Leon Uris (3 page)

‘It is very early for you to be playing such games, Ishmael,’ he said.

‘I want half. You will give my half to Mother.’

‘What about Uncle Farouk?’

‘It must come from your, half. Uncle Farouk had better be careful because Father is ready to throw him out of the village. Well, do you agree or not?’ Fuming, he shook his head in agreement and left.

When my mother and I slept together again in a few nights she stroked my head and kissed my face a hundred times over and cried of how proud she was of me. So before I was nine I had learned the basic canon of Arab life. It was me against my brother; me and my brother against our father; my family against my cousins and the clan; the clan against the tribe; and the tribe against the world. And all of us against the infidel.

‘S
UN, STAND THOU STILL
at Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in the Valley of Ayalon
.’ Thus, Joshua requested the light by which to smite his enemies.

The Village of Tabah occupies a small but strategic knoll in Ayalon, which has been described as both a valley and a plain. A German archaeological dig before the First World War determined that remnants of civilized man on this hillock dated back over four thousand years. If one were to come from the sea from Jaffa moving south and east toward Jerusalem, one would enter the plain through the twin guardian cities of Ramle and Lydda, where St. George the dragon slayer allegedly held court.

Ten miles into the plain one would come upon the knoll where the Village of Tabah stands sentinel as the gateway to Jerusalem. Beyond Tabah the road takes on a tortuous uphill route, snaking along the bed of a steep ravine known as the Bab el Wad. The Bab el Wad squirms a dozen miles to the outskirts of Jerusalem.

Before Joshua’s battle, this was ancient Canaan, a land bridge between the powers of the Fertile Crescent Mesopotamia and Egypt. Then, as today, the land of Canaan lay like a morsel between the jaws of a crocodile, a passageway for invading armies. Waves of Semitic tribes drifted or swarmed into Canaan and settled to create a prebiblical civilization of city-states that were eventually conquered and absorbed by the nomadic Hebrew tribes.

After Joshua, the knoll of Tabah bore witness to the scourging armies of Assyria and Babylon, of Egypt and Persia, of Greece and Rome. It was the pale of the ill-fated Hebrew Tribe of Dan and the home of the errant Jewish judge, Samson. It knew the wheels of the Philistine chariot all too well.

It saw the great Jewish revolt against the Greeks, and here Judah, ‘the Hammerer,’ assembled his Maccabees for the assault to liberate Jerusalem.

It is said that Mohammed stopped at the knoll on his legendary overnight journey from Mecca to Jerusalem and back, riding his mythical horse, el-Buraq, which had the face of a woman, the tail of a peacock, and could gallop in a single stride as far as the eye could see. Mohammed, any villager will tell you, leaped from the knoll at Tabah and landed in Jerusalem.

Mohammed was followed to this place by the armies that swept out of the desert under the banner of Islam to evict the Christians from the Holy Land.

And Richard the Lion-Heart encamped here before his disastrous march to Jerusalem that ended his Crusade in a shambles.

The knoll of Tabah witnessed the British legions fighting their way to Jerusalem in the First World War.

Between those times, millions of pairs of feet of devout Jews, Christians, and Moslems passed here on their pilgrimage. Insofar as the pageant of history goes, the Village of Tabah rested on a hill that was.

The most recent of the captains of conquest were the Ottomans, who stormed out of Turkey to devour the Middle East in the sixteenth century and drew a curtain of darkness over the region for four hundred years.

Under the Ottomans, the Holy Land lay gasping, the rocks of her fields protruding like the baked bones of a monolithic mastodon, or from mucky, diseased swamp. As a minor backwater district of the Syrian province, Palestine had been devalued to bastardy and orphanhood. It had no status except dim echoes of its past. And Jerusalem, wrote the travelers of the day, was reduced to sackcloth and ashes.

Total cruelty, total corruption, and pernicious feudalism spelled out the infamous rule of the Turks. A few influential Palestinian Arab families did the dirty business for the Ottomans. One of these was the Kabir family, which was rewarded for its collaboration by large land grants in the Palestine district. One of its holdings covered a good part of the Valley of Ayalon.

