Leon Uris (24 page)

Within moments of the vote the fellahin of Tabah had unearthed their cache of arms and fired angrily into the air, swearing revenge. All over Arab Palestine this was echoed with an eruption of country-wide riots and a general strike. But alas, the night no longer belonged to them.

Tabah’s new and powerful radio receiver was able to get broadcasts from every part of the world. They heard the Arab and Moslem prime ministers, presidents, kings, the Moslem Brotherhood, the Moslem Youth, and the Moslem clergy all spew forth public venom. With each declaration of support the fellahin of Tabah became heartened and shouts of agreement followed every new blood-curdling announcement.

Cairo:
‘The Zionist invasion is like that of the Tartars. If the Jews dare to declare their independence on May 14, they shall be so ravaged that it wilt make Genghis Khan seem like a man of peace. There will be new pyramids of skulls ... Jewish skulls!’

Damascus:
‘Arab weapons will make this so-called partition plan just so much worthless ink on paper.’

Baghdad:
‘Revenge and hatred of the Jews is just and legitimate. We shall proudly uproot this Zionist cancer from sacred Arab soil.’

Kuwait
: ‘O Arab brothers in Palestine, take heart. We shall cause history to repeat itself. We have rejoiced over the devastation of the Jews, whose filthy economic cunning led to their massacre in Europe. We shall finish Hitler’s work.’

Saudi Arabia:
‘May the greatest of Islamic dogmas light our way into the battle of the extermination of the Jews.’

Trans
-
Jordan
: ‘The Jews are wild beasts, bloodsuckers, traitors, enemies of mankind. The world has scorned, rejected, and expelled them. If they try to establish a Zionist state, it shall be eradicated by blood and victims.’

Libya:
‘We shall drench Palestine with rivers of Jewish blood. We shall crush Jewish bones and use them for fertilizer.’

Yemen
: ‘We live and die with Arab Palestine. We shall strew Jewish entrails over the land.’

Tunis
: ‘May the Prophet strike us blind, nay dead, if we permit a Jewish state in the midst of sacred Islamic soil.’

Lebanon
: ‘Victory is ours! We shall throw every Jew and every Jewish baby into the sea with its mother.’

Haj Ibrahim alone understood the difference between rhetoric and action. The Arab language was now its saltiest and filled with an overkill of wild phrases. To a listening stranger it could be the most fearful use of language they would ever hear. To the Arab masses it was a siren song from a distant mirage.

Words painted elaborate pictures, but like a mirage, the words were illusions. Haj Ibrahim had long ago realized that fantasy and reality were one and the same thing among his people. The fantasy had to be kept alive at all costs.

He also knew that he alone would have to make a decision for all of them, for none would undertake responsibility.

Each night a fever arose from the café of Tabah. ‘Jihad! Jihad! Jihad! Holy War! Holy War! Holy War!’

Riots and massacres ripped through the Arab world, turning their fury on small and defenseless Jewish populations. Synagogues from Aleppo to Aden buckled under the torch. In those Arab lands yet under British rule nothing was done to stop the massacres.

As the Arab rage crescendoed, the United Nations, having given the Jews their ‘pound of flesh,’ threw up their hands en masse and cried, ‘Neutral!’

The world’s military experts unanimously concluded that the Jews would be overrun. In the end they would probably be squeezed into an enclave around Tel Aviv. At such time, when the remaining Jews had their backs to the sea and annihilation before them, perhaps the United Nations could step in with some kind of humane gesture to evacuate what was left of the Jews.

It was the day of Christian Christmas. You must know the commotion caused when Mr. Dandash’s black Mercedes fought through the potholes to the village square. The village boys engulfed the car as his chauffeur shooed them back. They all gave a respectful salute as Mr. Dandash emerged.

I recognized him instantly as one of the Effendi Kabir’s aides. I stepped forward and announced to him that I was the son of the muktar because I knew he would want to see my father. I led him to the prophet’s tomb, where my father was contemplating away another day.

Haj Ibrahim looked up. His eyes wore dark circles, large circles telling of nights with little sleep. He arose and embraced Dandash in the familiar Arab manner. They did not like each other; their embrace was too sincere.

‘I have come from Damascus with a message from the Effendi,’ Dandash said.

‘Yes?’

‘The Effendi requests your urgent presence in Damascus. He has sent a car for you.’

