Art of a Jewish Woman (7 page)

Felice took his hands and held them. After awhile she said, “Can you pour us some more tea?”

One April afternoon about six months after she started to work in Jaffa, Felice was running the office while her employer was out for a morning coffee. She was preparing for a dental extraction when suddenly Dr. el Hadj came bursting into the office wild-eyed. “They are killing Jews, they are killing Jews,” he yelled. “Hurry. We have to leave,” he yelled mixing French and Arabic. “Get in the car. I must take you away.”

“Calm yourself, Doctor. Slow down. What do you mean?” She had never seen him like this, and it was frightening her. Two days earlier he had whispered again that her eyes were persecuting him. She wondered if he had gone crazy and was going to take her somewhere and attack her.

He saw her reluctance. “I have to drive you back to Tel Aviv immediately. Go across the hall and ask my brother-in-law.” Felice trusted him.

When she went across the hall she found the ophthalmologist at the window looking down at the street.

“Ibrahim, what is happening?”

“Jaffa Arabs are rioting against Jewish shopkeepers and workers, even against professionals like you. It is the port workers protesting against newly-arrived Jewish workers taking jobs from native-born Arabs.” It was more than a labor protest. Four days earlier Arab brigands had killed two Jews on the Nablus highway. In retaliation, two days later Jews killed Arabs riding a bus near Tel Aviv.

Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. It could just as easily have been the other way around as it sometimes was; two Arabs could have been killed first that day and after the Arabs retaliated more vengeance would need to be served. The tinderbox was ready to burst into flames. Arabs poured into the central square of Jaffa and began marching toward Tel Aviv, gaining strength in numbers as they went, attacking Jews in the Jaffa streets and shattering windows with rocks.

“I will take the bus back to Tel Aviv.” Ibrahim could not drive and Felice was still frightened of her employer.

“You can’t. Look out the window.”

People were running, trying to get on buses, and crowds of youth were running after them with placards calling for a general strike. Many had sticks and were beating the people they caught. People were lying in the street.

“They just shattered the windows of Zadoc and Itzak Levy’s pharmacy across the street. You have to go with Sayeed, now. What if they come into our building?”

In the car Dr. el Hadj said, “Get low so they can’t see you.”

At one moment the crowd blocked their way and threw rocks at them, which hit the doors and trunk. There were gunshots, then the way cleared a bit. Sayeed el Hadj turned off the large street and took little lanes to a bridge over a gulley with a seasonal stream. Tel Aviv began on the other side. There the political street scene changed. Throngs of people marched and yelled in Hebrew, “Struggle against the Arabs. Palestine for us. British out.”

They drove to Felice’s house. Dr. Sayeed el Hadj got out, looked sadly at the dents in his Citroen, and opened the door for Felice. “It is the end of your job. You won’t be able to come and work for me because we are now in a time of
intifada.
It isn’t safe. It is a very sad day for me. Maybe in the future when it will quiet down, I will be in touch with you. Or you will be in touch with me. Now you cannot return.”

“Doctor, I think I owe my life to you.”

He took her hand, put it to his lips and kissed it. “We will not see each other again.” There were tears in both of their eyes.

This became known as the Arab Revolt and it continued with waves of violence for three years, making it the longest, largest Arab action against colonial occupation to that time. The Arab High Commission--a collation of Palestinian sheiks headed by the Mufti in Jerusalem--had ceded effective power to the British, but with the onset of the demonstrations the Mufti called for a general strike. It was to be lifted only when Jewish immigration and the transfer of land to Jewish ownership was stopped, and a general, democratic representative government was established.

Though the daytime streets quieted somewhat, guerrilla action began in earnest: more Jewish property was burnt, travelers were assaulted, and Jewish settlements and British convoys and police were attacked. The British counterattacked. Likewise the Jewish paramilitary group Irgun and terrorist Stern gang--condemned and hunted by the British--started attacking Arab villages as well as British targets to drive the English out.

In the summer of 1936 the British army destroyed hundreds of family houses in the Old City of Jaffa with dynamite, tanks and bulldozers. The Arabs who lived there became refugees, crowding into cellars, tents on the beach, and schools. The Mandate said it was for urban renewal but the chief justice of the British Mandate court protested this rationalization. “The government is throwing dust in people’s eyes,” he said.
¹
He was relieved of his position and sent back to England.

The destruction of old Jaffa was really retaliation for a sniper shooting a British soldier. The sniper fled into the Old City where the tangle of alleyways provided an escape. They were also good staging areas for demonstrators and for stone throwers--
children of the stone
who symbolized insurrection.

In the months that followed, Arab rebels took control of large sections of the country--roads, villages, Beersheba, and the old city of Jerusalem briefly in 1938. Hundreds of Jews were massacred. Jewish fighters naturally returned fire and took their measure.

The British army was caught in the middle, and as they fiercely counter-attacked it was reported that if there were no men when they occupied an Arab village, they forced the Arab women to bare their breasts to show that they were not men in disguise. To terrorize the citizenry into submission, the British shot or hung so-called terrorists. Men and women were segregated into open-air pens in the sun without food or water. Women were released after awhile and men died.

A British schoolteacher described the British soldiers guarding an Arab village, “They always looked tired, hungry, like sleepwalkers. They go on rampages out of boredom.”
²
The British High Commissioner’s secretary wrote, “How long O Lord, how long? Palestine hasn’t known peace for 2,000 years. Perhaps it is God’s punishment for the country that crucified Christ.”
³

A poem of the times expressed Jewish hope:

Run quickly to Tel Aviv.

Go to the Hills; there in the evening

On the sand, there you will see,

You will find everything
⁴

From
their
diaspora, Palestinians longed too. A poet wrote:

Oh Jaffa by God we will return to you,

Carrying the flag and crawling,

Watering your land with the blood of honor

and millions pushing millions.

