Leon Uris (56 page)

‘Where is dinner!’ Jamil demanded.

Ibrahim rose from his seat slowly and came face-to-face with Jamil. His fist lashed out so fast I could barely see it. Jamil was smashed to the dirt floor and lay there with a shocked expression and blood bubbling out of his mouth.

‘Jamil, my son,’ Father said ever so softly, ‘you go outside and come back and show me that you have respect for your father.’

Jamil groped to all fours, then looked up fiercely. ‘You don’t own me anymore!’ Jamil screamed.

Ibrahim kicked him in the ribs, splattering him against the wall, busting up a half-dozen mud bricks.

‘Jamil, my son,’ Father repeated gently, ‘go outside and come in again and show me that you have respect for your father.’

Jamil inched up, grasping the wall, until he stood, slightly doubled over, holding his ribs with one hand and his bloody mouth with the other. He charged at Father, shouting on oath, and struck him in the face! It was the most terrible thing I had ever seen! I rushed into the house to help Ibrahim, but his arm backhanded me and shoved me away.

‘So, my little Avenging Leopard wishes to have some sport! Good! Good!’ And with that, Father opened his arms, then brought the heels of his hands in a clap against Jamil’s ears. Jamil shrieked, crumpled, and lay quivering.

‘Jamil, my son,’ Father said again, not lifting his voice, ‘go outside and come in again and show me that you have respect for your father.’

‘Nooooo,’ Jamil rasped.

Ibrahim’s foot caught him in the pit of the stomach. Jamil’s body was disarrayed into a grotesque shape. Father planted his foot on Jamil’s chest and once again repeated the instruction.

‘Father, stop or you’ll kill him!’ I cried.

‘No, no,’ Father said, ‘I am only teaching him respect. Have you learned it, Jamil?’

‘No more,’ he gasped.

‘No more what?’

‘I quit.’ He mustered his strength, crawled out on all fours, turned at the door and crawled to Father’s feet, reached up and grasped his hand and kissed it.

‘Now you hear me very well, my dear little Avenging Leopard. What I have just contributed to your education is but a tiny drop in the sea of what you will receive if any person in the Tabah section is ever set upon for any reason. Is that very clear?’

‘Yes, Father,’ he whimpered.

‘Now, Jamil, if you touch a single one of our weapons, for any reason, I am going to kill you the same way you brave martyrs of the revenge kill little chickens. I am going to tear your throat out with my teeth. You go to the home of Daoud al Hamdan and return what has been taken and humiliate yourself before him.’

Father reached down, grabbed Jamil by the scruff of the neck, and hurled him outside.

Jamil was clever enough to realize that his great day of respect had not yet come and that the Avenging Leopards were not going to replace the old authority without spilling their own blood. He licked his wounds, then took another approach by becoming the ‘protector’ of the Tabah section and endearing himself to the families as the fine son of Haj Ibrahim.

Within himself, though, Jamil had turned forever. From then on he wore an expression of the Blaze, with a rage in his eyes that revealed him to be saturated with hatred and always just a fraction away from an explosion of violence. He was a bit crazy now but not so crazy as to challenge Father’s word. In fact, Jamil now delighted in groveling before Father to try to prove his worth.

A few weeks after the fight we received an announcement that King Abdullah had ordered a celebration of the West Bank merger with Jordan. This so-called festive occasion had been forced on the king by the powerful reaction of the Arab League, which had denounced the annexation in the saltiest of terms.

The king’s ministers had waited for nations of the West to recognize the annexation. Abdullah continued to claim innocence. Allah forbid that he had coerced the Palestinians. After all, his ministers proclaimed, the unity conference had been a democratic expression of Palestinian desires.

The recognition Jordan sought came only from Britain and Pakistan. The British were still Abdullah’s master and controlled the Arab Legion by subsidy and through its British officers. Although they were also leery of Abdullah’s ambitions, they were forced by their marriage to the little king to go along with the charade.

The failure of the Arab world as well as the world at large to recognize his acquisition did not dissuade him. He felt that a holy endowed ruler such as himself was entitled to keep his divine marching order toward a Greater Syria. The foibles of mere mortals could not stop a king on a mission decreed by Allah. Deeper still, he believed that the Palestinian people would rally to his banner and make fools of the rest of the world, and he intended to demonstrate that his had been a popular move.

