LIVES IN COMMON MENACHEM KLEIN Lives in Common Arabs and Jews in Jerusalem, Jaffa, and Hebron Translated by Haim Watzman A A Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright © 2014 Menachem Klein Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 Published in the United Kingdom in 2014 by C. Hurst & Co. (Publishers) Ltd. www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available for this title Menachem Klein Lives in Common Arabs and Jews in Jerusalem, Jaffa and Hebron ISBN 978-0-19939-626-9 CONTENTS About this Book vii PART I CONNECTED TO PLACE Introduction: Jerusalem, Jaffa Gate/Bab al-Khalil 3 The Gate of Forked Ways 3 1. Arab Jews 19 Neither Oxymoron nor Aspersion 19 The Locals 22 2. Mixed Cities 65 A Holy Site Chooses a City—A City Chooses a Holy Site 87 Coexistence Disturbed by Confrontation 94 3. Life On the Verge of the Future 111 A Large Problem in a Small Place 111 Conflict as Routine 121 PART II CONNECTED BY FORCE 4. Expanding the Boundaries of the Possible 139 A New Land 139 An Ambiguous V 157 5. Like Owners 171 Transferring the Deed 171 Houses from Within, People from Without 188 v CONTENTS 6. Occupation, Assimilation, Opposition 213 Jerusalem: A Bustling and Noisy Place 213 Jaffa: Abandoned and Attractive 246 Hebron and Jerusalem: The Force of History 258 Epilogue 285 Notes 291 Bibliography 305 Index 325 vi ABOUT THIS BOOK Historians should not adopt the past, but rather investigate the relationship between past and future. – Alon Confino1 Modern history has connected and disconnected Jaffa, Hebron, and Jerusalem, showing them to have much in common but also much that separates them. Jerusalem and Hebron, two mountain cities and the two holiest cities in Palestine, have been contrasted with Jaffa, the worldly coastal city. Each of these cities is home to a Palestinian com- munity with its own character and status, and each of them is also home to a Jewish community of a different sort. The conflict between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs is different in each of these cities, only about 40 miles distant from each other, yet it is also much alike. In the same way, the Jews and Arabs in each of these cities have evolved relationships that, while similar in some ways, are different in others. All three cities have a long history. Jerusalem and Hebron were founded about 5,000 years ago. Jaffa is younger—only about 3,800 years old. Many books have been written about each of these cities but no work has been devoted to comparing them. However, it is impor- tant to make such a comparison because each of them has become a focus of modern Israeli or Palestinian national identity (or of both). The confrontation between these two peoples has played out in each of these cities, dividing them and setting into motion a series of demo- graphic, urban, and political changes. But—and this is one of the book’s original insights—urban life has also created types of common vii ABOUT THIS BOOK identity and coexistence. Only at a few points in time did the conflict become total. The following chapters reveal this by focusing on daily life. It is a new approach in the history of the Israeli–Palestinian con- flict. Whereas the existing historical literature stresses national institu- tions and leaderships, this book views the cities from the bottom up, concentrating on the day-to-day interactions between Jews and Arabs. The national struggle broke out within this context, impairing the pre- vious web of relations and reorganizing daily life. The triangle formed by Jaffa, Jerusalem, and Hebron lies in the geo- graphical, political, religious, and historical center of the Land of Israel, as the Jews call it, or Palestine, as the Arabs call it. Another tri- angle, formed by Haifa, Acre, and Nazareth, lies to the north. Jews and Arabs who lived in that triangle fashioned a system of relation- ships that differed from that of the central triangle. It was less fervent religiously and nationally, and exhibited more cooperation between ethnic groups.2 But the northern triangle lies in the country’s geograph- ical and historical periphery. None of the three cities that formed it had ever been a capital, nor were any of them holy to Muslims or Jews. Jews and Muslims together constitute an overwhelming majority of the country’s inhabitants, and for more than a century have contested who the country belongs to. The focal point of this contest is the Jaffa– Jerusalem–Hebron triangle. Furthermore, up until 1948 Jaffa was a much more important city than Arab Haifa or Nazareth. By telling the stories of these three cities, the book casts new light on the larger story of the Jewish–Palestinian conflict. It reveals aspects of the conflict that have been missed by previous studies which examined the subject from the top down and whose starting point was Zionism or Palestinian nationalism and the conflict between them. Unlike the approach generally taken by historians of the Jewish national move- ment or its Palestinian rival, this book’s starting point is not an event that was constitutive of Zionism or Palestinian nationalism—say, for example, the inception of Jewish immigration motivated by national sentiments or the Palestinian riots of 1920. This book’s story instead begins at an earlier point in time, toward the end of the nineteenth cen- tury, when a local Palestinian identity began to form, an identity in which Jews and Arabs were partners. It did not arrive from the outside, like Arab nationalism and Zionism, but grew out of the daily lives of the country’s inhabitants during a rapidly modernizing and Westernizing period, in which the authority of the Ottoman regime was growing viii