City of oranges
Subtitle: Arabs and Jews in Jaffa
By: Adam LeBor.
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: 2006
Place of publication: London
Language: eng
Number of pages: 357
ISBN-13: 9780747573661
Subjects: Jews -- Israel -- Tel Aviv -- Social life and customs.; Arabs -- Israel -- Tel Aviv -- Social life and customs.; Jaffa (Tel Aviv, Israel) -- Social life and customs.; Jaffa (Tel Aviv, Israel) -- History.; Tel Aviv (Israel) -- Social life and customs.; Tel Aviv (Israel) -- History.
Other titles: Arabs and Jews in Jaffa
Description: The ancient city of Jaffa was for centuries the main port of the eastern Mediterranean, a city of traders, merchants, teachers and administrators, home to Muslims, Christians and Jews, while the produce of its orange groves was famed throughout the world. It was in Jaffa that Peter the apostle was said to have raised Dorcas from the dead, and where Richard the Lionheart defeated Saladin. It was here, too, that Napoleon stormed ashore in 1799, while from 1920 the British administered the city under the Mandate. It is in 1920 that Adam LeBor's ambitious and engaging new book begins. Through the stories of six families - three Arab and three Jewish - City of Oranges illuminates the underlying complexity of modern Israel, telling the story from the Ashkenazi as well as from the very different Sephardic point of view, and from Christian Arab as well as from the Muslim perspective. Through the eyes of these families we understand how the founding of the state of Israel was simultaneously a moment of jubilation for the Jews, and a disaster - the Naqba - for the 100,000 Arabs who fled Jaffa in 1948, most of them never to return. Adam LeBor goes beyond the daily news and political rhetoric to break down the media stereotypes and recount a moving human story through the prism of Jaffa and its inhabitants. From the Christian Arab car-dealer, the Jewish coffee-and-spice merchant, the Arab baker who made bread for the whole community and the Palestinian exile who tried to bring modern business methods to the Arafat era, to the Jewish schoolgirl who befriended an Arab drug dealer, we see people striving to make a life in a country born of conflict.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [347]-351).