Ariel, Usamah explained, was now home to eight thousand Israelis, but was projected ultimately to house a hundred thousand - a gloomy prospect for Biddya, which, sited precariously beneath the town, looked certain to have all its remaining land requisitioned for new housing estates from which Palestinians would be banned. This year, said Usamah, a further series of olive groves separating the village from the settlement had been seized and bulldozed to provide room for a thousand new houses being built for Soviet Jews fleeing a resurgent Russian racism. Yet again it was the Palestinians who were being made to pay the price for European anti-Semitism.
'A Russian can come to my land tomorrow and have more right to it than me, my wife or my children,' said Usamah. 'Now the cultivated land has all been taken, and nearly all the olives cut down. Every year they take a little bit more. They think that if they can take it piece by piece there will be no trouble.'
In the end, however, Biddya had not stood by and waited for the slow extinction that was being imposed on it. On the outbreak of the
intifada
Palestinian flags had been raised on the power lines, demonstrations had been mounted, stones thrown. Faced with this defiance, the Israelis could have placed the village under rigorous curfew. This would have limited the trouble but would have been time-consuming, expensive and have tied up large numbers of troops. Far less effort was the option of controlling the village through a client
mukhtar
who, in return for power over the village, would keep order for his Israeli masters.
For seven years Abu Zeid had ruled Biddya as a tyrant, but since his demise the Israelis had been forced to rule the village directly. Neither method had managed to subdue Biddya, but together they had succeeded in ruining it. Of a total population of 3,300, more than five hundred villagers - most of the younger generation - were currently in prison, and forty families had had their houses destroyed. Moreover, after every incident the army made a point of cutting down an olive grove: so far two thousand trees had gone, and only a few remained. Ninety per cent of the village's income used to come from its olives, and it is now bankrupt.
Usamah's uncle, Tariq, was part of the large Nasbeh clan that had ruled Biddya until the Israeli military authorities deposed them. We found him in the walled garden of the family's ancestral house, tending his old musk roses under a trellis of tumbling vines. Usamah had sent word that we were coming, and his aunt, Um-Mohammed, had prepared breakfast for us. She was a big woman and wore a big blue dress, trussed at the waist. At her command we sat on stools, nibbling from the avalanche of olives, mountains of humus and several low ranges of feta cheese she had spread out for our pleasure.
While we ate, Tariq began. 'Abu-Zeid - God burn his bones! - was a very clever man.' He rearranged his shift and twirled his worry beads around his index finger. 'Ya Allah! No one knew how to extort money like him.' 'How did he do it?' I asked.
'The wild dog!' said Um-Mohammed. 'He tried everything.'
'It's true,' said Tariq. 'My great-great-great-grandfather brought Abu-Zeid's Negro forebears here from the Hijaz to be our house-slaves. This was his way of getting revenge.' Tariq shook his head sadly. 'He did everything he could to ruin this village. He would threaten to build a road through someone's house, then collect bribes to stop it. Once he cut off everyone's water and electricity and demanded 500 dinars [£700] from every family before he would reconnect it.'
'Tchk!' said Um-Mohammed, spitting on the ground. 'That was nothing. It was what he did with our land that made us hate him.'
'My younger brother was in prison for throwing stones,' explained Tariq. 'Abu-Zeid came to our house and offered to get his sentence reduced. He asked my father to put his thumbprint on some papers. It was only later that we discovered that he had tricked my father into signing away 110 dunums of our land west of the village. Ariel has an industrial park there now.'
'Abu-Zeid tricked all of us,' said Um-Mohammed. 'Like a mad dog he bit everyone around him.'
'We got a petition signed by every family in the village and took it to the Military Governor. He was a good man, and I think he would have replaced Abu-Zeid. But the settlers at Ariel blocked it. Abu-Zeid was their man. After our petition failed, Abu-Zeid arranged the killing of the old man who had organised the petition. We knew then that we had to destroy Abu-Zeid before he destroyed the village.'
'We are under military occupation,' said Usamah. 'We have no courts or civil authorities to look after our interests. This is what the occupation has reduced us to.'
'At that time we knew nothing about killing,' said Tariq, 'so we hired a Bedouin to do it for us. The Bedouin collaborate with the Israelis and are allowed to join the army and possess weapons. But they will kill anyone if they are paid. My brother knew this killer from Kafr Qasim. After we hired him, this man waited for
Abu-Zeid and shot him with an Uzi. He took fourteen bullets in the stomach. But he didn't die. The Israelis took him to a new hospital in Jerusalem and gave him a new plastic stomach. After a month he was back. The Bedouin is still in prison.'
Tariq popped an olive into his mouth. 'After the Bedouin failed, we vowed to finish Abu-Zeid ourselves. Our first attempt was very amateur. We tried to run him over. The first time we used a car, but he clung onto the bonnet. When the car crashed against the wall, the driver was killed but Abu-Zeid was unhurt. The next time we used a big lorry. That put Abu-Zeid in hospital - he lost his left leg - but although both his younger sons were killed, Abu-Zeid lived.'
