the BBC.

Old Jaffa still dazzles, but for all its beauty something is missing: the original inhabitants. Old Jaffa is a city of ghosts. This week Israel celebrates its 60th anniversary, which the Palestinians remember as the nakba (the catastrophe). Jaffa, known in Arabic as Urs al-Bahr (Bride of the Sea), was the cultural capital of Palestine. It was home to publishing houses, newspapers, cinemas, theatres, sports teams and social clubs.

Jaffa boasted a thriving Arab middle class, proud of their Palestinian heritage but rooted in the modern world. It had a complex and deep relationship with Tel Aviv, the neighbouring Hebrew city. Jaffa's pillars were men like Ahmad Hammami, a scion of an old Jaffa family who, like many Jaffans, worked in the orange business. The city smelled of citrus; the groves stretched for miles all around. Ahmad built a large stone villa on the southern tip of Jaffa, in an area called Jebaliyyeh. He lived next door to his cousins, and the two houses shared a lush fruit garden, from which Ahmad's wife, Nafise, would make jam.

That world ended quickly in April 1948. Jaffa was awarded to the Arab side in the 1947 United Nations partition plan--an Arab island surrounded by Jewish territory. The mainstream Zionist militia, the Haganah, had no plans to attack, believing that the city would surrender. And indeed its mayor was already negotiating with the Zionist leadership. But Menachem Begin, leader of the right-wing Irgun, wanted to capture Jaffa to build his political capital in the already simmering rivalry between the left and right wings of the Zionist movement.

So at the end of Passover the Irgun launched a rain of mortars onto the ancient port. Tens of thousands of Palestinians fled. Perhaps unnecessarily--for the attack stopped after three days when the British, still the Mandate power, intervened. Even now those few thousand Arabs who stayed will argue that Jaffa was abandoned, even betrayed, by its inhabitants.

But hindsight is an easy virtue, and those were days of terror. So much so that Ahmad Hammami, who had planned to stay, came home and put his family into a taxi and sped to the port. They packed what they could as the mortars rained down, grabbed some jewellery, rolled up some Persian carpets and squeezed themselves onto the SS Argentina. It took them three days to reach southern Lebanon.

While researching my book, "City of Oranges", which tells the lives of Arab and Jewish families in Jaffa, I became friends with Hasan Hammami, Ahmad's son. He is now in his 70s and lives in the United States. Hasan wrote his memoirs and shared them with me. They are a poignant, moving account of a life spent in exile, of career and material success that fail to compensate for the loss of a homeland. Hasan's book resembles nothing so much as the memoirs of Jewish exiles from pre-Holocaust Europe, a longing for a rich and vanished world.

I also came to know his sister Fadwa and his daughter Rema, who live in East Jerusalem. One day Fadwa and Rema took me to the Hammami villa. It is now an Israeli old people's home. The rooms have been chopped and divided by cheap aluminium partitions and an institutional smell lingers. Concrete covers the garden; the fruit trees are gone.

The suburb of Jebaliyyeh has been renamed Givat Aliyah-hill of aliyah, meaning immigration to Israel. Still, the Hammamis return, especially when a new baby is born. I learnt a lot that day about the experience of exile and dispossession, one thing at least that Jews and Palestinians can share. Ahmad Hammami never saw his home again after 1948. But his stone villa still stands, a mute and still-elegant reminder of a lost world, of Jaffa's glory days before the nakba.

(*Adam LeBor is a journalist based in Budapest and the author, most recently, of "City of Oranges". This column is part of his week-long diary about Jaffa, published on Economist.com.)