My father gave Dandash a fishy-eyed look, clearly one of suspicion. I could almost feel my father thinking ...
I will not go to Damascus to be assassinated.

‘I have no papers to cross the border,’ he said.

‘It has all been arranged,’ Dandash answered. ‘And be assured that the Effendi guarantees your safety under the tradition of protection to a guest.’

‘The Effendi also guaranteed us our water, which he sold to the Jews.’

‘I suggest that you had better be reasonable.’

My father did not know the details, but it was rumored that Kabir had liquidated most of his holdings in Palestine and had transferred millions to Switzerland for safekeeping. It would be no trick for him to sell off the land of Tabah and the other villages nearby. He had no choice but to answer the summons. ‘I am honored,’ he said. ‘When shall we leave?’

H
AJ
I
BRAHIM HAD NEVER
seen an automobile as imposing and luxurious. When the driver cleaned it off from the trip it shined so that one could see one’s face as if in a mirror. The inside smelled of fine leather and it drove with enormous power. Nonetheless, Haj Ibrahim was quite uncomfortable. The Effendi had never done anything so grand as to send an automobile all the way down from Damascus. What was he up to?

Obviously it had something to do with the partition plan. Political and military alliances were being made between old enemies, and Kabir was a cat who always landed on his feet. Even though Kabir had transferred much of his wealth out of Palestine, he would certainly keep a foot in the door.

Haj Ibrahim would find out soon enough. For the moment he was made more uncomfortable by the driver as the car pushed its way up the winding, crooked Bab el Wad, throwing them rudely from side to side on the turns that came up every few seconds. Truck traffic spewed smoke and coughed along at a snail’s pace. The Mercedes would roar up behind a truck and the driver would tattoo his horn impatiently, then make a hair-raising pass into the lane of oncoming traffic. Dandash seemed relaxed, even bored, as he fiddled with the radio, which alternated between hotly delivered news and high-pitched oriental music.

Haj Ibrahim did not go to Jerusalem often. He studied the high banks on either side of the road filled with likely places for snipers and ambush. It had been thus for three thousand years of wars. The road would be more important than ever in anyone’s military plans.

Where the Bab el Wad flattened out briefly at its summit, the British had set up a roadblock. Fifty cars were held up in two lines, one of Jews and one of Arabs. Mr. Dandash ordered the driver to go around the line directly to the checkpoint. Because of the obvious importance of the Mercedes, no one waiting in the Arab line voiced objections. Dandash stuck his head out the window and spoke a few terse, well-chosen words to the officer in charge and the barrier was opened immediately for him to pass through. Haj Ibrahim marveled at such power.

The highway took a downward plunge into a deep valley before starting the last climb to Jerusalem. On either side there was a smattering of Arab villages. To the left, in the distance, a tall hill arose that held the traditional Arab tomb of the prophet Samuel. It was from that particular hill that Richard the Lion-Heart was compelled to end and dismantle his Crusade. From there the British king had stared into a Jerusalem he would never enter.

As they took the final long hill up, homes made of the subtle pink Jerusalem stone revealed themselves glaringly under a midday sun. They broke into the suburbs, with an Arab district on the left of the highway and Jewish West Jerusalem before them. Moving down Jaffa Road to the central business district of the Jews, they snarled along behind a regiment of slow-moving traffic. Undisciplined Hasidim crossed the street in front of them at random with their side curls flopping up and down beneath broad-rimmed black beaver hats. Arab donkey carts, buses belching smoke, and a Mardi Gras mixture of unlikely peoples thickened near the Old City Wall.

A jungle of barbed wire and British presence blocked the way where Jaffa Road met the Jaffa Gate of the Old City. Dandash personally had to leave the car to find an officer to get them through.

They skirted the Old City, then turned abruptly onto Jericho Road and the welcome sight of all-Arab suburb. Once they cleared the outlying villages, the car took its downward trek into the bleak landscape of the Judean wilderness: the wilderness where David hid from Saul, the wilderness of the Essenes, of John the Baptist, and the wilderness of Christ. Ever downward they drove toward the lowest point on earth. A British convoy tore uphill, passing them in a race for Jerusalem, as military convoys will, with a sense of the utmost urgency.

