Biblical port city of Jaffa, Israel. "I wanted to invite these families to a restaurant because I wrote about them. They play a key role in one of my latest books: ‘City of Oranges–Arabs and Jews in Jaffa’," LeBor, 45, told BosNewsLife Saturday, February 10, after returning to Budapest where he lives with his wife and two children. "It was the first time these families directly spoke to each other."
However with Palestinian-Israeli clashes even spreading to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, tensions are rising between Arab and Jewish citizens of Israel, confirmed LeBor. The internationally acclaimed writer said he hopes his book will encourage reconciliation and a debate about the future of Israel as a Jewish state.
Besides Arabs, "There are a lot of guest workers from say Nigeria or Romania who work already eight or ten years in Israel. Should they not have the right to become Israeli citizens?" Some Israeli politicians have argued that Jews should remain a majority in Israel to guarantee its survival and that therefore strict rules on citizenship should apply.
ARAB MINORITY
LeBor said he understood that "the law of return", which grants automatic Israeli citizenship to Jewish people, was crucial after the Holocaust in which at least six million Jews died. "But we are now in 2007, and I think Israel has to decide what kind of state it wants to be. Israel should focus more on its Arab minority."
That’s also what he promotes in his ‘City of Oranges’ book set in Jaffa, where the Bible claims people celebrated that Apostle Peter rose Dorcas from death after praying for her. Through the stories of six families, starting in 1920, the reader learns how the foundation of the State of Israel was simultaneously a moment of jubilation for Jews and seen as a disaster by 100,000 Arabs who fled Jaffa in 1948. Most of these Arabs never returned.
The ambitious LeBor went out of his way to find Arabs and Jews to help him fill the nearly 400
pages of his book, and show that Israel can be a peaceful, multi-religious society.
He interviewed a variety of people ranging from a Christian Arab car-dealer, a Jewish coffee-and-spice merchant, an Arab baker who made bread for the whole community, a Palestinian exile who tried to bring modern business methods to the Arafat era, to the Jewish schoolgirl who befriended an Arab drug leader.
"I wanted to go beyond the headlines and the hard news of everyday. The Jerusalem press core focuses almost only on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict" and the impact that has on Arab and Jewish citizens of Israel, he said. "I think my book shows that life goes on. They may have different backgrounds but all have the same dreams, try to make a living, have love affairs."
COMMON DREAMS
He hopes his book will soon be translated into Arabic and Hebrew to make Arabs and Jews realize they have more in common than is often perceived.
"Many Arabs are like Jews, Israeli citizens. It was interesting to see that Israeli Arabs have tensions with fellow Arabs in the Palestinian territories," noted LeBor during his extensive travels there.
"The Palestinians in the West Bank often don’t like the Arabs in Israel, because they live in a democratic state with a market economy and the rule of law. Arabs in Israel criticize Palestinians saying: ‘You left [after the foundation of Israel] but we stayed’."
LeBor said that with the arrival of Arabic satellite television, "Arabs within Israel feel more conscious about their Arabic," identity. "It gives them confidence, but they are also pulled in two directions. Their future is tight to the Jewish state [of Israel], they need to realize that as well."
He dedicated ‘City of Oranges’ to his mother, Brenda LeBor, who he says impacted his life as
much as his Jewish faith. His previous books were dedicated to his father, who recently passed away. "I think that my Jewish faith is an inspiration and has given me social awareness. It’s part of who I am."
LeBor has gone a long way from the moment when a BosNewsLife reporter first met him in the early 1990s, as a young man dressed in shorts, in a luxurious Budapest hotel and favorite gossip hangout of foreign correspondents or those pretending to be them.
FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT
"I arrived from the UK on an assignment and was just checking what possibilities there were to become a foreign correspondent, I was always interested in Eastern Europe and the changes after Communism." He soon started to cover Balkan wars and other world events in the troubled region for a variety of media, including UK-based The Independent and The Times newspapers, and never looked back. But writing became his passion.
Besides ‘City of Oranges’, LeBor penned six other books, including a critically acclaimed biography of late Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic and the best-selling Hitler’s Secret Bankers, which was short-listed for the Orwell Prize. His newest non-fiction work is an exposé "of the United Nations’ failure to confront genocide" called ‘Complicity With Evil’. "It investigates the UN’s role in the genocides in Rwanda, [the Bosnian town of] Srebrenica and Darfur," he said.
LeBor also managed to write a thriller, ‘Night Hotel’, set in Budapest inspired in part by a real document, known as the "Red House Report", a four-page US intelligence memo. Dated November 7, 1944, it describes "plans of German industrialists to engage in underground activity after Germany’s defeat" and to organize "the flow of capital to neutral countries".
He is pleased to be based in Budapest where he believes a "Jewish revival" has begun following the democratic changes in 1989. He said about 200,000 copies were sold of ‘Fatelesness’, a book written by Imre Kertesz, a Jewish Hungarian author and Holocaust concentration camp survivor who won the 2002 Nobel Prize in Literature. An estimated 600,000 Hungarian Jews were killed during World War Two, but there are about 100,000 Jewish people living in Hungary today.
LeBor (www.adamlebor.com) said he doesn’t know yet what his next book will be. "For now I take a rest. It’s great to see your name on a book in the book store, but it takes two or three years before it’s done."
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