Bloomsbury £18.99 pp357

Beirut has its bars, bombs and brash wealth, Alexandria has its lighthouse and literary shadows, but Jaffa? What does Jaffa mean to us? Little more than an idea, a “cake”, or a premium orange juice. Yet it was once one of the key eastern Mediterranean ports and, as Adam LeBor makes clear, the city of oranges has plenty of juice left in it.

Before the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, Jaffa was the port of Jerusalem and southern Palestine, a place of strategic importance and considerable history: stone-age man was there, the Egyptian pharaoh Thutmose III included its conquest in a list of his achievements, Jonah sailed from Jaffa’s port to his meeting with the whale, the Crusaders built it up (Richard the Lionheart met Saladin nearby), the Ottomans taxed it, Napoleon thought it sufficiently important to be worth conquering and the British had a sizeable presence there during the League of Nations mandate. Then came Israel, what Palestinians call al naqba, the catastrophe, and finally obscurity.

A century ago, when LeBor’s narrative opens, Jaffa was a town of some 17,000 people, a typical Levantine melting pot where the majority Muslim community lived alongside Jews and Christians (the status quo might not have amounted to love, but was mostly tolerant). But in the Holy Land, in the 20th century, unholy struggle was never far away. Jaffa, “the Bride of Palestine”, became one of the main ports through which European Jewish immigrants arrived, many with little in their bags, but cherishing dreams of a better life. In 1909, a group of Jewish families broke out of Jaffa’s municipal grip and founded a settlement in the sands just to the north. They called it Ahuza Bayit. The development attracted an increasing number of settlers and grew into the place we now call Tel Aviv, a large, brash, lively, European-styled Jewish city with a Bauhaus flavour and a mixed accent. The offspring first eclipsed, then absorbed the old Arab port of Jaffa.

LeBor’s book sets out to chart the fortunes of several Jaffa families (Muslims, Jews and Christians) through the 20th century and to set their stories in historical context. His groups are well chosen, among them the Christian Geday and Andraus families, Abulafia, the famous Muslim baker, the Jewish Aharonis who run the Tiv coffee and spice shop, and the Chelouches, one of Tel Aviv’s founding families. Their stories are remarkable and typical of many involved in Jaffa’s turbulent century. Between them they have memories of Jewish Zionists battling it out with Palestinians, of both groups fighting the occupying British, of Israel engulfed in a series of wars against its Arab neighbours. They remember the exodus of Palestinians around the time of the creation of Israel — the Palestinians claiming their lives were not safe, the Israeli leader Ben-Gurion insisting he did not understand why they left. They recall the “Judaisation” of Jaffa as the Palestinians found themselves unable to return, the creation of the PLO in the 1960s, the growth of radical Islam, the outbreak of the intifadas, the gentrification of old Jaffa and the rise in drug and street crime.

The idea of presenting the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through personal stories from both sides of the divide within the same town is smart and rewarding. But LeBor’s ambitions get him into trouble when he tries to show Jaffa as a microcosm of the larger conflict: in the city’s history, he seems to be saying, we can see the big picture. However, his claim of Jaffa’s “central place in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict” seems a little overblown when compared to, say, Jerusalem. Nor does he show that Jaffa is any more central or representative than, for example, Haifa or Nazareth. On the contrary, his opening chapters suggest Jaffa was atypical because it was used to absorbing immigrants. At other times, the city recedes to the horizon as LeBor moves towards another telling of the history of Israel and the Palestinians.

But neither this nor the author’s occasional loss of narrative momentum (“so turned the wheel of history”) detract from the wonder of the voices he allows to speak. We have heard the story from politicians and generals, heard the last words of suicide bombers and the howls of their victims. But City of Oranges brings us something quite different: the sound of ordinary people trying to get on with their lives in the middle of interminable conflict.

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