It was immediately suggested by his British colleagues that a plebiscite be held on the West Bank to confirm the decision of the unity conference. Abdullah did not like the idea of a vote that he could not cancel by a personal veto. Surely, he felt, the Palestinians would vote overwhelmingly in favor. However, he did not trust the vote. As a monarch, he had royal prerogatives to protect the people from themselves, should they err.

Instead, Abdullah ordered parades in the major West Bank cities. He massed his supporters and lieutenants to make certain the Palestinians erupted in a spontaneous show of support.

The Allenby Bridge rumbled and buckled under the hooves of his Bedouin camel corps and horses of the desert police. The Legion poured over the river in Land-Rovers and armored personnel carriers and tanks. Infantry and the bands were trucked over. They dispersed in battalion strength to Hebron, Bethlehem, Jericho, Nablus, and Ramallah.

East Jerusalem was avoided in fear of a Jewish military reaction. Abdullah had not kept the terms of the truce and continued to refuse to allow the Jews access to the Western Wall, their holiest site. He did not wish to risk provoking the Jews into throwing him out.

On the great day of the celebration, everyone had been rousted from the camps and cities into the main streets, where banners, flags, and garlands awaited our saviors, the almighty Jordanians.

Father fumed his way down to Jericho with me, as usual, at his right-hand side, a step behind him. We went atop Professor Doctor Nuri Mudhil’s building, where we would have a perfect view over the procession.

The parade was led by the king’s own elegant band, which had played concerts for us when we were in Amman. The ‘Colonel Bogey’ March incongruously filled the air of ancient Jericho. Platoons of armored carriers bearing Legion warriors were followed by batteries of artillery and a tank battalion that shook the buildings and drowned out the music with their mighty roars. Overhead airplanes in elements of threes zipped down at low level.

Now we could hear the honking of the camels ridden by the desert police who patrolled Jordan’s vast sand-lands along its border with Saudi Arabia. The soldiers swayed arrogantly atop their lofty perches. As fast as one could say ‘Allah is great,’ the street in front of the camel corps was filled with dozens of youths wearing the orange headbands of the Avenging Leopards. In the following seconds, they unleashed a devastating barrage of stones at the camels and their riders, then fled into the crowd.

One of the camels fell to its knees, dumping its rider, and several others bolted in confusion. They broke into an uncontrolled gallop and plunged into the crowd, grinding onlookers underfoot, scattering the rest, then smashing into peddlers’ stalls. There was shrieking, and some shots. The crowd dispersed in panic while the Jordanians organized themselves furiously and bore down on the place of the ambush. Soldiers leaped out of their vehicles, bashing madly with their rifle butts at anyone near them. More shots. A woman fell in the street and was very still.

That night we huddled about the radio and dialed East Jerusalem and Amman, but there was not a word about the incident. We tried Radio Damascus and Cairo. All we were told was that there was a news blackout over the entire West Bank.

The next morning still brought no mention in the newspapers, but as the day wore on we learned that the Jordanian troops had also been stoned in Ramallah and Nablus and that six people had been killed.

The camp was ablaze with conversation as many of the ardent Abdullah supporters began to look around, thinking of new alliances. There was a constant pilgrimage to our hovel, with one sheik after another now pledging loyalty to Father. He accepted their homage with a well-disguised cynicism.

Jamil’s eyes alone bore the tale that his generation was, in fact, the generation of liberation. All right, Father, his expression said, take glory in the victory but remember who struck the blow.

When the grovelers were gone Father took me aside, excitedly. ‘The time has come for us to take our destiny into our own hands,’ he said with a power I had not seen from him since the exile. ‘You will travel by bus tomorrow to Ramallah, to the Birah Camp, where you will find Charles Maan. When he fixes a date for us to meet secretly at the Convent of the Sisters of Zion, you will then travel to Hebron and find Sheik Taji.’

Father handed me the black jasper pendant to identify myself. I repeated my instructions on how Sheik Taji was to find the convent and assured Father I would not fail.

Strange, what I remembered most about the day was not the sight in Jericho but the mockery in Jamil’s eyes.

