CITY OF ORANGES
by Adam LeBor
Bloomsbury, £18.99; 384pp

A STRANGE DEATH
by Hillel Halkin
Weidenfield, £12.99; 352pp

IF THE POPULAR VIEW OF Israel in the 1960s could be distilled into one image, it would probably be the refugee Jews on Leon Uris’s ship, The Exodus, clamouring for their own country. This was the Israel born in adversity out of oppression. If there was a symbol of Israel since, it might be that of the Mossad operative, faithful servant to a powerful state — ruthless and almost invincible. The change might have marked Israel’s increased security (though not, as this week’s suicide bomb in Tel Aviv has shown, the security of its citizens), but it also marks its declining purchase on our affections. It should worry about our affections, many Israelis might think.

Efraim Halevy was born in London in 1934 and went to Israel in the year of its foundation, 1948. He became president of the students’ union and from there, in a familiar progression for those times, found his way into the intelligence services. For 12 years from 1991 to 2003 he was at the top of Mossad, first as deputy director, then as director. This is the period covered by his book, of which the title, Man in the Shadows, is by far the most dramatic part. If Halevy killed any enemies with his bare hands, he keeps it to himself.

A dry and partisan account of his geopolitical thoughts and various missions — usually as adviser or secret ambassador to other countries — the book provides insight into an anti- heroic time in his country’s existence. His predispositions go unanalysed, by him at any rate — the Palestinians, desiring a change in the status quo, are the originators of all violence, the Israelis (in possession of that which is desired) are inevitably the respondents. In that sense, “we” are good and “they” are bad, in an ultra-sophisticated version of playground psychology.

There are revealing passages about the attitude towards Yassir Arafat, in which several incidents — most notably the interception of an arms shipment in 2001 — destroy his credibility in the eyes of the Americans. The cardinal sin that any statesman can commit, Halevy concludes, is to lie to the President of the USA.

A year later, after one of the most catastrophic suicide bomb attacks, in the town of Netanya at Passover, Halevy attended a series of high-level meetings about the Israeli response. Some key figures wanted the Palestinian Authority abolished, Ariel Sharon argued for Arafat to be forcibly exiled. Halevy opposed both because of the effect on Israel’s international standing. Halevy’s relative moderation won. He notes, with almost a dash of humour, that while outwardly advocating a tough position, Sharon ensured that the more politic approach prevailed. All the time, running as a barely stated lode through Halevy’s mind is the equation that what is good for Israel is bad for the Palestinians, and vice versa. The reader wonders whether it could ever have been otherwise.

Perhaps, if only we could see each other as people. That is the message from City of Oranges, Adam LeBor’s story of the ancient Palestinian-Israeli city of Jaffa. Using the simple but effective idea of examining the past 80 years through the eyes of six families, LeBor illustrates an astute and balanced history of the area with pictures of real people experiencing the consequences of decisions made partly by men like Efraim Halevy.

The families start in Jaffa, or Bulgaria, or England, and then — with successive waves of Jewish immigration from 1920 onwards, their futures curl around each other. One Jew leaves a doomed Bulgaria in 1936 and becomes a terrorist, another experiences the terrors of the Arab Revolt, when many Jews died in pogroms. This revolt is itself partly a reaction to the desire for a Jewish state, and its realisation through the sale of Arab lands — by Arab landowners — to Jews.

Just along the coast from Jaffa, an entirely new city, Tel Aviv — a gigantic European import — takes shape. In November 1947 the UN General Assembly voted for Palestine to be partitioned. Jaffa was to be an Arab enclave inside the Jewish state — an island within an island.

The Palestinians rejected any such settlement — probably what many in the Zionist movement wanted — and an Arab assault on Tel Aviv from the Jaffa side was repulsed. The Arab upper class began to leave, then the others followed. A Jewish terrorist bomb killed 26 people in the centre of Jaffa, and within days families such as the Hammamis found themselves on filthy ships heading for the Lebanese port of Tyre and permanent exile. The same year, bombs in the Jewish quarter of Cairo killed 70 people, and the reverse exodus began.

If Halevy drily tells us where we are now and LeBor brilliantly tells us how we got there, Hillel Halkin reminds us about who we really are: disputatious, nostalgic, hopeful and fond. His book, A Strange Death, is essentially an account of his quest for the recent history of a small town in northern Israel, Zichron Yaakov. Halkin, a novelist, passed through shortly after the Six-Day War in 1967, and he and his wife decided to stay.

The death of the title is at first taken by the reader to be that of Sarah Aaronsohn, a Jew who spied for Britain when Palestine was held by the Turks. But as Halkin moves around the ruins of the original Jewish colony — funded and ruled from overseas by Edmond de Rothschild — poking in the detritus of the Graf Hotel and nosing around disused sheds, he turns up other deaths. And other lives. Some of the older inhabitants recall when Beduin roamed the area, and their colony was surrounded by a sea of Arab villages. The stories that Halkin hears are wonderful and horrifying.

At the end of the book, having long left Zichron, Halkin returns. It is the early 1980s. Now there are “instant neighbourhoods of three-bedroom homes, take-home lawns, golden retrievers and children on bicycles, of squash-court sized gardens, bright with bougainvillea and loop-around streets called Almond and Anemone . . .”

That’s one truth. Another is told to Halkin in the form of a joke. A fairy godmother knocked on the door of a Zichron farmer and granted him any wish he cared to make, adding, “whatever you wish for, your neighbour will get twice as much of”. The farmer thought hard, then said: “All right. Poke out one of my eyes.”

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