Scion of a Jewish family from Algeria who sailed to Palestine in the 19th century, Yosef-Eliyahu Chelouche - pictured here with his wife and children - was perhaps the first peacenik. Through his writings and the founding of Hamagen, a group of Arabic-speaking Tel-Avivians aiming at coexistence, he tried to steer the Arabs of Palestine away from extremism until his death in 1934. Alas, in vain. Sarah Honig writes in The Jerusalem Post:
"In 1880, 10-year-old Yosef-Eliahu was lured out of Jaffa's winding alleyways by his father's Arab acquaintance and marched through the undulating shadeless wilderness beyond. It was a horrendous, almost impassable and seemingly interminable tract, without landmarks or signs of habitation. The kidnapped boy's feet kept sinking in the sand; he was thirsty, beaten and terrified. At night, however, salvation came to Yosef-Eliahu as a silhouetted figure on a donkey approached. It was Yisrael Simhon, guard of the Montefiore orange grove, near where the Azrieli Center currently dominates Tel Aviv's skyline.
"To his last day, despite decades of distinguished public service, Yosef-Eliahu was known as the "abducted child." The barren expanse through which he was forcibly dragged now lies beneath bustling downtown east-central Tel Aviv, intersected by the country's busiest traffic arteries.
"His early trauma notwithstanding, Yosef-Eliahu tirelessly campaigned for coexistence. He was perhaps the first peacenik. In 1913, to counter already rife judeophobia and incendiary agitation in the Arab press, Yosef-Eliahu, along with other Arabic-speaking Tel Avivians, founded Hamagen (the shield), an organization dedicated to persuading Arabs that they and Jews share economic and cultural interests and can only improve each other's lot.
"Yosef-Eliahu published an Arabic-language daily in Jaffa, Saut el-Othmania(Voice of the Ottomans), and cultivated close contacts with leading local Arabs in the hope of stemming already-rampant hate mongering.
"The unprovoked five-day Jaffa-generated Arab riots of 1921, in which 49 Jews were massacred and more than 150 wounded, effectively brought down the curtain on Jaffa's Jewish community and boosted adjacent Tel Aviv as a separate, independent, viable, modern and thriving alternative entity. The carnage should have disheartened Yosef-Eliahu, but he wouldn't abandon his peace-quest.
"It seemed mission-impossible after Yom Kippur 1928, when notorious Jerusalem Mufti Haj Amin el-Husseini raised a shrill cry over a flimsy cloth partition positioned to segregate male and female worshipers at the Western Wall. The British lost no time in tearing down the offensive screen. Jewish opinion of all political shades was outraged.
"On October 6, 1928, Yosef-Eliahu published an article entitled "To the Arabs," his last-ditch plea for sanity. "You crudely disrupted and battered congregants who came to pour out their souls to their Father in Heaven at the place and date holiest to them," he wrote. "Then you declared holy war against your victims, charging they assailed your holy shrines... You prepare for outright bloodbath and jihad against the infidel desecrators. What desecration?... How can such absurdity be allowed to foment religious hostilities between Jews and Muslims? My good brothers, you are manipulated by wily politicians... How can anyone begrudge Jews the pitiable remnant that is their Western Wall, the sole relic of the brokenhearted?"
"But the mufti's disciples didn't heed Yosef-Eliahu. Their premeditated harassment grew increasingly violent, till trumped-up tales of Jewish takeover attempts at the Temple Mount sent Arabs rioting countrywide on August 23, 1929. The slaughter lasted an entire week.
The rampages began in Jerusalem, but the most notorious carnage took place in Hebron, where 67 men, women and children were hideously hacked to death in a homicidal frenzy. Hebron's centuries-old Jewish community was dispossessed. Smaller Jewish enclaves in Gaza, Jenin, Tulkarm and Nablus were likewise dislodged."
in addition to Yosef-Eliyahu Street that Sarah Honig mentions, there is a separate Chelouche Street in Tel Aviv. This is mentioned in a movie called The House on Chelouche Street by the director Moshe Mizrahi.
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