We will build and raise what was destroyed,

Quenched by your sweet water

for your gardens.

We will lay ourselves down under the lemon trees

from which above sing the birds
⁵

A sentence from the Old Testament appeared on a plaque on the door of the home of the mayor of Tel Aviv:
God will restore the fortunes of my people, Israel, and they shall rebuild the ruined cities and inhabit them.
⁶

The Arab Revolt finally calmed in the summer of 1939. By then the British finally had enough troops and police in the land to gain the upper hand by force. Further, too many Arabs were already without work, so that the calls for Arab general strikes could no longer bring out large numbers. The workers needed to feed their families first, but it had been one of the longest general strikes in history. The Jewish Agency and Histadrut labor union were constructing a new port in Tel Aviv as strike-proof competition. Further north the Histadrut had convinced the Arab mayor of Haifa that Jews and Arabs working together was better than striking, and Hisadrut representatives also bribed leaders of the Arab port workers union in Haifa to cooperate in keeping the port open. Thus for the most part Arab labor action was less effective in Haifa, even in the face of the fact that once the bribery was discovered Arab agents assassinated some Arab leaders who opted for worker solidarity between Arab and Jew.

Further, everyone’s attention was turning toward Europe, where Hitler’s troops had just occupied Czechoslovakia in March of 1939. Britain had let Hitler proceed without English intervention in return for Hitler’s signing a non-aggression pact against England--later called the appeasement pact. This had freed up British troops for Palestine for a time. But most people assumed that it was just a matter of time before Hitler began World War II, not a question of whether he was going to invade the rest of Europe.

When war came, everyone knew the Jews would support any alliance against Hitler, but the Arabs needed to be placated and brought into the fold against Hitler. In May 1939, Britain published their White Paper that announced that there would be a Palestinian state in ten years with a government elected by a representative vote. The White Paper included tight restrictions on further land purchases by Jews from Arabs, and a ceiling of 75,000 Jewish immigrants for the next five years after which further immigration would require Arab consent. Five years was precisely to be the length of the war during which 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust. Clandestine immigration continued, of course, but The Promised Land, promised to the Jews in the Old Testament, then (it seemed to them) by Britain in 1917, was, in being promised back to the Arab majority, three times promised.

The British Mandate Report to the League of Nations for the year 1936 described the April 19 events in Jaffa: “Near Morum’s Corner two private cars had been violently attacked by the mob. The occupant of the second car, whom the crowd imagined to be a Jew, but whose identity has never been discovered was saved from certain death by the action of an officer who, seeing two Arabs in succession about to attack the car, ordered a British constable to shoot. Both Arabs were killed. Curfew was imposed on Jaffa and Tel Aviv on the night of 19
^th
of April.”

Felice may well have been an occupant in one of the two cars. The evening after the Jaffa rioting in which she was caught, Felice found an envelope under the door of her flat. It was addressed to her with no stamp. It read, “Fraternizing with the enemy is not allowed. If you continue, you risk being killed.”

The radical Jewish underground paid children to spy on the populace. They had seen Felice dining with Ibrahim and had reported it. The letter gave her the chills. It scared her more than the street riots. She had been through strikes and demonstrations—even participated in them—as a student in Wilno. This was a threat to her personally. Her life was threatened simply for who she was: a young woman who enjoyed being with people, a person who did not discriminate.

Two evenings later, even though the streets were still under curfew, she met with Shuli and told him about the warning. “The militant Zionists are trying to make me conform but I can’t. I don’t want a separated way of life. I want a land that is for everybody.”

Shuli nodded, weighing things in his mind. Their cigarettes glowed like little tracers in the darkened room as they gesticulated with their hands while they talked; there was just enough light to see the little cups of black, sweetened Arabic coffee on the table when they reached for them.

“I can’t control the underground cells,” he finally said, “But I don’t condone their threats.”

“Is it because of me that you don’t condone their threats, or would you extend that to any Jew who wants to be a friend of the Arabs?” Felice asked. “All of your organizations, your cells are like little boxes nestled inside each other.”

“So?”

“Inside the last one, do you think you will find a fertile seed or a bomb that will destroy everything?”

“Felice, my dear, you have no idea what it is like—how bad it is in Poland and Germany. We have to do what we have to do here.” He thought for a moment. “There is a way.”

“A way for what?”

“For you to keep your Arab friends. The Jewish Agency has a new section, Special Squads. I know the word sounds terrible, but it is not for people who work in a squadron, it is for people who work alone. You could spend as much time with your Arab friends as you want. You would give the section information, and when you are in Tel Aviv you will be protected.”

Felice got up and said, “I have to leave.”

To sustain herself intellectually and obtain political analysis, Felice’s favored newspaper in Palestine, as in France, was the communist newspaper
L’Humanité.
It had the best reasoning, even though she wasn’t a Bolshevik. It was her food, her nourishment. It didn’t matter that it arrived days or weeks late from Paris. She would buy it before she would eat. In the May 26, 1936 edition she read Gabriel Peri’s column, “The Revolt in Palestine”:

For a month Palestine is in a state of open revolt. There have been 36 deaths to date in the Arab and Jewish population and in the British occupation force. New tanks and armored vehicles are being sent…today the Port of Jaffa, after colonization, has become a quarter of Tel Aviv … Under the pretext of a Jewish national homeland, the Zionist organization Keren Hayessod is profiting by the absence of property titles in Arab working class neighborhoods and Bedouin districts, and forming an alliance with wealthy, feudal Arab chiefs, to appropriate lands … It is a form of exploitation foreseen and put in motion by British imperialism.
⁷