Leon Uris (53 page)

‘I did not mean to offend you,’ my father said coarsely.

‘I was born as you see me,’ Nuri Mudhil said. ‘My mother and father were first cousins and this is the result. It is a scourge in the entire Arab world, this marriage between cousins. It has given birth to a million other warped bodies like mine. Did you have them in your village, Haj Ibrahim?’

We did indeed. My father’s lips were tight.

‘You came to me to seek out the Jews,’ Mudhil continued. ‘Now you are being sanctimonious about it. Why did you come to me? To seek out a better life for that boy because you know if we follow our leaders you will die a wretched death after a wretched life in that miserable camp. Or did you come because you take issue with the Syrian prime minister, who said last week that it would be better for all the Palestinian refugees to be exterminated than to agree to give up one inch of land. At least, he said, by the death of a half-million Palestinians we will have created martyrs to keep our hatred boiling for a thousand years.’

He turned and limped back into his office and crumpled behind his desk, wheezing. My father and I followed cautiously. ‘Sit down!’ he ordered. ‘You too, Ishmael.’

‘I was the middle son of nine boys,’ he said in a voice that spoke as though we were not in the room. ‘My father was a man who traded in goats and sheep. At the age of four, he put me at the Allenby Bridge as a beggar. Be proud, he told me. Begging is an honorable profession and if you make yourself grotesque enough, no Moslem can refuse to give you alms. Charity is a pillar of Islam, he said. So, when the buses stopped for inspection at the bridge, I and a dozen other beggars, all terrible cripples, poured on the bus and screamed for baksheesh. My face was filled with ugly sores, as well, so my earnings were substantial.

‘When I was nine, I knew nothing but begging at the Allenby Bridge. That was the year that the great Dr. Farber came to Jericho to dig. I hung around trying to make myself useful to him, but I was so ill that I needed hospitalization or faced certain death. When my father learned that Dr. Farber had taken me to the Hadassah Hospital, he dragged me from my ward and beat me into unconsciousness and warned me never to leave the bridge again. It was then that Dr. Farber purchased me for a hundred pounds, money he had to borrow.

‘He took me to his home and made me well and taught me to read and write....’ He stopped and fought off tears.

‘I am very sorry to have offended you,’ my father repeated.

‘No, hear the rest of it. When the dig closed for the season, I pleaded to stay and guard it. And I dug and dug. All summer I dug till my hands bled. I, Nuri, found a Neolithic skull, the wonder of the dig! Do you know what it meant when I handed this to Dr. Farber? You see that,’ he cried, pointing to the diploma over his desk. ‘That is from Hebrew University—and you can take your shit and peddle it among the thieves!’

My father nodded for me to leave and I did.

‘What can I say?’ Ibrahim said.

‘We are a people living in hate, despair, and darkness,’ Mudhil said. ‘The Jews are our bridge out of darkness.’

Ibrahim sunk into a chair, exhausted from further fight. ‘You can trust Ishmael,’ he mumbled. ‘He keeps a secret unlike anyone I have ever known. He keeps secrets from me. You will never be in danger because of him. Take the artifacts and get the best price you can.’

‘Only on the condition that Ishmael is not punished for taking his sister with him. She had the courage to keep climbing when another boy stopped out of fear. She had rendered a great service to humanity. You must swear on your father’s honor.’

Ibrahim heaved a number of sighs that diminished from determination to nothingness. ‘I will overlook my son’s indiscretion this time,’ he said finally. ‘Now what do you hear from Gideon Asch?’

There are going to be a number of conferences between Abdullah and the Palestinians. Your views on him are known. For the moment, he will not move against any Palestinians of stature, such as yourself. He wants to give every appearance that the Palestinians want him and not the other way around. It is a case, I believe, of a goldfish trying to swallow a shark. This is my advice. You should be a delegate to these conferences. There are other men who think as you do. You will find them.’

Ibrahim listened and pondered for a time. ‘I want only one thing of life. I want to return to Tabah and reunite my people there. They are somewhere in Lebanon. I will not return to Tabah alone or even at the head of my people. I will not be a traitor to the Arabs. Right or wrong, I cannot do that. I can only return to Tabah at the head of a line of many thousands of Palestinians as a vanguard to a full resettlement.’

