The first account of the Arab-Israeli conflict to be told through the moving personal stories of families who live there, and which faces up to the harsh realities of bombings and checkpoints but keeps the human side firmly in view
Through the stories of six families - three Jewish and three Arab - Adam LeBor goes behind the daily news and rhetoric of entrenched positions to tell the tragic, occasionally comic, but always deeply human story of Israel in the last eighty years.
'City Of Oranges' is also the first book to get at the true complexity of the story, telling it from the European Ashkenazi and very different Sephardic points of view on the one hand, and from the Christian Arab point of view as well as that of Muslim Arabs and Palestinians in exile.
In LeBor's intelligent, lively and sensitive account we understand that the founding of the state of Israel could be simultaneously a moment of jubilation for the Jews and a moment of disaster - the naqba - for the 100,000 Arabs who fled Jaffa in 1948, most of them never to return. And we see the main port of the Eastern Mediterranean sprout a modern European suburb of Tel Aviv, with white Bauhaus architecture, of which Jaffa today has become a suburb. But, though full of tension and violence, this is not a story without hope and the book, packed as it is with extraordinary characters, ends with a consideration of Jaffa's attempts to regain the relatively peaceful co-operation of earlier times.
