Leon Uris (58 page)

‘We who have tasted the sweetness of life must also taste its bitterness. But joy always follows sorrow, as the bird follows the wind. Sadness is only separated from joy by time. And the time has come to turn the page. But remember, my brothers, if we had not tasted bitterness, how would we appreciate sweetness?’

It was becoming extremely difficult to follow Sheik Taji’s trail of words without ideas or substance as they wove, tickled fancies, raised and lowered emotions. Nevertheless, his speech was received with enthusiasm.

Charles Maan came to the rostrum, a complete contrast to the first orator. His suit of Western cut was rumpled, as was his small, thin body. He hefted a report of many pages, opened it with browned fingers, and read without passion but as cuttingly as a man with a razor blade for a tongue. His report was a dispassionate analysis of the reasons we had become the refugees. It was a moment of great truth for this gathering, because no such words had ever been displayed before an Arab audience. Charles Maan had the extra stature of being a Christian school teacher, and his composure at this moment began to glue restless men to their seats and hold their mouths agape in silence.

‘The leaders of the Arab world must bear the main responsibility for our problem,’ he said. ‘They, the wealthy Palestinians who fled before a shot was fired, and the Mufti who tried to rule us through terror and assassination are the unholy trinity. They told us, “Brothers, we are working for your interests and victory is close at hand.” This was the first of many lies that undermined our existence.’

Murmurs of agreement floated up to the projection room. I believe that, to a delegate, everyone was awed by the courage of Charles Maan.

‘The Dier Yassin massacre was deliberately blown out of all proportion, as well as false reports of Jewish atrocities. What man here will secretly whisper in my ear that his wife was really desecrated and his child was thrown into a well and drowned? These were lies that flitted from false tongues to false ears.

‘... It was the outright refusal of anyone to step forward and speak the ways of peace with the Jews. It is a peace now enjoyed by a hundred and fifty thousand of our brothers who remained in Israel. Does not their existence, your cousins and my cousins in the Jewish state, put to rest the perfidious propaganda of the Arab leaders who stated that anyone who remained would be murdered by the Jews?’

Chucking their fear, a number of men began to rise.

‘Charles Maan speaks the truth!’

‘We have been betrayed!’

‘Death to the liars in Damascus!’

The little teacher held up his hands for silence. ‘We were put upon, sent into a war for which we were not prepared and which we did not need. It ruined agriculture, created unemployment, the black market, and famine, and forced us to leave. Once our noble armies breached Israel’s borders and her settlements were attacked for plunder, the Jews were not under any obligation to protect a hostile Arab population. Do any of you believe we would not have annihilated the Jews if we were winning the war?’

The murmur in the audience grew to a rumble.

‘What have the Jews done to us to compare to what the Arabs have done to us? The Syrian refugee camps have no sanitation, no allotments of clothing, and the only food is from international charity. No Palestinian in Syria can travel beyond the camp in which he dwells. Hundreds of our people have been thrown into Syrian jails without charges and without trials. Their attempts to organize have been brutally crushed.

‘The Lebanese took in our wealthiest citizens, who bought respectability with dollars and sterling. But their camps are no better than these dismal rat-breeders we live in. Do you know where you can get Red Crescent supplies? They are sold openly in the streets of Beirut. The Lebanese are very generous. They allow our people to work. You will find our children sweeping the streets, cleaning the toilets, peddling, washing dishes in cafes. But you will not find them in schools, for it is forbidden to educate a Palestinian child. Aha, the generous Lebanese allow our people to leave the camps and rent homes where the rates are double what is charged their own citizens. The drinking water is foul in many Lebanese camps, and the sale of water often robs our people of their last penny. Hear this, O brother, the Lebanese Refugee Committee has issued this statement,’ he said, holding it aloft. ‘They blame the Mufti of Jerusalem and the leaders of the Arab nations for their plight! Not the Jews but the Arabs! Read it, my brothers.

Read it and weep. Do I have to speak about Jordan, my brothers? Do we not know the bitterness of that tale?’

‘Death to Abdullah!’

‘Death to the Arab Legion!’