‘I am about to reveal to you the most important secret of your life. You and you alone will go into these conferences knowing that Ben-Gurion and the Jews will agree to the immediate return of a hundred thousand Arabs, with the balance to be negotiated with a peace treaty.’

‘A hundred thousand,’ Ibrahim whispered in astonishment.

‘A hundred thousand as a start,’ Nuri Mudhil said.

I
T IS
I
SHMAEL SPEAKING
to you again, honored reader. We were, in truth, prisoners of the Jordanians. It is necessary that you know of King Abdullah and his insane ambitions.

He came from the Hashem family of Mecca. Hashem was the great-grandfather of Mohammed, and the Hashemites were very important to the early rise of Islam. However, when Islam kept moving its center from Arabia to Damascus to Baghdad, the Hashemite family was gradually reduced to petty functionaries, keepers of the holy places in Mecca and Medina.

Centuries passed.

The head of the Hashemites, known as the Sharif of Mecca, cast his lot with the British in the First World War against the Ottoman Empire. He had hoped to end up as King of the Greater Arab Nation. Instead, he was tossed a few bones and was ultimately run out of Arabia by his archrivals, the Saudis, and lived the balance of his life in exile.

His son Abdullah was granted puppet status over Eastern Palestine, a beleaguered desert in the Trans-Jordan area. Its only purpose for ‘nationhood’ was to serve as a British military base.

The Emirate of Trans-Jordan was a wretched wasteland largely inhabited by Bedouin tribes who lived off the camel, which provided the basic needs of food, shelter, and clothing. They drank the camel’s milk and ate the camel’s flesh. They lived beneath tents of camel’s skin and wore clothing woven of camel’s hair. Heat was provided by the camel’s dung and transportation by the camel’s back. This was an ill-tempered, ugly, smelly beast but one that knew how to survive in the desert, as did its Bedouin master. Life in Trans-Jordan was primitive and brutal, with endless tribal warfare. Abdullah was loathed by other Arab leaders, for he was under complete control of his British master.

A clever Englishman, John Bagot Glubb, transformed the Arab Legion and united the hostile tribes under a single banner loyal to Abdullah. He forged a fighting force blending modern weapons and tactics with gaudy uniforms and the pomp that appealed to the Bedouin. The Arab Legion became the only first-rate military force in the Arab world and provoked further jealousy against Abdullah.

Trans-Jordan, later to become the Kingdom of Jordan, continued to languish as a godforsaken, broiling, destitute land of fewer than a half million lethargic and dispirited inhabitants. It was a land of nothing: no cultural facilities, no literature, no university, no acceptable medical facility.

Abdullah proved as patient as he was ambitious. By placing the Legion at the disposal of the British in the Second World War, he was the only Arab leader to cast his lot with the Allies and used their victory as a springboard for his long-smoldering desires.

What were Abdullah’s desires, you ask Ishmael? No more and no less than his father’s and his brother Faisal’s: to be the ruler of a Greater Arab Nation encompassing Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, and Saudi Arabia. As you can see, his dreams were not small, nor particularly disguised.

My father, Haj Ibrahim, often said Abdullah was his own worst enemy, for he could not control his tongue. Abdullah openly boasted that there was no Jordan, and no Palestine, but only a Greater Syria, which the Hashemites were destined to lead.

Although the Arab League, our council of nations, seethed at the audacity of the little king in his ridiculous capital of Amman, it could not move against him, for he was well hidden behind the skirts of the British lion.

Everyone hated Abdullah. The Egyptians, who considered themselves the heart and elite of the Arab world. The Saudis, who quaked at the thought of the vengeance he would seek for the ejection of the Hashemites from Arabia. The Syrians, who were targeted by Abdullah to take over their country. The Mufti, who had considered Palestine his personal domain. And they all plotted his demise.

Abdullah came out of the war with the Jews alone among the Arab nations with victories, territory, and his flag planted over East Jerusalem and the Dome of the Rock.

Moreover, with the flight of the Palestinians, he ended up inheriting a population twice the size of his own kingdom, a half million West Bank Palestinians and a half million who crossed the river into Jordan.