In the eighteenth century the Kabirs took over several farming villages and peopled them with illiterate, impoverished, land-hungry Arab peasants, then proceeded to suck them dry. Tabah was the central village, with smaller ones scattered about the valley. The Kabirs had long abandoned permanent residence in the desolation of Palestine for Damascus, from which the Syrian province was governed. As landed gentry, they wintered in Spain and summered in London. They were known at the roulette tables of Europe and were frequent guests of the sultans of Istanbul.

Neither the Ottomans nor the Kabirs put anything into the land for centuries. Neither schools nor roads, neither hospitals nor new farming methods. Under the burden of a classic serf-landowner formulation, revenues began to dry up as villages collapsed in defeat. The stone-poor fellahin who worked the land were fleeced by day by the Turks, marauded by the Bedouin by night, and cheated by owners.

By 1800 the Kabir holdings in the Valley of Ayalon were severely in trouble. Villagers were constantly fleeing their own birth-to-death debts and the debts of their fathers. Drought, pestilence, and disease added to a misery that had brought the entire Holy Land to the brink of collapse.

Tabah had been a particular feasting ground for the Bedouin. The principal raiders were of the Wahhabis, who roamed away from their normal pasturages and fields around Gaza. They came in at the harvest time, looted the fields, prowled the snake road, the Bab el Wad, and robbed the pilgrims.

The Kabir family determined that the Soukori clan, of the Wahhabis, were the chief offenders. Around 1800 the head of the Kabir family sought out the sheik of the Soukori Bedouin and made him an offer that would change his stature from privation to position. If the Soukoris agreed to occupy Tabah, their sheik would become the land agent for all the Kabir properties in the valley. It was a none too subtle bribe that would supply the human fodder to work the land. A strong sheik could keep his people in place and assure the Kabirs their rents. Moreover, it would ensure that no further Bedouin raids would terrorize the valley.

The offer brought a major disruption to the Wahhabi tribe. For a clan of Bedouin to give up their nomadic ways was akin to giving up their freedom. The Bedouin had always considered himself the elite of the Arabs, the true Arab. The Bedouin had been the original driving force behind Islam, for it was their men who had filled the ranks of Mohammed’s first armies and spearheaded the Moslem conquests.

The Bedouin owed no taxes, paid no landlord, recognized no borders. The Arabian Peninsula, from which he sprang, had remained remote and beyond the grasp of the early conquests of Egypt and Rome. In the punishing desert a cruel culture evolved that matched the brutal dictates of nature. While the world of progress passed him by, the Bedouin survived largely by plundering the vulnerable. Strong sheiks with no more compassion than the blistering sun showed little mercy to the weak. A system of absolute social order emerged, so that each man had a specific place in the tribe into which he was locked from birth to death. The only way to rise was to destroy the man above and dominate the men below. The demands of survival left no room for convocations of Bedouin to debate democratic principles, for the law of the desert was absolute.

The Bedouin was thief, assassin, and raider, and hard labor was immoral. Despite his raggedness and destitution, the Bedouin remained the Arab ideal, for he was the man with stars for a roof. The city Arab was considered of a lower order and the fellah who tilled the soil in the villages was the lowest of them all.

It was small wonder that when a strong sheik of the Soukori clan moved to the Village of Tabah, a fifty-year feud with the main Wahhabi tribe ensued. After five decades of intermittent bloodshed, the rift healed when other clans of the Wahhabi moved into Ayalon villages, opting for a less nomadic existence. If the scars of desert feuds never entirely heal, they were made more palatable by intertribal marriages and periodic reuniting to fight the threat of another tribe or the infidel.

The sheiks of the Soukori clan had succeeded one another as the muktars of Tabah for well over a hundred years.

N
O SOONER HAD
I
BRAHIM
ensconced himself at the café for the daily ritual of holding court, than his brother Farouk came in screaming.

‘The Jews are coming!’ he cried.

In a moment the village street was flooded with running, chattering people who all followed Ibrahim up to the high point of the knoll, from which they could look down the highway.

Ibrahim was handed a pair of field glasses belonging to one of the villagers who had fought in the Turkish Army. What he saw on the road was a line of huge flatbed trucks filled with materials such as barbed wire, shovels, fence posts, sacks of dried foods, and farming equipment. He had Farouk count them. There were twenty men and six women. The men were dressed in the blue of Jewish collective farmers. The women’s legs were naked to the thighs, a disgusting sight.