‘Be careful,’ Charles Maan said, ‘be careful. Abdullah has ears among us. Ears that should be sliced off and pickled in a jar.’ He turned the page of his report and looked down from the stage, and spoke in hammer blows. ‘Now I come to our own Palestinian brothers on the West Bank. They, more than anyone else, have forced us into these camps. All available housing rents have been raised by 500 percent. We cannot even bury our dead without paying a grave tax. Despite the fact that the Red Crescent alone supports these camps, we must pay municipal taxes to adjoining cities. There is no employment or education, and what isn’t done to us by our own people is finished by the Jordanians.’

‘Death to our brothers!’

‘I am not through, because we still must speak about the worst of the lot. We live in paradise by comparison to the camps in the Gaza Strip under the control of the almighty Egyptians. Do you know what it is like for a refugee to get a travel permit from Gaza to Egypt? First you must bribe a half-dozen officials for papers. Then, at the border, you must pay exorbitant customs duties or leave all your belongings to the Egyptians. Our boys have been pulled out of the camps in the middle of the night and forced to serve in the Egyptian Army, trained in abominable conditions and thrown into battle totally unprepared. We cannot even imagine the number of our people who have been pushed into prisons and tortured to death. Each day there are over a hundred new deaths from tuberculosis and dysentery and typhoid and cholera. When we tried to organize in Gaza, what happened? The Mufti of Jerusalem, under Egyptian orders, sent in his assassins. When a man is jailed, his wife and daughters and sisters and his mother can expect a visit from Egyptian soldiers who will rape and desecrate them!’

‘Charles Maan lies!’

‘Death to Charles Maan!’

The seats, barely bolted in place, were being ripped up and hurled toward the stage. ‘Aha! Here come Abdullah’s dogs, right on cue!’

The Avenging Leopards closed in with homemade batons coming from under their clothing, but pandemonium had been created and there was the start of a mass charge for the exits.

At that moment, my father, the immortal Haj Ibrahim al Soukori al Wahhabi, pulled Charles Maan away from the rostrum, stepped up to it, took out a huge pistol, and fired into the air right before the microphone. It sounded like no fewer than a dozen cannons erupting, and the echoes off the stone walls all but shattered our ears. Everyone dived for cover, cowering.

‘Kindly remove the traitors and we shall go on,’ he said in a calming voice. His orders were not carried out until he fired several more times. ‘Please, my brothers, we are not finished with our work. This is a democratic convention. You will return to your seats.’ The final pistol shot sent everyone scurrying back to his place and order was restored.

‘We have sinned!’ my father cried. ‘After fourteen centuries of hatred we finally deliberately and with calculation and arrogance picked a war we thought we could not lose. We did not defend our land!

‘... None of us have been exactly blinded by the bright sunlight of hospitality from the Arab leaders, and that goes double for our own Palestinian brothers on the West Bank.

‘
Kaif
,’ my father said, changing this tone to softness. ‘It is a word of profound significance to us. It means do nothing, say nothing, think nothing. We deceive ourselves by saying the kaif is the perfect form of patience, but in truth kaif is a philosophy of deliberate idleness, of being half-awake without leaving the world of private fantasy. We go into kaif, a state of semiconsciousness, to alleviate the reality of our suffering. We are men locked in boxes inside our own minds. Here the keys are being placed before you. We failed in our other test in the war—but dare we fail again? It has been said that it is not necessary to instruct our children, for life will teach them. Can you see what life is teaching our children?’

Haj Ibrahim had captured silence and held it in his hands. I had never heard him speak like this. It must have come from many hundreds of hours of meditation, and the audience looked up to the stage as though they were listening to a prophet.

‘In our dream world we would like to think that we are so lofty that a thousand ladders could not reach as high as our heads. We consider ourselves noble men who would rather die from starvation than ask for help ... that our left hand does not need our right hand ... that it is better to die with honor than to live with humiliation. We would like to think that the head that has no pride deserves to be severed. If we believe these things, then why do we accept life as slovenly dogs in these wretched camps?