With the traffic thinned, the chauffeur floored the pedal, slowing only to slam on the brakes and swerve past a suddenly appearing old truck or cart. A blinding afternoon heat blazed off the desert floor, sending up little waves rippling off the rocks. Haj Ibrahim was astonished that the inside of the automobile had remained cooled by some kind of miraculous device.

Through a Jericho lolling in stagnation, they skirted the northern tip of the Dead Sea and zipped along an empty straight road at breakneck speed. They were in a deep depression of the earth known as the Great Rift Valley. In the background on both sides of the river rose a backbone of sentinel mountains, one in Palestine and one in Trans-Jordan.

Across the river, Moses had died after seeing the Promised Land and Joshua had staged the Hebrew Tribes for their invasion. This had once been the ancient King’s Highway, a vital caravan route from Damascus to its terminal at the Gulf of Aqaba, from whence Solomon’s ships departed for Africa and the Orient.

On May 14 of the coming year of 1948, the British would withdraw from Trans-Jordan as well, leaving only an officer corps for the Arab Legion. The Emir Abdullah, who had already crowned himself king, now ruled a territory known as the Kingdom of Jordan. It would be a bogus kingdom, one of the weakest and poorest in the Arab world.

Everyone knew that Abdullah talked with the Jews and was only mildly interested in getting mixed up in a war with them. Despite his moderate hatred of the Jews, he did covet Jerusalem and longed for it to be annexed into his kingdom. He felt there was an excellent chance of obtaining both East Jerusalem and some lands on the West Bank by negotiation with the Jews. Unfortunately, he was an Arab monarch and under fierce pressure from the larger Arab states to join the conflict.

Although Abdullah was small and would be prone to yield, he had perhaps the best single army in the Arab world. Egypt, Syria, and the Saudis wanted to use Abdullah’s Arab Legion, even if they were also wary of Abdullah’s ambitions.

The British-armed, British-trained, and British-led Legion was likewise commanded by a British general. Its potential in the future war struck fear into the Jews. Abdullah was dancing on the head of a pin.

Evening found them travel-weary as they entered Tiberias. This town on the Sea of Galilee was of great historic importance to both Jew and Arab. At the nearby Horns of Hittim Saladin the Kurd had all but destroyed the first Crusader kingdom in an epic battle.

The Galilee remained relatively quiet during the Roman period while the rest of the nation waged rebellion. Jews who had been driven out of Jerusalem fled to Tiberias as a refuge. Here great rabbis and scholars worked and studied down through the ages and made Tiberias one of their holy cities. The tombs of many of the rabbis who had kept Judaism alive embraced the lake and were scenes of great religious gatherings.

A hundred years earlier, during Ottoman times, the city was ravaged by an earthquake and was largely rebuilt by the Jews. They used the unique native black basalt rock as the main building material, which gave the town a look as uncommon as Jerusalem’s pink stone.

As was the case with all towns and settlements in the region, the sun took a vicious toll on human energy. The Jews had the better of the energy and used it to establish a string of green kibbutzim and villages. Their strong presence in the region enabled the Jews to maintain relative peace and a balance of order.

Haj Ibrahim was surprised when Mr. Dandash ordered the driver to continue on past the Arab old town on the sea to an isolated Jewish hotel farther down the road. It was called the Gallei Kinneret and was owned and operated by a German refugee lady. They pulled into the driveway and halted. The driver emptied the trunk and was ordered to find himself a room at an Arab hotel and report in the morning.

‘I do not wish to insult your hospitality,’ Haj Ibrahim said, ‘but I would feel more comfortable going with the driver to one of our own.’

‘But I have specific instructions from the Effendi,’ Dandash said sourly.

‘It is also a matter of principle with me,’ Ibrahim added.’

‘As you wish,’ Dandash said, annoyed, ‘I will see you in the morning.’

Haj Ibrahim had only been to Tiberias once before in his life and that was many years ago as a boy. The lake was heady stuff. He and the driver took their meal at a seafront café and watched the moon rise enchantingly above the hills on the opposite side. These were the Golan Heights of Syria, a high plateau hovering directly above the lake’s eastern shoreline.

In Tiberias, as in all of Palestine, the conversation centered about the coming war with the Jews. The driver soon let it be known to everyone that Haj Ibrahim, the famous Muktar of Tabah, was with him. They all knew of the man who had used Saladin’s tactic of burning the fields to defeat Kaukji’s Irregulars.