T
HE
C
ONVENT OF THE
S
ISTERS
of Zion sat atop the ruins of the ancient Roman Antonia Fortress, which was brutally connected to the agony of Jesus. In a cellar room where traditionally Jesus was tortured and degraded by the soldiers of Rome, Sister Mary Amelia closed the door behind the three men who had slipped into the convent a few minutes apart.

They greeted each other nervously, then settled around a plank table. ‘There is no question about it, my brothers, Abdullah has failed,’ Haj Ibrahim said.

‘The old Hashemite is wounded but he is not dead,’ Charles Maan said, lighting the first cigarette of a new chain.

‘Then let us hammer the nail right through him,’ the graybearded sheik said, pointing to his forehead.

‘We are in the right place when you speak of nailing up men,’ Maan noted.

‘What do you think we should do?’ Ibrahim asked.

‘Assassinate him, of course,’ Taji answered.

‘I have no objection to his assassination,’ Ibrahim said. ‘However, that will not help us achieve our goals. On the contrary, it will only whet the appetite of all the vultures from Baghdad to Morocco who are waiting to pounce on Palestine.’

‘Haj Ibrahim is right,’ Maan said. To murder Abdullah will only bring us under more severe repression. We have already bloodied the Legion and they are impatient to strike us. You would be able to paint the city of Hebron red with our blood after an assassination of Abdullah.’

‘Maybe assassination is not such a good idea, after all,’ Taji recanted. ‘But Abdullah has been dealt a blow, his march has been stemmed. We must follow up with something. Why don’t we simply declare our independence?’

‘Independence? Now, that has some merit,’ Ibrahim agreed.

They turned to Charles Maan, who had sucked his cigarette dry and, when it was about to crisp the tips of his fingers, deftly used it to light another in a movement perfected by much practice. ‘We have already been offered independence and we refused.’

‘When were we offered independence?’ the sheik challenged, now flailing his hands.

‘By the United Nations. Maybe we should have taken the offer and run. However, all we did was run. Both the Mufti and Abdullah have tried to take over Palestine, one with Egyptian backing and one with British backing. Both failed. Who backs us? Who are we? We are three poverty-stricken refugees sitting in a cellar with the ghost of Jesus Christ. Our own brother Palestinians who are not refugees would fight against us. And do you think the Arab Legion will drop dead with fear because we declare our independence?’

‘Then we must enter an eternal struggle,’ Taji said impulsively.

‘Struggle with what?’ Charles Maan retorted with cynicism. ‘We have no organization. Who do we represent? Who will support us? The Americans support the Jews. The British support Abdullah. Who will recognize us? Madagascar? Albania? Outer Mongolia?’

The old Bedouin was becoming frustrated with Charles Maan’s terse observations. He looked to Haj Ibrahim for support.

Ibrahim sized up his confederates. Maan was a logical and learned man, the kind who would be sorely needed in the deftness required by Arab politics. Sheik Taji, if he could be controlled, had the fire in his stomach that was the salt of men.

‘Who else has the right to declare independence if we do not have it?’ Ibrahim prodded.

‘You see my point, then,’ the sheik put in hastily.

‘Of course I see your point. But on the other hand, our eminent friend Charles also makes a point.’

‘What point?’

‘That if we declare independence we will make the impact of a whisper in the middle of a desert windstorm.’

‘Brothers, brothers, brothers,’ the schoolteacher soothed, ‘we have a very bad history as far as believing we really have the ability to rule ourselves. Since the time of the ancient Hebrews, Palestine has been ruled by everyone but Palestinians.’ He held up his hand and spread his fingers, then ticked off one finger after another, counting as he spoke. ‘First it was Rome, then the Byzantine Christians, then the Arabs from Arabia, the Crusaders, Saladin, the Mamelukes of Egypt, the Turks, the British, and the Jews again. The Jews always had a capital here either in reality or in their souls. All our decisions have been made from the outside, just like the decision that turned us into a people begging the world for pity. Independence is a dream that we never bothered to dream.’

Sheik Ahmed Taji tugged at his beard while Ibrahim gnawed at his moustache with his fingertips. Charles Maan got to his feet to answer a knock on the door, spilling ashes as he went. He took a tray of coffee from his daughter and closed the door, then poured for the three.