‘Our time for kaif is over, my brothers. We must ford a boisterous river. We can no longer trust our fate to thieves who have abandoned and pilfered from us. We can no longer be lulled to sleep by the false music of revenge. We must have the character to admit to a terrible mistake. Only such an admission will unlock us from our boxes and allow us to step onto the path that will lead us back to our homes and our land. Otherwise our diet will become decades of false promises and our beards will grow white with age and our stomachs and minds become so rancid that even the vultures will not wish to pick our bones. ...

‘As for the Jews, they did not run away in 1948 and they will not run away in the future. The sweet dream of a new Arab invasion is a cruel hoax because it will be impossible to throw a desperate people into the sea without destroying ourselves in the process. The price for armed victory over the Jews will only be spent in words, not in blood. We must face the Jews with our genuine desire for peace and the world will be in our corner. We no longer have the luxury of having our greatest joy in life come from killing a Jew. We must appear reasonable at every turn. We must establish trust, and I believe the Jews can be dealt with. The real war we have to win is to enter an honest dialogue with the Jews, and the only conquest we have to make is of the minds of the West.’

There was scarcely a smattering of applause at the end of my father’s speech. As the severity of Father’s words and his challenge sank in, I knew he was trying to swim upstream against many centuries of calcified hatred. I became filled with fear that some hothead would take his life. And then my fear gave way to a swelling pride. Oh, Haj Ibrahim, so utterly magnificent, so courageous. What other man from the desert to the sea would stand before his brothers and dare speak such words?

‘We have the resolution of this convention to be voted upon,’ Charles Maan said. ‘I will read it to you. “Be it resolved that this convention has been attended by delegates who truly represent the refugees of the West Bank, the principal sufferers of the war. We hereby express our conviction that we should have an equal voice in our own fate. We hereby demand to negotiate to return to our homes and have our assets unfrozen, no matter who rules Palestine politically. We express our willingness to sit down and speak with representatives of the State of Israel for the purpose of ending our exile. We hereby elect a delegation to represent us and our aspirations at the International Arbitration Commission that is convening in Zurich later this summer. This delegation shall consist of Haj Ibrahim al Soukori al Wahhabi, Mr. Charles Maan, and Sheik Ahmed Taji.” ’

The vote came as anticlimax. What was important was that the leaders had kept the convention together, spoken harsh words, opened minds, and ended with a favorable resolution all in a single day. The delegates paraded up to the table on the stage and picked up their ballots: white for approval and black for disapproval. The preconvention pledges held firm.

As they voted, the delegates also put a contribution into a large box for the expenses of the meeting and of sending the delegation to Zurich. I waited in the projection room while the money was counted as the delegates drifted from the hall. I could hear the disappointment. They did not meet expenses, much less have the money to travel on.

‘Does anyone know how much this will cost?’ I heard over the microphone, which had not been turned off.

‘It all depends on how long the Zurich meeting lasts. Many thousands of dollars, anyhow,’ my father said.

‘My air ticket will be paid for by some Catholic charities who will also house me in Zurich,’ Charles Maan said. ‘But I cannot go alone.’

‘We are truly done for,’ Sheik Taji moaned. ‘We are all in debt up to our throats.’

‘Somehow Allah will provide,’ Father said.

‘I think that Allah may not hear us,’ Taji answered.

‘Perhaps I can help Allah help us,’ Father said. ‘I know of some secret funds, so do not despair.’

I was about to leave the projection room when the air was abruptly filled with the sound of whistles, the shouting of military commands, and the clumping of boots running fast over the stone square. I ran to the window! The Arab Legion had converged from all four sides, grabbing, clubbing, and dragging off the Avenging Leopards and other gangs who had conveniently identified themselves with special armbands. I saw my brother Jamil being carried off by four Jordanian soldiers and thrown into one of a dozen army trucks parked before the Church of the Nativity. Father, Sheik Taji, and Charles Maan rushed out of the theater. A half-dozen Legion soldiers leveled their weapons at them and led them away.

T
HE OPERATION HAD GONE
smoothly. The sweep of Manger Square had netted Colonel Farid Zyyad fifty-two of the so-called Avenging Leopards and their counterparts from ten separate refugee camps. A clean wedge had been driven between the refugees and their plans to create trouble in Zurich. A soldier entered the office and announced that Haj Ibrahim had arrived at the police fort.