Another dozen men, whom Ibrahim had seen roaming through on occasion, were with them. These were on horseback and had rifles and crossed bandoliers of ammunition slung over their shoulders. They wore pale green uniforms, but several had Arab headdresses. Ibrahim knew them to be Shomer, the Jewish watchmen.

Then the convoy turned off the highway away from Tabah into an area that was swamp and marshland. One of the Jews had a megaphone and directed the others. In moments Jews with surveying instruments were staking out a square on some of the drier land. They were obviously in haste to lay out a defense perimeter of barbed wire.

Ibrahim handed the field glasses to Farouk and walked away. ‘Have the elders come to the café,’ he said softly. In a matter of moments they had been gleaned from the fields and their places of rest.

‘What do you think it means?’

‘What do you see? That’s what it means, you fool. The Jews are intending to build a settlement across the road.’

‘In the swamp?’

‘But it is worthless land, Ibrahim.’

‘Do you think they have purchased the land?’

‘Yes,’ Ibrahim answered, ‘they always do everything legally. But if we do not stop them here, there won’t be an Arab village left in this valley. Effendi Kabir will sell them everything. We must give them a reception tonight.’

There was unanimous agreement. A young boy pushed his way through the wall of gathered villagers and made his way excitedly to the muktar’s table.

‘A Jew is coming on a horse!’ he cried.

Everyone looked to Ibrahim. He stood menacingly and the crowd parted before him. With a wave of the hand he commanded everyone to stand fast and made his way into the square alone.

In a moment a solitary rider on a magnificent, dappled Arabian mount trotted in. The man was of medium build, with a neat blond beard and blue eyes. He seemed rather old to be a Shomer; perhaps he had seen forty years. He bore no arms. Ibrahim understood immediately that the rider knew Arab custom, for once he had entered the village, the village was honor-bound to protect him, even if he was a Jew. He dismounted as smartly as he had handled his horse and tethered it near the well and walked toward Ibrahim with a hand extended.

Ibrahim held up his hand for the man to stop a distance away from him.

‘I am Gideon Asch,’ the man said in perfect Arabic. ‘We have purchased several thousand dunams of land over the road from the Effendi Kabir. We hope to be able to make a farm out of it. I take it you are the muktar?’

‘I am the muktar,’ Ibrahim said icily as everyone behind him inched in. Ibrahim was extremely quick in sizing up a man’s courage. The Shomer had a reputation for bravery and this one obviously had his share. Ibrahim was now obliged to show his own courage and perform with the might of a fearless muktar.

‘They are nice young people over there,’ the man called Gideon Asch continued, ‘and we hope that we all become good neighbors.’

In the silence that followed, the men began to encircle the Jew, cutting him off from his horse and then, as if on a signal, everyone began shouting and shaking their fists at him at once. Ibrahim held up his hand again for silence.

‘Our water truck was delayed,’ Gideon continued. ‘I was hoping we could draw some from your well.’

‘Not one drop,’ Ibrahim hissed.

This brought on a mixture of laughter and renewed shouting. The Jew walked toward Ibrahim and only stopped when he was so close their noses nearly touched.

‘You will have to change your minds,’ Gideon said, ‘and the sooner you do, the better for all of us.’ Having struck everyone silent, he spun around and walked right at the men who enclosed him. They separated. He took his horse by the reins and led it to the well and allowed it to drink, then dunked his own face in it. Everyone looked to Ibrahim, confused, as the Jew mounted.

‘You are not welcome,’ Ibrahim shouted, shaking a fist. ‘If you enter Tabah again, you will not have our sanctuary. In fact, I’ll cut off your balls and stick them in your eyes.’

Then the Jew did an astonishing thing. He laughed, saluted in a mock manner, and spurred off.

Ibrahim knew instantly that his people were in for serious trouble. The Gideon person was reckless, fearless. Ibrahim didn’t like it. He had heard that the Shomer were as clever and brave as Bedouin. But Ibrahim was the Muktar of Tabah and he had absolutely no choice but to play out the game. If he didn’t, they would replace him. Well, he would order an attack, and then let nature take its course.