'We didn't give up, though,' said Usamah. 'We sent a boy to buy two grenades on the black market in Tel Aviv. When he got back he experimented with one in a cave. It seemed easy to operate, so the next day he threw the other at Abu-Zeid. It sailed through the window of his car, but it was faulty and didn't blow. After that the Israelis gave Abu-Zeid many more weapons and rebuilt his house so that it was like a fortress.'
'Abu-Zeid went crazy,' said Usamah. 'He destroyed the houses belonging to everyone he thought of as an enemy. Then he bought two huge Rottweilers. He used to hobble around the village on his wooden leg, patrolling with the dogs, his brother and his two remaining sons. They beat anyone they found in the streets after dark.'
'Abu-Zeid promised, "Before the next olive season I will have destroyed this village completely,"' said Tariq. 'People said he had gone insane. He blew up the olive press we had been given by the Jordanians before 1967, then began systematically cutting down the olive trees of those he didn't like. But he didn't run away. He knew we would try again, and wherever he went we would find him and kill him.'
'The fifth attempt was a mass attack,' said Usamah. 'The
intifada
was at its height and the
shabab
[young men] had formed hit squads. On 6 March at eight o'clock the
shabab
attacked his house with molotov cocktails. Their object was to blow him up by igniting the gas canisters he kept in his garage. But they didn't know that the Israelis had given the garage new metal doors. As they tried to break in, Abu-Zeid hobbled up onto his roof and began picking them off with his gun. After he had killed four, the village imam broadcast an appeal for help on the mosque loudspeakers. The whole village rushed into the street and joined in. There must have been seven hundred people out there.'
'But we didn't get anywhere,' said Tariq gloomily. 'While we all went off to evening prayers, one of Abu-Zeid's sons slipped out the back and ran to Ariel. When prayers were over, we managed to get into the garage and blow up his bulletproof car. But before we could do anything more the settlers arrived. They were all armed, and began firing into the crowd. Later, when the army came, they put the village under curfew, arrested a hundred people and demolished
...
I don't know how many houses.'
'Ya Allah!' said Um-Mohammed, who had reappeared with a little bowl of humus. 'There wasn't a woman in the village who wouldn't have gladly strangled Abu-Zeid after that.'
'It's true,' said Tariq, raising his eyebrows and giving his beads a twirl. 'But we thought he would not suspect this. So on the sixth attempt we dressed up one of my nephews as a Palestinian woman and sent him off to Abu-Zeid's house with a basket of fruit on his head. Abu-Zeid was sitting outside with Zeid, his eldest son. My nephew put the basket down, pulled out a pistol from under the figs and fired six shots from twenty metres. He hit both men and killed Zeid, but he only succeeded in taking off Abu-Zeid's left arm and wounding him in one lung. Abu-Zeid was fifteen days in intensive care and they had to give him a new arm and a mechanical lung. By this stage he was more like a robot than a man. But within a month he was back.'
'Some in the village believed that Abu-Zeid was some kind of
djinn,'
said Um-Mohammed. 'We thought he would never die.'
'He escaped us six times.
Six times!
But we got him in the end.'
T saw it with my own eyes,' said Um-Mohammed, rearranging her white calico
chador.
'It was a few days before the olive season. I was coming back from my brother's house early in the morning when I noticed Abu-Zeid's car coming along the Ariel road. He turned a corner and saw that there was a roadblock. At the same time two
shabab
leapt out from behind a wall and -
pfoo! -
peppered his car with Uzi guns.'
'The Israelis had given him bulletproof windows,' said Tariq, 'but he had left them open.'
'Abu-Zeid tried to reverse and escape, but he hit a wall and they got him all the same.' Um-Mohammed's face exploded into a broad grin. 'He died in great pain. I was so happy.'
'The village gathered around and one of the old men said that they should pour gasoline over the car and burn it, otherwise the settlers might take him away to Tel Aviv and bring him back to life with one of their machines. After his earlier escapes they were worried he might survive even thirty bullets in the chest.'
'But do you know the strange thing?' said Um-Mohammed, scooping up some humus on a piece of pitta bread and popping it into her mouth. 'Because he was half Negro, the smoke was as black as pitch. The place where he died, nothing grows there now.'
'So you understand now why we were so pleased when we finally got him on the seventh attempt?' asked Tariq.
'After we killed him and made a fire of his body, the
Yahoodi
[Jewish] settlers saw the black smoke and came running again. But they were too late. There was only a burned skull, a leg bone, a fire-blackened lung machine and a great pile of plastic sludge that had been his stomach. All they could do was put it all in a sack and give it to his wife. '
'She threw it onto a rubbish tip,' said Um-Mohammed. 'Abu-Zeid had another woman in Kifl Harith. His wife hated him as much as the rest of us.'
'The army put the village under curfew for two weeks,' said Tariq. 'We couldn't even harvest our trees. But no one minded. Inside every house it was like a holiday. People were singing and dancing.'
'Even in the prisons there was rejoicing,' said Usamah. 'All Abu-Zeid's old enemies - there were about two hundred of them in jail at that time - they had a big party also.'
The curfew was due to resume in less than ten minutes. I got up and said my goodbyes, while Usamah hurried me out to the car. We drove out of the village and past the gates and guntowers of Ariel. Under the razor wire, the settlers' bulldozers were at work clearing Biddya's olive groves.