Thursday, May 24, 2007

Irgun Jaffa Operation Mentioned in New Book

A new book has just been published, An Intimate History of Arabs and Jews in Jaffa.
By Adam LeBor, Illustrated, 424 pp., W. W. Norton & Company, Paper, $14.95 and in the New York Times review, we caught this:-

Reading Adam LeBor’s “City of Oranges,” I once again met Fakhri Geday, along with much displacement. LeBor writes Jaffa’s past as a sprawling family saga. At its center are a half-dozen or so clans, Jewish and Arab, whose lives intertwine from the 19th century till today, as the Mediterranean port flowers and then is torn apart by conflict.

The Gedays, a Christian Arab family in Jaffa for generations, are one thread in the chronicle. Unlike other wealthy Arabs, Fakhri’s father, Youssef, refused to sell land to the Jews who poured into British-ruled Palestine. Unlike his neighbors, he also rejected panic and flight when Menachem Begin’s right-wing Irgun underground overran Jaffa in April and May 1948.


Since the reviewer is Gershom Gorenberg, it is to be expected to find the following line:-

That era ended in 1921, when tension between Arab nationalists and Zionists erupted into riots in Jaffa.

One might get the impression that the riots were mutual. After all, there was "tension" and riots (plural) "erupted". But as we all know, Arabs exploited a May Day march by socialists and communists which had nothing to do with the Arab-Israel conflict and set about invading Jewish homes, pillaging and murdering, including Yosef Haim Brener, the famous author, who wasn't in Jaffa at the time but in an orange grove near Abu-Kabbir. Almost 50 Jews were killed by Arabs and no Arabs were killed by Jews rather by British security personnel.

See here, here too and here as well.

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