Most were illiterate and destitute peasants. However, there were many thousands of educated Palestinians, all the right kind of people who had been missing from Jordan’s society. These were to give the backward land a sudden infusion of education, trade, and finance that cracked open the curtain of the modern world.

Abdullah seized the opportunity by granting the refugees citizenship and freedom of movement. Many of the elite Palestinians were appointed to high positions in the Jordanian Government to legitimize his creeping annexation of the West Bank. He glued on a thin veneer of a constitutional government with half Palestinians in his Parliament. It was a fraud, for the king retained the right to appoint and dismiss anyone, veto any law, and dissolve the Parliament at his whim.

The Arab League, the formal association of all Arab nations, renounced the annexation attempt and vowed never to recognize it. This left Abdullah isolated in a sea of hostile neighbors.

Abdullah’s long-time enemy, the Mufti of Jerusalem, had fled to Gaza, where he attempted to counter the king’s claims. But the Mufti’s glory days were over.

It surfaced that during World War II, when the Mufti was a Nazi agent, he had visited Poland to examine the extermination camps. Feeling that German conquest of Palestine was inevitable, he presented Hitler with a plan to set up gas chambers in the Dothan Valley north of Nablus. Here he would exterminate the Jews of any and all lands the Germans conquered in the Middle East.

Egypt alone recognized the Mufti’s claim on Palestine but its support was weak and insincere. In truth, he had outlived value to the Arab cause. Haj Amin al Heusseini was to finish his life as a revered man in various Arab locales, but his political star was burned out.

Also in powerful opposition to Abdullah’s annexation plans were many Palestinians themselves. The king was shocked to learn that all of Palestine wasn’t flocking to the Hashemite flag. But his skin was not very thin. He went about securing his claim to the West Bank, careful not to antagonize important men in opposition. At the same time he made certain the refugees did not organize a countermovement.

Abdullah’s agents and supporters infiltrated West Bank towns and refugee camps, coercing, bribing, and promising political payoffs to those who joined his cause.

The refugee camps on the Jordan side, spaced like satellites around Amman, easily fell under his control. He removed opposition from these camps by quiet imprisonments and assassinations.

On the West Bank he initiated numerous conferences and smaller meetings to fortify his position. At last he felt strong enough to unify Jordan with the West Bank and called for a great convention in Amman for the unstated purpose of offering him the crown of Greater Palestine, the first giant step on the way to Greater Syria.

My father watched these maneuverings carefully. He attended meetings, large and small, remaining low-key. He was in constant communication with Professor Doctor Nuri Mudhil. When the great Amman Conference was called, he knew he had to attend and put his beliefs on the line, even though it targeted him for imprisonment or death.

T
HE ROMANS CALLED IT
Philadelphia. Amman, capital of the biblical Ammonites, was that place where David the King sent his captain, Uriah, to certain death in battle in order to steal the man’s wife, the magnificent Bath-sheba. Like ancient Sodom, Amman had a reputation for unabashed hedonism and evil ways that made it incur the wrath of the prophets Amos and Jeremiah. Their forecasts of Amman’s destruction were only partly fulfilled. Amman was never destroyed. It simply was never anything. It just lay there, stretched out on the proverbial seven hills, a forgotten way station along the King’s Highway, the trading route between the Red Sea and Damascus. It stayed thus, weary under the sun, for nearly two thousand years, with little inkling of the world beyond.

Then came Abdullah and his ambitions and the British unifying of the Bedouin into the Arab Legion. Amman lifted its windy, dust-encrusted head and went from being the capital of nothing to a new center of Arab intrigue.

Can you imagine how thrilled and honored I was when my father told me that I was to accompany him to the Great Democratic Unity Conference in Amman! The Arab world seems to gallop from conference to conference, but I had never been to one, much less a democratic conference.

For weeks Aqbat Jabar and the four other camps around Jericho were ablaze with lively discussion.

Jordanian agents inundated us with literature and persuasion. There were to be over a thousand delegates, half from the West bank and half from among the Palestinians now living in Jordan.

If one could count, one could see that Abdullah had 50 percent of the conference locked up before he even began seeking out delegates in the West Bank. Those affluent Palestinians living in Amman and the others living in some fifty camps over the river were in Abdullah’s pocket, and no one had any doubt about how they would vote.